The Giving Tree, urgh

[pegkerr]

I was looking at various critics' list for best 100 books, and ran across The National Education Association's list of 100 best books for children.

Right at the top is Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, and I think urgh, urgh urgh.

To me, The Giving Tree is a loathsome, evil book.

I'm a Christian, but to me the message of that book is just twisted, and certainly not a picture of what true Christian giving should be like, although I am sure there are many that would argue otherwise. It is clear that the author approves of the tree (Edited to add: or perhaps he doesn't; perhaps it's meant as a cautionary tale). The tree is always referred to as she, and she gives up her apples, her branches, and eventually the wood of her trunk to a selfish, greedy boy. When he is an old man, he sits on her stump. That's the payoff: "And the tree was happy."

I rewrote the story once because it disgusted me so much. I wish I had a copy of my rewrite (Edited to add: I remember now: I titled my rewrite The Sharing Tree). When he asked for apples, she told him to take half the apples and sell them for fertilizer to put around her trunk, and then she could make even more apples, so there would be some for him, but she would not be bereft. I think at one point she told him to apply yet more fertilizer so she would be even bigger and stronger, and then invited him to make a tree house in her (much larger) branches, using the extra wood she had grown big enough to spare, and invite all his friends over so that he would not be lonely. In the end, she was a mighty tree indeed, with many extra apples and many extra branches, with a breezy tree house up above and a whole happy, thriving community around her roots. My point was, she could give to him without maiming and destroying herself. And goddamn it, why did he have to be so selfish, anyway? Why did he (male) always get to be the taker, and she (female) always have to be the giver? Couldn't there be ways that he could take and she could give that wouldn't involve her destruction, but instead her being nurtured by him? Why was she happy that he parked his bony ass on her in the end, destroyed by giving herself up for him, when he had done nothing for her? How could the author approve of this?

I think it's an awful message, both for girls and for boys.

So? Do you agree or disagree?

Edited to add (again!): Thanks to mereilin, who provided a link to a symposium at the always interesting First Things about the book.

Comments

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

You are brilliant, is what I think. I, oddly, never read that particular Silverstein. But your version sounds much better than his.

[malkingrey.livejournal.com]

I always found The Giving Tree to be -- if you'll forgive the word -- sappy.

[fireflowerlass.livejournal.com]

Hmm, to be honest I never thought about it that way before. I guess cuz I only read it as a kid and saw it through kid's eyes. But now that I think about it, the boy was pretty selfish, wasn't he? Wow, I haven't read this in a long time. I wonder what kind of messages one could glean from this book. I always thought the tree represented something bigger than just a woman, but I've never came to a conclusion of exactly what.

[sternel.livejournal.com]

When I read that as a kid, I always found it sad. I thought the Boy was too stupid to see what an amazing thing he had right under his nose until it was too late.

[charlietudor.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you -- that book appalls me, utterly, and I made very sure that I discussed it with my kids when they read it (and they both did, but I can't remember if it's part of the curriculum in the school district). That tree has debilitating masochism, and the little boy suffers from extreme narcissism. Not. Healthy.

[kate_nepveu]

I hate loathe and despise that book, and fully agree with Book-A-Minute's ultra-condensed version.

It is deeply worrying, by the way, to be told by one's mother that she thinks it's a beautiful and true reflection on parenthood.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You know, if she said that, if you have kids, your mother is never going to believe you're doing enough for them, no matter what.

There are actually several picture books that strike me as being about sick relationships between parents and children. There's one about a mother who sings a lullaby to her baby about "I will always love you best of everything in the world, I will always make everything right" which is all very well, but when he's grown up she breaks into his house at night to sing it to him and then when she's old he sings it to her. There's a very odd message there that I'm not sure the author or the publisher intended to be given to pre-schoolers -- or for that matter, new parents.

Then again, there's Can't You Sleep, Little Bear, in which Big Bear and Little Bear live together in the woods and try to work things out scientifically and tolerantly and lovingly, and Big Bear actually just wants to read his book (which is just getting to the interesting part) and with whom I've never had any difficulty identifying.

[ceilidh]

You know... I never really thought about it that way. The book never sat right with me but I couldn't put my finger on why.

Some of the books on that list I do like though (my favorites):

The Mitten (anything by Jan Brett, really)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (I like the Very Grouchy Ladybug better though)
The Velveteen Rabbit
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
Peter Rabbit
Curious George

Charlotte's Web
Bridge to Terabithia
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh
Matilda
Harriet the Spy (I used to pretend to be Harriet when I was little. ;) )


Other than The Giving Tree and The Giver (I hate the ending of The Giver, it felt like a letdown and a ripoff to me), I like all the books on that list I've read.

