Victorian Children's Fiction in the Anthropocene: Becoming Fairy in The Secret Garden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Recent critics have pointed to the posthuman ecologies that emerge within the counter-industrial and scientific discourses of the Victorian period. Through an ecocritical, posthumanist reading of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 novel The Secret Garden , this article illuminates the ways in which a critical engagement with Victorian children's Fiction within this framework can help us conceptualize alternative ways of being in and with the world. Considering in particular Donna Haraway's concepts of "naturecultures" and "companion species," as well as The Secret Garden 's situatedness within nineteenth-century discourses surrounding horticulture and fairies, I discuss how Burnett's portrayal of the garden space unsettles the nature-culture dichotomy and constitutes the garden's more-than-human cosmos as subjective and agential. In doing so, I argue, the narrative allows for the emergence of an alternative, ecocentric mode of human–non-human relationality that resonates strongly with Haraway's notion of a "companion species" community. An examination of the child protagonists' increasing embodiment and mediation of this alternative order further points to the possibility of its realization beyond the novel's alternative cosmos and thus beyond the space of "childhood."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".