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.Although critics frequently discuss Colin Craven's illness and convalescence in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden (1911), many have overlooked how Colin's (and the novel's) investment in traditional notions of class and gender frames and enables his recovery. For example, Lois Keith classifies Colin's rehabilitation as a "miracle cure"-the consequence not of proper diagnosis or effective medical treatment but "of faith in himself and faith in others" (98). But Colin's "miracle cure" also depends on his faith in his own superiority to the working-class Dickon Sowerby and to his female cousin, Mary Lennox. Colin's improvement relies on using Dickon's body to push his wheelchair and support his limbs; the discourse of healing "magic" employed by both the narrative and by Colin himself, however, frequently erases those examples of Dickon's labor. Ultimately, Colin's attainment of ability is intertwined with embodying an upper-class masculinity and rests on compelling Dickon and Mary into muteness and invisibility in the novel's conclusion.
Much of The Secret Gardens portrayal of disability aligns with the stereotypical view "that people with disabilities are more dependent, childlike, passive, sensitive, and miserable and are less competent than people who do not have disabilities" (Linton 25). While confined to his sickroom, Colin is unhappy, needy, and prickly. My interpretation, however, not only allows for a reading of the novel in which Burnett affirms that disability may be socially constructed, but also shows how ability/disability intersects with the categories of gender and class. Disability theorist Susan Wendell asserts that "other characteristics of a person, such as race, age, gender, class, or sexual identity, may alter the meaning of her/his disability" (62). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson agrees that disability studies should attend to "how subjects are multiply interpellated: in other words, how the representational systems of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and class mutually produce, inflect, and contradict one another" (355). Recognizing Colin as a "multiply interpellated" character reveals how his access to distinct resources (doctors, nurses, servants, plenty of food, and technology such as braces and wheelchairs) as well as his class and gender influence both his disability and his attainment of ability.
Although critics rarely mention Colin's use of a wheelchair to travel to and within the garden, the wheelchair is the primary locus for the text's negotiations...