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

have you read the two sequels to the Giver? Not really sequels per se, but companions.

[nsmom.livejournal.com]

I agree 100% and I think I like your version better.

" I can't believe you cut that tree down, you jerk"

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

I read it as a kid, and cried, and my parents decided it was Very Disturbing, and took it away. I like your version much better.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually encounter the story until I was an adult, and, yes, urgh urgh urgh. Appalling. Misogynist. Tripe.

And it makes me think of Marge Piercy's "The Friend."

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

A housemate and I had this exact discussion over the summer. One of the other housies was saying how much she loved the story, and we were like, "Hello? The tree was codependent." It's a horrid sort of message. It was probably Shel being sarcastic, and then once it got popular it wasn't like he could say, "Oh, it was just a joke." :)

If I have to have a favorite tree book, I much prefer "The Birthday Tree" in which the tree just is linked with the boy, without senseless sacrifice. Plus, the pictures are better.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It is the world's most codependent book, and I waffle back and forth between whether its meant in earnest, or it's meant to make you go "ew."

Based on Silverstein's other work, I suspect the "ew," but yanno, it's a near thing....

I'm with you bwanna.

[huladavid.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Silverstein ever said what he was trying to get across with "The Giving Tree".

(Just been having fond memories of book shopping for my nephews at Wild Rumpus. When they were down last month Cole, the youngest fell in love with the ceiling.)

[qwerty88.livejournal.com]

I hate the giving tree with a passion. Not only for the gender dynamics, but for the the whole environmental message.

AGH!

I especially hate it when people read it to poor unsuspecting Brownies and tell them it's their favourite book ever. The reader's other book, _Zoom_, was much better.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

I never thought of it like that, but you are absolutely right and now I'm angry.

[corinnethewise.livejournal.com]

Yes. This is how I feel now.

[chernobylred.livejournal.com]

I agree completely. I hate that book, regardless of the genders given the characters. In my opinion, it's a book completely about loss. Nobody wins in that story. Nobody.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

The Giving Tree is such a nasty squick for me. Ew. No, self-abegnation is not the route to happiness.

Another widely-recommended book that I loathe is Love You Forever, in which the grown boy climbs into his Alzheimer's-patient mother's bed.

Then there's the one with the iridescent scale, whose moral is that you need to buy friends...

[kishmish.livejournal.com]

First the story made me angry although I never thought about the gender dynamics. Then I thought it was really sad. Recently I was reading Fruits Basket manga and there's a story with a similar undertone about a fool who gave away everything including all his body parts to thieves and murderers and just kept saying how happy he was that he could help. For some reason I wasn't mad at all, just really sad, because of the way its told. I think perhaps this differed because of the context it was told in? The Giving Tree still makes me angry...

[tromboneborges.livejournal.com]

Excuse the length, as I think I got rather carried away. This is not really meant as a defense of the Giving Tree, as I think all of what you said is correct, and, personally, it gives me the willies. The bad-relationship willies.

But I think the best light in which to see it is as a cynical metaphor for *parenting*, not couple-hood. I think the idea is to represent the self-sacrifice of parenting -- that you give everything of yourself, again and again, without question, because it is what your child needs, and sacrifice things that you might want to do and be so that your child might have the things they need. And that sacrifice, although real, makes you happy anyway, because you put the happiness and success of your child, often, above your own. And your child doesn't really understand, while growing up, what those sacrifices really mean.

Now, I think that this is an incredibly cynical view of things, as what Silverstein *fails* to do is give any reason why the tree should be happy to have the boy around in the first place, other than that we are vaguely told that the tree loves the boy. Clearly in actual parenting the sacrificing may often be thankless but it is not *reward*less. The tree appears to get *nothing* in exchange for its sacrifice, and no parent (well, no good parent) would say that they get nothing out of being a parent. That's just silly.

Also, the cycle of parenting seems, to me anyway, to involve children growing up and becoming parents of their own and doing the same sacrificing and only then understanding what it is to give of yourself as a parent, and in the Giving Tree, the boy never has that experience, perhaps because, well, he isn't a tree. But he never, even as an old man, appears to understand what the tree has done for him, which takes away the sense of any of this being all right at all.

Not to mention the fact that, although perhaps there are parents who would read this book and think, "yes, that is what it is like, I am that tree," it has got to be the most intense guilt trip in print for a kid. Kids *aren't* prepared to understand the notion of love involving sacrifice. If they get that message at all, it's just going to make them feel unbearably guilty for their own existence in a way that they can never fix.

Perhaps I am reading too much into a simple terrible book extolling codependency, but it's an alternate reading to consider, anyway.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I hadn't stated it in my entry, but yes, absolutely I can read it as either bad male/female relationships in general or unbalanced mother/child relationships in particular. And of course it's the mother, not the father: after all, in our culture it's the mothers who are sooooo extolled by everyone for being utterly self-sacrificing (especially politicians, who don't want to actually pay them or support them for for the work they do).

