If you don’t stop to analyze the snot spray, you are missing that which is best in life.
Toby Zeigler talking about his newborn kids on The West Wing:
They’re great. And if somebody was hurtin’ 'em, I’d drop napalm on Yellowstone to make them stop. Letting some prisoners out of jail wouldn’t be nothing and I’ve known my kids for about forty-five minutes.
The Giving Tree isn’t about what a parent should do for a child, it’s about what a parent will do for a child, if necessary.
The tree and the boy are Mildred and Veda Pierce.
Well, sure, if you wanna be technical about it and, um, weird.
Julie
I think that would make an absolutely great sig!
Mind if I use it?
And I used to wonder how media geared towards children became so damn disgustingly sanitary.
Analyzing your environment is a good thing; applying cynical adult attitudes that a child could never possess to a simple story about basic human decency and deeming it unfitted for children is not.
If you’re going to critique something geared towards children, you have to think like a child again. Frankly, I don’t think the vast majority of people can or are willing to do that.
We all probably read Dr. Suess growing up, but at age 5, who among us was thinking, “This guy has to be on acid!”? Who of us, at age 7, was pondering Scooby Doo’s Fred and Velma’s sexual preferences? Or wondering why there was only one female Smurf in a village of males, and just where the baby eventually came from?
Children are innocent, and they remain so until we apply our own bitter cynicism to their world.
Just let it be.
I read The GIveing Tree to my class each year.
I teach Juniors. This year I even read it to my AP students.
It’s a great introduction to the fact that engaging in a text doesn’t maen you have to agree with it, that discussing the messier, more painful parts of a story isn’t tantamount to condoning them.
It’s a great introduction to theme, because there are about 50 different “themes” that are pretty easy to extract from The Giving Tree–some of which contradict each other, or seem to in the end.
It’s a great way to teach close reading–a critical line in the story takes place after the boy goes away with her trunk and it says “The tree was happy . . .but not really”. The more sophisticated reading of the story point at how this line shifts the story.
It’s a good way to teaching literary elements: everything from foreshadowing (The boy liked to “play king of the forest”) to alliteration, to the parts of a plot.
And finally, it’s a great intro to discussing how a story can operate on more than one level and have both levels be a “legitimate” way to read the piece. The Giving Tree is the story of a parent’s unconditional love. It’s also the story of a nice kid who was spoiled into being a brat and it ruined his chances for happiness. It’s also a story about the destructive power of love. It’s also a story about how redemption comes to those who wait. It’s also a story about how giving maes people happier than recieving and a story about how love is in your actions, not in your words.
Lastly, its a good way to teach the difference between “multiple readings” and “whacky ass” readings. It’s not a story about aliens taking over the local flora, nor about how good relationships must involve constant fighting.
(We do, of course, reinforce all these things with more traditional works of literature. But THe GIving Tree is a great gateway drug to the harder stuff)
Help yourself.
I suppose Roald Dahl’s children’s books aren’t really popular with some of you, either?
I’ll just repeat what I posted in previous threads on this same subject. In one of his lectures, Leo Buscaglia said about this book, “That’s not love, that’s SICK!”
It may be sick. That does seem to be the consensus here.
The real question is whether the book condones it. Some have assumed, at great volume, that it does. I have asked for a line reference or quote that shows that interpretation is clearly implied by the text, and no one has offered one.
The fact is that this book is written in very simple language, and does not lay the “right” interpretation out for the reader. It is left vague to make you think. Notice that the people who were screaming about the book being evil have not returned.
The question is NOT whether the book condones it, and I LOVE the books of Roald Dahl. One of my favorite children’s books is Russell Hoban’s “Big John Turkle,” which is essentially a portrait of depression. Big John Turkle is a snapping turtle who’s introduced to us in the act of diving at a duckling with a knife. He misses, and grumbles sourly, “Well, it’s not lobster salad.” It seems BJT had lobster salad once, when picnickers dropped some over the side of the boat. Since then, everything in his life has been compared to lobster salad and found lacking. One day he sees Jim Crow playing with a Willow Pattern cup handle. “Hmph,” BJT says to Jim Crow, “It’s not lobster salad.” “Lobster salad,” says Jim Crow, “is not Art.” When JC hides the piece of china, BJT steals it, and takes it to the bottom of the pond. As he sets his alarm clock for Spring and turns over to go to sleep, he says to himself, “Well, it’s not lobster salad. But at least Jim Crow hasn’t got it.”
The End.
I LOVE that book. But I still hate The Giving Tree.
The question being debated hotly here IS whether the book condones the actions of the characters. People here were mad only because they thought the author offered up one or the other as a model.
