[This month we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Arbor Day, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of tree-tastic stories. Leading up to a special weekend post on the holiday’s histories!]
On two ways to
frame and teach “one of the
most divisive books in children’s literature.”
First things first:
I’m a big Shel Silverstein fan
(and that was even before I learned that he
wrote “A Boy Named Sue”). In my experience, it’s very rare to find children’s
literature that genuinely and fully appeals to both kids (of all ages, no less)
and adults, and the Silverstein poems featured in classic books like Where the Sidewalk Ends
(1974) and A
Light in the Attic (1981) absolutely succeed at that tough task. They,
like Silverstein’s style and voice overall, are also truly unique, unlike any
other children’s lit that I’ve encountered (which is likely a main reason,
along with that broad audience appeal, why they have remained popular for
nearly fifty years). I say all that not just to praise a very deserving author
and artist, but also and especially so that when I say The
Giving Tree (1964) is on the short list of books I hate most, you’ll
know that I don’t make that claim at all lightly.
I’m not
alone in that hate—but at the same time, as my opening quote above (from librarian
and author Betsy Bird) illustrates, those who deeply love the book
are likewise far from alone. That kind of incredibly varied range of readings
can be enough to make one throw one’s hands in the air and mutter my sons’ and
my favorite phrase to diffuse many arguments: de
gustibus non est disputandum. But it also offers teachers (in and out of
classrooms) a chance to, as a familiar pedagogical saying goes, “teach
the controversy”—and in this case, I would add, through highlighting and
engaging directly with the book’s divisiveness to teach and talk about the idea
of reader-response criticism: how we can read and analyze readers and readings
to think about what they tell us about audiences, perspectives, communities,
how cultural works work, and more. Just the range of “Interpretations” traced on
the book’s Wikipedia
page offers a fascinating window into late 20th and early 21st
century readers, communities, and ways of thinking about what culture does and
means.
For all those
reasons I don’t think it makes sense to privilege any one reading of the book
as more “correct”—but in the spirit of this week’s series, I do want to say a
bit more here about what it would mean to take The Giving Tree seriously as an environmentalist parable. I
don’t know that there’s any direct evidence that Silverstein was particularly concerned
with such issues, either with this book or overall in his career and life; but
at the same time, it’s interesting and important to note that he makes a tree
one of his book’s two characters, and moreover makes the tree the one who gives
so much and is so thoroughly wrecked in the process. To take the
reader-response idea one step further—whatever Silverstein may have intended,
it seems impossible for any 21st century reader not to think about
that tree in the context of all that humans have done to the Earth; and even if
children and all of us are deeply bothered by reading Silverstein’s images,
indeed perhaps especially if we’re bothered, that particular reader-response
feels like a very worthwhile one to produce and engage.
Next tree tale
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?
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