Lucy Alibar, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” will adapt Frances Hodgson Burnett's “The Secret Garden” in a fresh version to be produced by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Johnson. According to Deadline, Universal beat out four studios to acquire a pitch for the project.
It is thought that del Toro won’t direct the movie because of his many commitments, but that he “will guide Alibar creatively as producer.” Deadline's Mike Fleming makes the useful point that the writer of “Beasts” and the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” will make a good team because “both of them had success with projects surrounding young people who build fantasy worlds as a way of dealing with loneliness, grief, loss, and abandonment.”
Burnett’s celebrated children’s novel, which began serialization in 1910 and was published in full in 1911, fits the bill exactly. It is about a sickly girl, Mary Lennox, the daughter of colonials in India, whose mother’s neglect has psychologically damaged her: "...by the time she was sick six years old she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived,” Burnett wrote.
Following the cholera deaths of her parents, 10-year-old Mary goes to live with an uncle on the rural estate of Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire, England. There she discovers the secret walled garden and, under its magical influence and that of the pantheistic “common moor boy” Dickon, she recovers spiritually and emotionally. Her cousin, Colin, is a feeble hysteric, the polar opposite of Dickon, whose masculine energy Mary finds alluring: "The Secret Garden" is nothing if not a story of emergent desire. The change in Mary is so radical, however, that she enables Colin to overcome his psychosomatic sickness by refusing to tolerate his self-indulgent morbidity and negativity.
Burnett’s garden, self-evidently a psychic space, was influenced by Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science theories with their emphasis on spiritual healing, the power of positive thinking, and the regenerative properties of living things. (Like Eddy, Colin was afflicted with a spinal problem.)
It’s been contended, though, that Burnett (1849-1924) may have drawn on Sigmund Freud and neurologist Joseph Breuer’s 1895 book “Studies on Hysteria,” which roots hysteria in repressed sexual fantasies – and was a seminal work of psychoanalytic advocacy. Colin’s imaginary disease is theoretically attributable to the thwarted Oedipal desire for his mother, who died bearing him. The opening of the garden, which was closed at that time, symbolizes for Mary and Colin, who is also 10, the therapeutic release from hidden traumas – and, of course, the dawn of their sexuality.
Alibar and del Toro’s film will apparently be set not in Edwardian England but in the Deep South around 1900 – and who knows how (and with what phantoms and anthropomorphized creatures) they will deal with the return of the repressed?
It will be the twelfth known screen treatment of Burnett’s novel or its characters, there having been three straightforward movie adaptations (1919, 1949, 1993), two movie sequels (2000, 2001), three TV series (1952, 1960, 1975), and three single-episode TV versions (1959, 1987, 1994, the last of which is animated).
Burnett’s other works include two oft-filmed novels, “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (1885-86) and “A Little Princess” (1905). Born in the north of England in 1849, she suffered the death of her father three years later. Her impoverished family emigrated to the United States in 1865, settling in Knoxville, Tennessee. Her literary success made her wealthy. Twice married and divorced, she is buried in Roslyn Cemetery, in Greenvale, Long Island.
Should del Toro decide to go the 3-D route, there exists an arcadian example. The bronze figures of Mary and Dickon that comprise the Mary Hodgson Burnett Memorial Fountain in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden were sculpted by Bessie Potter Vonnoh and dedicated in 1936. Mary holds a water bowl that has drawn the attention of bronze swallows. Dickon, reclining behind her on the pink granite pedestal, plays a flute – a pipe of Pan, no less.