The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling is based on a story of Helen Turrell, a British woman who visits war graves in France. Helen keeps the birth of her illegal son a secret. The child is only allowed to address her as mummy at bedtime. Michael becomes an adult and is sent to the World War I. Times passes and Helen is informed that Michael is dead. As a result, she is told where Michael’s grave is and decides to travel to see it. Here, she meets Mrs. Scarsworth who confesses all her lies. The following day Helen visits the cemetery but discovers that she was given the wrong address. Fortunately, she meets a Gardener who helps her locate the grave of Michael.
Kipling uses an objective tone to describe the characters and scenes shunning the use of emotional or dramatic sense. He also uses sentences and vocabulary with some dialogs that showed up a better idea about how the characters deal with the situations. The author despises the so-called civilized society for its triviality of feeling, dead habits and lack of respect for personal feelings and emotions. The tale shows how an individual can be caught up in two worlds: the world of social values, norms, and rules and a world of emotion and feelings.
The story is based on a split between external reality and questionable inner reality. Indeed, the story is grounded in details in public and details in private. Details in public are total lie while details in private are truth. Helen knows the truth but what is in the public domain is a lie. Even at the end of the story, Helen does not acknowledge Michael as her child. This perpetuates the protective lie she has been using throughout the story. It can be argued that the story is based on a double life- the life of private emotion and the life of the public property.
