Hysterics

Hysterics is the name given in The Secret Garden to the violent emotional paroxysms that have governed Colin Craven's life and held the entire household of Misselthwaite Manor in thrall. The term appears at a crucial moment when Mary Lennox, having witnessed one of Colin's worst screaming fits, seizes on the word as a weapon of demystification. The nurse who attends Colin explains the condition bluntly: "Hysterics and temper are half what ails him" . This clinical dismissal, spoken by a woman who cannot bear invalids, strips Colin's terrifying outbursts of their mystery and reframes them as a manageable, even contemptible, habit rather than a symptom of mortal illness.

The Nature of the Attacks

Colin's hysterics are described as dreadful sounds that fill the night corridors of the great house. When Mary is awakened by one such episode, she hears "some one was crying and screaming at the same time, screaming and crying in a horrible way" . The noise is so appalling that the servants have long since learned to give Colin his own way in everything rather than provoke him. Mary herself, listening from her room, finds the sobbing screams almost unbearable: she puts her hands over her ears and feels "sick and shivering" . The attacks are not merely loud; they are performances of helplessness that have successfully terrorized every adult in the house into submission.

Mary's Intervention and the Power of Naming

When the nurse, desperate, fetches Mary to confront Colin in the midst of a tantrum, Mary does not soothe him. She stamps her foot and shouts, "Half that ails you is hysterics and temper—just hysterics—hysterics—hysterics!" . The repetition is a kind of incantation, but one that works by exposure rather than magic. Mary has never heard the word before, but she intuits its power: "She liked the word 'hysterics' and felt somehow as if it had an effect on him. He was probably like herself and had never heard it before" . The unfamiliar term breaks the spell of Colin's performance. When he insists he has felt a lump on his spine, Mary counters with the same clinical vocabulary: "If you did it was only a hysterical lump. Hysterics makes lumps" . She strips his secret terror of its authority by giving it a name that belongs to the nurse's world, not to the realm of fatal disease.

The Mechanism of the Condition

The narrative makes clear that Colin's hysterics are not feigned but are a genuine psychosomatic disorder rooted in years of isolation, fear, and absolute indulgence. He has been told since infancy that he will die, that his back is weak, that he may become a hunchback. These whispered prophecies have become a self-fulfilling illness. The nurse observes that "hysterics and temper are half what ails him" , and the London doctor had earlier implied the same: the boy might live "if he would make up his mind to it." Colin's tantrums are the explosive release of a terror he has never been allowed to voice or test against reality. The "hysterical lump" he feels on his spine is a phantom—a physical sensation generated by years of dread, not by any organic disease. Mary's refusal to treat it with reverence is the first step in breaking the cycle.

Hysterics as a Social Weapon and a Prison

Colin has used his hysterics to control everyone around him. The servants, Mrs. Medlock, Dr. Craven, even his father have all surrendered to his demands rather than face another screaming fit. But the condition also imprisons him: each tantrum exhausts him, leaves him feverish and weak, and reinforces his belief that he is dying. The nurse, who is not sympathetic, notes that Colin's hysterics are partly a bid for attention and partly a genuine loss of control. Mary's intervention works because she is the first person who has ever dared to contradict him during an attack. She does not offer comfort; she offers a diagnosis. And in doing so, she gives Colin the one thing his illness has never allowed him: a way out of the role of the dying invalid.