I don’t think so; I think it’s tongue in cheek. I think he’s ridiculing both characters.
So, let’s say he’s "ridiculing’ both of them. Then, “People here were mad only because they thought the author offered up one or the other as a model” would still be an accurate statment.
I love Dahl’s books and have since I was a kid. The people who dislike kids the most are the ones who write the best children’s stories; they’re not afraid of traumatizing the little guys.
Suzene
I’ve always thought that’s what makes me such a good parent!
Scylla, that was a truly lovely interpretation, thank you.
In the end I’d have to agree with Manda JO. The story means alot of things. It means nothing, it means everything. It really just means whatever you thought it meant. I always felt his point was a “take it as you will” sort of precautionary tale.
At least, those are the impressions I remember having when I read and re-read it as a child. It was an amazingly sad book as I recall, and I’d put money on the fact it was intended to be so.
Why is it bad for a children’s book to be sad, or present characters that are not entirely healthy individuals? Alot of classic children’s literature is incredibly sad and tragic, and had they been shiny happy stories with happy endings, I doubt most of them would be considered classics at all.
Little Women was a host of tragedies based in the South of the Civil War, with many of the horrors that period of time entailed. Black Beauty is one of my all time favorite books, and in 20 years of reading and re-reading it, I’ve yet to NOT cry reading it.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was horrifyingly depressing, and still an amazing book detailing how incredibly tragic immigrant life was in the early Industrial Age. It illustrated in a very stark and tragic way the concept that this great country of ours was built directly from the sweat and tears of our immigrant population and in many cases, were treated as less than animals because of it.
Madeleine was an orphan, and so was Little Orphan Annie, not to mention Oliver Twist and the Brothers Grimm were never anything but.
I outright sobbed when Aslan died in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I shed more than a few tears at Charlotte’s death in Charlotte’s Web too. The Phantom Tollbooth was a precautionary tale of many varying themes, and put forth some wonderful metaphors.
Cinderella as written by Grimm was in the end a tale of servitude, slavery and torture, Nicodemus was murdered in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Meg is responsible for trying to save the lives of both her father and her baby brother in The Wrinkle In Time, and Christopher Robin eventually rather abandoned Pooh to go to school.
Um…I’ll stop now, think I went a tad overboard, but I was a voracious lover of children’s lit as a kid, and once I get goin down Memory Lane of beloved books I read, it’s easy for me to go off on a tangent. chuckles
Shel Silverstein wrote alot of poems about mentally unhealthy individuals, imo. What about Sarah Cynthia Silvia Stout living in filth piled to the sky, because she wouldn’t “Take Her Garbage Out”? Ticklish Tom was so ticklish he eventually died due to rolling under a moving train and Jimmy Jet and His TV Set was the picture of addiction as relates to television (and a precautionary tale kids today could stand to hear more of, imo).
Heck, Trying On Clothes says that being naked was way better than wearin any darn clothes (a point of view with which I heartily concur wink).
Sure, The Giving Tree was a bit twisted…based on alot of Shel Silverstein’s other works, I’d wager that was rather the intention.
I hate this book. I also hate The Rainbow fish because the message is " if people don’t like you, give them stuff, and then they’ll be your friend!" And it’s not fair to say that the books don’t give kids a message, that’s what kids books do.
Even if the author doesn’t intend for there to be one, the kids will come up with a “moral” to the story. Like The Mitten for example, which is just cute and silly. You know what the moral to that one is? " Letting the mouse into the mitten causes everyone to have to get out, so the mouse going in is bad" Now, I don’t see it as being the mouse that’s the problem (the mitten simply didn’t have enough room for another animal, no matter which kind), but we read it to nine groups of children between the ages of 2 and 10, all in different locations, and they came up with that theory every time. I’ll tell you, we weren’t expecting that! That just goes to show how ingrained it is in kids minds that stories are supposed to be about right and wrong, and what to and not do- they think they all are.
The first time this book was read to me (I think I was seven), I assumed that it was a warning about what can happen in life if you let it. You can let yourself be treated horribly by others, or you can let yourself be turned into a spoiled brat. But I in no way thought the tree and the boy had a normal, healthy relationship.
As to whether you give this book to kids or not . . . I guess that depends on the kid. If you trust them to be able to draw wise conclusions, you could, but they probably don’t need to read the book to get the lesson. If you don’t trust them to do so, you probably shouldn’t, but they’d be the most likely child to benefit from it.
[Bart’s blackboard]
The giving tree was not a chump.
The giving tree was not a chump.
The giving tree was not a chump…
[/Bart’s blackboard]
That being said, when I read it when I was a kid, the moral I got from it was that you in the end companionship is the most meaningful part of life. Everything else one does only takes away from that.