Christ in Flanders?: another look at Rudyard Kipling's "The Gardener" - Critical Essay

As "The Burden," the poem that forms a quietly joyful coda to the story, makes clear, "The Gardener" is less about the horror and waste of the Great War than Helen Turrell's release from the crushing weight of her secret and all its attendant hypocrisy. And in this release, I submit, Kipling subtly validates the virtues of war. Though the first six words of the story--"Every one in the village knew'--perhaps suggests, as Helen Pike Bauer points out, (3) that the protagonist's secret is shared by her neighbors from the beginning. Kipling's tale movingly depicts the way that Edwardian social propriety and prudishness warp Helen's relationship with her son. Indeed, the story's powerful treatment of this subject has inspired Elliot L. Gilbert, in an incisive reading, to identify "the baleful influence of respectability" as its central theme (312). Compelled, at every moment, to maintain the fiction that she is merely Michael's aunt, Helen even goes so far as to "explain" to her neighbors why the boy sometimes addresses her as "Mummy." "You've hurted me in my insides and I'll hurt you back," declares Michael after learning that Helen has assiduously divulged the most personal details of their relationship (in order to conceal its true nature): "I'll hurt you as long as I live" (829). In the service of a lie, Helen turns the intimacy that she and Michael both crave into reciprocal torture. Thus, when Michael dies in the Great War, guilt compounds Helen's grief and, even worse, the demand for secrecy leaves her (like John Holden in Kipling's "Without Benefit of Clergy") without a support system of friends or family members within which she can openly mourn. Helen denies herself any connection with fellow sufferers.

Perhaps the only real hope for such connection, before Helen's climactic encounter with the gardener, comes in the form of Mrs. Scarsworth, a grotesque but similarly situated character who travels to Flanders each year, drawn to the grave of a married man she still loves. Both women have secretly journeyed "beyond the pale," and they continue to suffer for it long after the objects of their affection have died. Yet Helen loathes her double--thus rejecting an image of herself--and responds not with compassion, but with condescension and pity, when Mrs. Scarsworth finally reveals the true motives behind her annual pilgrimage. Such is the welter of false pride, prevarication, and denial that Kipling establishes within his protagonist as she draws closer to the mysterious gardener.

I have already suggested that Helen's progress from the "merciless sea of black crosses" to the comforting rows of white markers constitutes a subtle homage to the Commission; the same, I think, applies to the details of her son's burial, and, in turning to the climax of Kipling's tale, we should consider how Kipling uses Michael's re-interment to bestow a spiritual aura to the Commission itself. Covered by "what had been the foundation of a barn wall ... so that none but an expert would have guessed that something unpleasant happened there," Michael's corpse remains for years among the so-called "missing." Then, in 1919, Helen suddenly receives an "official intimation ... to the effect that the body of Lieutenant Michael Turrell had been found, identified, and re-interred in Hagenzeele Third Military Cemetery" (833). Here, again, Kipling pays discreet tribute to the Commission, whose "expert[s]" achieve the seemingly impossible. Yet Michael's removal from the ranks of the missing is also significant symbolically. Just as the Commission recovers Michael's body and identifies it, the Gardener exhumes the truth from beneath Helen's lies and restores Michael's long-denied title: "I will show you where your son lies" (838; emphasis added). As the only character in the entire story to articulate Michael's true status, the gardener restores to Helen a son who was, if you will, "missing" long before he died in France. The Commission's compassionate achievements thus parallel the healing ministrations of Kipling's Christ figure. Where else, we are left to wonder, would one more likely encounter the Savior (or Savior-like) than amid the Commission's good works?