Shame, Enchantment, and the "There-ness" of Disability in The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has been a repugnant object for contemporary scholars of disability studies because of the equivalence it draws between able embodiment and morality. While scholars have remarked on the novel's linguistic register of rectitude, few have focused on what it might mean to analyze The Secret Garden through the prism of shame. I attempt to develop such a reading here, exploring shame's textual and historical multivalence. I will ask: what is at stake—affectively and critically—in the practice of re-reading a novel that one experienced first in childhood? What is created, and what is effaced or over-written, in the temporal distance of adulthood and the critical distance afforded by a theoretical framework unavailable to the child?