no one else believes me, but i SWEAR The Giving Tree is misogynistic propaganda. you're telling me a female described tree loves a boy so much she gives him everything. and the little boy asks for everything she has, and she gives it all until she has nothing left. and the boy is never grateful until the very end when the tree is just a stump, and even then the boy sees nothing wrong with what he's done. and this is a message we're supposed to read to children????? that men can take and take and take from women until we have nothing left and it's somehow wholesome?
i remember being read The Giving Tree as a little girl. i remember the little boys thinking it was a great story, while me and my friends, all girls, were left shocked. we had expected some message at the end about how taking and taking from someone while giving nothing in return is wrong. it was like pages had been ripped from the book. the little boys saw nothing wrong, but we understood that the book was saying we were supposed to give and give and give until we had nothing left, and it was a happy ending. because the boy got everything he could ever want, and the tree got the boys attention for an hour or two.
The Giving Tree should really have been called The Taking Boy. i still can't believe we read this to children.
this post has unearthed a deep forgotten memory of having this book read to me by my mother as a very young child, and crying inconsolably at the end of it. Like you say, I think because the story feels like it's missing a part where the tree receives some mutual care in return, and you wait and wait as the pages turn for this to happen, but it just never does, and the tree essentially dies as it watches the boy (now and old man) teach his grandson to plant a new tree... presumably to exploit in the same way.
I remember my mother telling me "Why are you crying? The tree was happy! It's a story about love. The tree gave itself because it loved the boy," and not knowing how to articulate what upset me so deeply about the book. It may sound dramatic to say but I felt deeply scarred by this book just from the few times it was read to me, and I think that's because even if we cannot put it into words at that age, even very small female children have some sort of subconscious awareness the book is about their mothers, and by extension about our own future as women, and about the unfairness and cruelty we will experience which will be treated as a virtuous expectation.
i want to bounce off this reblog because it's so great and i also thought of another point i didn't touch totally on in the OG post that relates to this response :)
i remember, as a little girl, hearing all these stories about "sacrifice". "she sacrificed everything for me, she's the best mom" or "my mom sacrificed her whole life to help me" or even our own mothers saying that "love is sacrifice" and how she was happy to give up her dreams or goals because she loved her husband and her kids. The Giving Tree is about our mothers that gave everything to this world, to their husbands, to their children, and it's called love. it's romanticized. it feels like the best thing a woman can be is someone who gives everything up, sacrifices everything, until she's not even a real person but a driving force in someone else's life. we watched our moms in relationships where she gave and gave for so little in return, and called it love. kids pick up on that, especially daughters. The Giving Tree is our mothers.
What you describe is something I have noticed over and over in TV and documentary interviews where adult children are asked to speak about their mothers. Both men and women will mention appreciating how their mothers sacrificed for them, but almost without fail, this will be the only thing the men have to say about who their mothers were. Women will often speak about her sense of humor, her style, her favorite hobbies, her talents unrelated to care-giving, but the men almost never mention a single thing about their mothers aside from what she did for them. To them, their mother's greatest achievement is having given up everything to make them a successful man.
In the male mind, women are not their own people with their own lives, but vessels that carry and sacrifice to make and support the people with actual lives... men.
