[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 historical,
cultural, and literary contexts for a beloved novel’s central symbol.
One of my
favorite things about this blog is how much I learn from researching just about
every post, and especially those where I start with a basic topic—“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn makes sense for
a series on tree stories”—and not much more. In this case, I learned (first
from the book’s Wikipedia page, natch; but verified with another source to
which I’ll link, also natch) a really striking historical context for Betty
Smith’s 1943 novel: that it was one of the books distributed to WWII
soldiers in pocket-sided
Armed Services Editions (ASE); that it was popular enough to be one of the
select few ASEs chosen for a second printing; and that Smith received countless
fan letters from grateful GIs. Of the letters I’ve seen quoted, the most
striking such response seems to me to closely parallel the book’s titular
symbolic story, the image of the resilient “Tree of Heaven” outside protagonist
Francie Nolan’s childhood window: that
Marine wrote to Smith, “I can't explain
the emotional reaction that took place in this dead heart of mine...A surge of
confidence has swept through me, and I feel that maybe a fellow has a fighting
chance in this world after all.”
I can’t
imagine a more moving response to, or context for, Smith’s titular image nor
her book as a whole. But there are always multiple meaningful contexts for any
work, and I would add a couple more layers to the conversation as well. On a
cultural level, Smith’s Tree offers a unique but tellingly representative symbol
of the multi-generational immigration experience in America: Francie’s father
Johnny Nolan is an Irish immigrant and her mother Katie Rommely Nolan an
Austrian one, and Francie both witnesses their struggles with early 20th
century urban poverty and American society and experiences her own 2nd-generation
challenges. Yet she not only perseveres but by the novel’s end is (at the age
of 17) as mature and thriving as the Tree, which thus becomes as moving a
symbol of these multi-generational immigrant American sagas as Tan’s Joy
Luck Club, Cisneros’ House
on Mango Street, or Lahiri’s Namesake.
Smith’s novel would pair with any and all of those books in an Ethnic American
Lit course.
That’s of
course already a literary as well as a cultural context for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I would
add one other literary context into the mix as well. I’ve
written and talked
a good bit in the last year and a bit about why and how we might replace To Kill a Mockingbird in our classrooms
and curricula, including with the book (and film adaptation) to which I’ll turn
in tomorrow’s post. But at the very least, if we’re going to keep Mockingbird I think we should find ways
to reframe it, to push past the (to my mind) largely inaccurate sense of it as
a novel about racism and justice and to read it for the complicated
coming-of-age story it truly is. One way to do so would be to pair it with
another such coming-of-age novel like Smith’s, and for example to think about
how Smith’s titular Tree might be compared and contrasted with the neighborhood
tree that becomes such a
pivotal part of the setting and the story of Scout Finch in Lee’s book. One
more way and reason to read, teach, and share Smith’s novel and its Tree.
Next tree tale
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other tree texts you’d throw in?
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