And of course, if we can hoodwink/brainwash mothers into thinking total self-abnegation, even self-annihilation in the service of parenting is admirable, it gets the rest of society (especially those parsimonious politicians) off the hook.

Of course, you end up with yet the next selfish generation and a lot of destroyed mothers. Tree stumps indeed. Argh.

[http://users.livejournal.com/anam_cara_/]

Absolutely- I had always wondered why everyone always said "oh, that was one of my favorites!"

I hadn't seen it as strongly in the male/female context as much as human abuse of nature, or a parent/child relationship in which a mother gives everything to a child without retaining anything to sustain herself.

[nmsunbear.livejournal.com]

I hate that book, and have had many impassioned argumnets about it over the years. Whether you see the tree as a lover, a mother, or a tree, the message is that the boy is justified in not giving a crap about it, in destroying it for his own purposes, and that the tree actually likes it.

I'm organizing the library at my UU church, and was delighted when Eva, the director of religious education, agreed with my assessment that that book absolutely did not belong in our library.

[winterbadger]

Wow. I've never eread the book, but it sounds pretty awful. Completion through self-sacrifice? Ugh! As others have said, even without the gender dynamics, that's a frightful message.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Didn't like it either, but it wasn't important enough to me to figure out why; I just didn't reread it. (When I was a kid, I was terminally short on books, so not rereading something was really bad.)

The rest of that list had good books, but I had to mentally recalibrate the age ranges a lot to account for them being assigned reading to kids who don't really want to read.

[mizzlaurajean.livejournal.com]

Sadly I think it accurately describes how many women have been brought up to be. I'm thankful that now we have more options to chose what we want to do with our lives rather then just give and serve others. The more current trend is trying to push that women must take time for themselves in order to be happy healthy parents, wives etc. I guess it depends on your perspective. I don't think the author intended it to be a negative thing. I always think if the boy hadn't been so selffish that he would have still had the tree in the end. That struck me as odd as I got older but not some horrible evil story.
I think it reflects the time it was writen and the culture of the author. There are other kid books that have little things in them that are no longer appropriate. I think it's a Madeline book where they all get spanked and sent to bed. "A Monster in my Closet" by Mercer Mayer where the kid has a big shot gun. A "Where's Willie?" book by Ezra Jack Keats that Peter has a toy gun in.
I don't think it's awful because you can use it as an opportunity for discussion with kids about how the boy could have done things differently and about how the tree could have some higher expectations for herself. And about whether the boy is being selffish and what he is doing that is selffish. And how it translates to their lives and their relationship with their parents reasonable give/take and how to show apprecaition and respect for those who do thigns for you. You could also discuss the different stereo types set in the story for boys and girls and how they feel aobut them.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

True: even a bad book can be a good jumping off point for a useful conversation between a parent and child.

[cedarlibrarian.livejournal.com]

AGREE!

I love you so much. For years I thought I was crazy because I always thought The Giving Tree was such a horrible book about a boy who never learned how to give back and a tree that had no sense of self. I understand the idea, that the tree was happy just because the boy was happy, but why did he never learn that it's not okay just to take without giving something back? It creeped me out and I'm glad that no one ever gave it to me as a sorority gift. (It was very popular in that realm.)

I never really thought much about gender in regards to the book, just because that wasn't the issue for me. My issue was always with the boy's selfishness and his lack of regard for the tree.

[unanon.livejournal.com]

Like a couple other people who have commented already, I didn't encounter the book until I was already an adult. I picked it up casually in a bookstore and read it on the spot; it's one of the only times I can recall totally losing it completely in public. I occasionally pick it up in bookstores and skim over it merely to see if it'll have the same effect. I'm masochistic that way.

I have to admit that the gender-specific language never really struck me. It makes sense now that you mention it, but I honestly never noticed it before...at least not enough for it to have made an impression. I'm going to have to keep that in mind for the next time I masochistically re-read the book in Barnes & Noble.

I can't agree that it's that horrible a book to illustrate 'love.' A lot of people exist in relationships that ARE primarily based on sacrifice and selfishness; it may not be right, but it's pretty realistic. So many relationships are exactly like the one illustrated in this book...usually down to the gender specifics. People find a balance between need and selfishness, often convincing themselves that being used and needed is the same as being loved.

I'm not a parent and it's likely that I'll think differently when and if I ever have a child, but I don't think it's that terrible a children's book...so long as you're the sort of person willing to explain to your child that a)the male character is a selfish horror of a human being and b)giving ideally should not = sacrifice.