«I know I’m fatter»: hunger and bodily awareness in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

This article analyses the connection between food, hunger, and child health in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s novel The Secret Garden. It combines food in children’s literature theory, medical history, and body studies, and specifically it draws from Pasi Falk’s concept of corporeality, which conceives the human body as a sensual and sensorial entity (1994). Within this theoretical framework, the article reads The Secret Garden as the account of the two child protagonists’ corporealization, that is, their transition from incorporeality (which coincides with lack of hunger, disconnection from one’s own body, and illness), to corporeality (which coincides with hunger, awareness of one’s physicality, and health). Tracing the two children’s progress from illness/incorporeality to health/corporeality, the article contributes to position the novel within the Victorian and Edwardian medical discourse about child nutrition and healthy child physicality; in this analysis food emerges as a key-element to both the corporealization process in the story, as a sensorial stimulant, and to the novel’s engagement with debates about child nutrition and health in its cultural and historical context.