When I first heard someone slander Shel Silverstein’s masterpiece, The Giving Tree, I was shocked. One of the greatest books ever written, it chronicles, should you need reminding, the tragic relationship of a boy and the tree who loved him. Initially, she meets his needs with ease: He gathers leaves, climbs her branches, eats her apples, rests in her shade, and the tree is happy. But the boy’s appetites grow unsustainable. He soon strips her of apples (to sell), then branches (for a house), and then takes her body (to make a boat). The book ends with the boy, ancient and bent and weary, resting on her stump.
The slanderers always raise the same basic objection: “What a wretched moral!” The book idealizes an impossibly selfless vision of motherhood or friendship, all give and no take, where true love means sacrificing yourself.
This reading is plainly wrong. In spare line drawings, Silverstein etches the boy’s face with misery. The tree, reduced to a stump so the boy can “sail away … and be happy,” “is happy … but not really.” And although the book ends with “and the tree was happy,” only a reader who has ignored everything that came before can read the line as earnest. Like the most provocative parables, this one does not admit an easy interpretation, but at least we can eliminate a relationship guide as the correct one. Silverstein himself, often pressed to defend the book, repeatedly said, “It’s just a relationship between two people; one gives, the other takes.”
So, why are so many people reading it wrong? The answer is simple: There is widespread, misguided insistence that children’s books are morality tales with clear heroes and villains. Good is rewarded and evil punished. Harry Potter wins. Voldemort dies. The selfless tree must be genuinely happy because, in stories for children, the righteous live happily ever after.
This assumption ruins many of the best children’s books, which have neither morals nor heroes. Take J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter and Wendy (the original title of Peter Pan). Despite Disney’s cartoon reimagining of the protagonist, the novel does not feature a role model who heroically refuses to grow up. Whatever his virtues, Peter is a narcissistic sociopath who at one point forces his hungry friends to eat imaginary food. Barrie describes him, repeatedly, as “heartless.” Remaining a boy forever may save a few fairies from blinking out of existence, but it also means stripping your loved ones bare and trying to stop hunger with nothing more than the power of imagination.
Insistence on adding morals where they don’t belong dates all the way back to anthologists of Aesop’s Fables. These days, the fables cannot be found without morals, but originally, they were left ambiguous. In the absence of a neat explanation, readers must come up with the meaning themselves. The stories remain open to interpretations, which can vary based on the reader or their context, rather than permanently solved like some kind of riddle.
The same problem exists with fairy tales, which, like Peter and Wendy, have been regrettably Disney-fied. It’s true that many fairy tales were more violent than the cartoon versions. The problematic sanitizing is not the removal of violence — children get plenty of that — but of ambiguity. “The Little Mermaid,” for example, ends with the mermaid’s horrific choice between murdering her beloved prince or taking her own life. Her time as a human is agonizing: “Every time her feet touched the ground it felt as if she were treading on sharp knives.” This is a story about the impossible transformations, about unfulfillable desire and the inevitable pain that results. Good does not triumph. In Disney’s version, it does, but at the cost of murdering the original.
Concern about morally ambiguous fairy tales predates Disney by several centuries. In the late 18th century, John Newbery, for whom the prestigious children’s book award is named, put out a series of children’s books meant to counter the moral chaos of fairy tales. Instead of fools who succeeded with the aid of chance and magic, Newbery’s heroes, among them Little Goody Two-Shoes and Primrose Prettyface, earn their happy endings with “Sweetness of Temper and Love of Learning.”
The idea that children’s stories should teach clear moral lessons has persisted ever since. “Ambiguities must wait until a relatively firm personality has been established,” cautioned the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his influential 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment. Instead, stories must present unambiguous heroes and villains who meet their proper ends. “In fairy tales, as in life, punishment or fear of it is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent, and that is why in fairy tales the bad person always loses out.”
Nowadays, we might laugh at the idea of Goody Two-Shoes, but only because our moral ideals have shifted. (Well, except for lovers of Goofus and Gallant, her direct descendant.) Heroes today are people with the courage to “be themselves,” who understand that their strength lies in their self-actualized and esteemed uniqueness. Once they embrace that strength, they are rewarded with happy endings. A children’s story in which embracing one’s own identity results in continued rejection by their peers seems almost sacrilegious.
Great artists and authors have pushed back against this moralistic narrative straitjacket. Edward Gorey, the masterly illustrator most famous for his gruesome alphabet The Gashlycrumb Tinies, crafted his books to avoid unambiguous resolutions. “I feel I’m doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind,” he once told an interviewer. “I think there should be a little bit of uneasiness in everything, because I do think we’re all really in a sense living on the edge. So much of life is inexplicable.”
In one of Gorey’s books for children, The Wuggly Ump, two girls and a boy play happily and eat wholesome food as a terrifying beast advances toward them. On the last page, they have been consumed, for no apparent sin other than being themselves. “This happy little tale will be read with profit and pleasure by a wide and varied audience,” reads the jacket flap. To those who agree with Bettelheim, this blurb reads like a joke. What profit can be gained from reading about unjust suffering, or evil rewarded and good punished? Why read The Giving Tree if there’s no hero?
Silverstein understands why. Children are not idiots. Along with Gorey, they recognize that much of life is inexplicable. They know that being yourself can get you into trouble. They are confronted with the paradox of being told to succeed while also being told that winning doesn’t matter. They know, because adults tell them, that life is not always fair. An endless diet of victorious heroes and vanquished villains hides these features of reality. At best, it will create the kind of frustration that Silverstein describes. At worst, it will succeed in convincing children, and adults, that the world really is filled with unambiguous binaries. There are good people and evil people, and if you’re ever confused about which is which, just look at who’s getting rewarded by the world because, in the end, good always wins and losers are evil.
But we don’t have to read every children’s story like that. The Giving Tree deserves to be able to be about complicated and inexplicable things. What’s the final word on what we’re supposed to take away from it? I wouldn’t presume to say because, like Gorey and unlike the anthologists, I want to do a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in a reader’s mind. It will mean what it needs to mean, when it needs to mean it, as long as Little Goody Two-Shoes doesn’t insist on adding a moral.
Alan Levinovitz is a professor of religion and a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. His most recent book is Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.
