THALT BE LIKE A BLUSH-ROSE WHEN THA GROWS UP, MY LITTLE LASS - ENGLISH CULTURAL AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN THE SECRET-GARDEN

Although gardens as cultural landscapes have been examined within geog raphy in relation to class, the ways in which gardens are constitutive of and constituted by gender relations have been largely ignored. Fem inist geographers are now engaging with the gender implications of lan dscape representation and this paper, in which the multiple significan ces of the garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett's (1911) children's story The Secret Garden are explored, is a contribution to this field. Usin g an approach informed by feminisms and poststructuralisms I draw atte ntion to intersections of late-19th and early-20th century discourses on Englishness, gender, class, and nature, gravitating around three ch ildren and set within an old abandoned garden. The garden is the site for a critical reading of the bodily regeneration of gendered and clas sed English identities whilst it is also a space of other possibilitie s.