While on the hunt for a birthday present for my friend, I came across Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree,” the childhood classic encased in its familiar green sleeve. Picking it up and reading it again, I was surprised to find it a lot sadder than I remember from my childhood, and I don’t think it was just the nostalgia. Later, when I told another friend my intention to give “The Giving Tree” as a gift (the birthday girl is an aspiring elementary school teacher who has picked up the habit of collecting picture books), she warned me that there were conflicting views about the moral message behind the story. I was taken aback. “The Giving Tree” had always had a place in the “fond childhood recollections” part of my memory, and I was distraught that others might think that it shouldn’t have belonged there.
However, it didn’t take long for me to understand where the controversy lay. As a quick recap, the story follows the relationship between a tree and a boy from childhood to old age. When he was young, the boy played in the branches of the tree. As the boy grows older, time and time again, he returns to the tree to ask for things to help him get a foothold in the adult world: from wooing his future wife to building a house to traveling the world, the tree willingly offers what she can to help him. From her apples, her branches, and finally to her trunk, the tree offers all of this to the boy. The repeated refrain after each of these events is, “and the tree was happy”.
We have a selfish boy who only knows how to take, and the selfless tree who only knows how to give. This isn’t exactly the stuff that healthy relationships are made out of. Obviously, we don’t want our future children to take after either character by constantly acting selfishly or constantly sacrificing themselves. So, what kind of message is the story really trying to convey?
Many have likened the role of the tree to that of a parent due to the unconditional love that it displays towards the boy. There’s nothing wrong with this understanding, but again, this isn’t the type of behaviour that we want to be teaching our kids. Some have understood the story as one cautioning against environmental destruction. After all, the boy does cut down the tree to build himself a house and a boat.
Still others have argued that the story is meant to be a warning against abusive relationships, those where one party gains at the expense of the other. Was the tree truly happy? After giving away her trunk so that the boy can sail around the world in his boat, the repeated refrain changes: “and the tree was happy… but not really”. Maybe the tree has realized how costly her love has been, and how little she has received in return.
Still others have hypothesized that the story argues against the value of material wealth over relationships. As the boy grows up, he gets a job, becomes busy, wants a wife and home, and eventually decides to travel the world. In the end, however, he no longer has the strength to play anymore and instead opts to rest on the tree’s stump. It would seem that in the end, all that the tree and boy have left are each other.
For me, I realized that this recent re-reading of “The Giving Tree” had served as a reminder of the selfless love that others have demonstrated towards me. It reminded me of all the times that the people around me -my parents, my mentors, my teachers- have put up with my selfish behaviour. And when I reflect on how I behaved in the past, how entitled and self-assured I was, I am horrified that, like the boy in “The Giving Tree” I hadn’t stopped to consider the sacrifices that I was asking of the people around me. Why hadn’t anybody beaten my ego down sooner?
In the end, I did give my friend a copy of “The Giving Tree”. The words that she left me with assure me that the children she reads it to will be guided towards positive personal growth. “It’s about the discussion and the leading questions that you follow up with,” she told me. Left on its own, the story doesn’t amount to much beyond a story of the boy that takes and the tree that gives and what is left when we grow old. “It’s about a boy and a tree,” Silverstein once said, “it has a pretty sad ending.”
Information sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/giving-tree-50-sadder-remembered
https://observer.com/2017/03/why-the-giving-tree-makes-you-cry-books-culture-love-life-lessons/
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2jj6fx/the_moral_behind_the_giving_tree/
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