One Gives, and One Takes

Since its publication forty years ago, Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree has endured as a book both treasured and derided for its unforgettable story of a boy and the tree that loves him. Readers have also interpreted (some would say misinterpreted) it as an environmentalist or anti-female story. Indeed, the story invites a multitude of different analyses because of its simple narrative and artwork.

In a succession of evocative line drawings, The Giving Tree shows the tree and the little boy who visits her daily. He "would gather her leaves" and play make-believe, or "swing from her branches and eat apples." Silverstein's drawings depict the tree as the central figure, while the presence of the boy is often implied by a glimpse of bare feet, or apple cores. The tree's sweeping branches are like swaying 'arms' as she embraces the little boy. It is obvious that they love each other very much; the tree is happy whenever the boy spends time with her.

The anthropomorphized tree-the fact that it "loves"-at first seems like a quirk of the boy's imagination. He plays with her and sleeps in her shade, and even carves a heart into her trunk (inscribed: "M.E. + T."). But time passes, and the boy is a young man. He no longer plays, but leans uneasily on the tree trunk. He starts visiting the tree less when he has a love interest, who is shown as a skirt and another pair of legs under the tree. At this stage of life, people often reject their old values and connections. An argument for the tree as a parental figure can be just as easily made as the other one of anti-female sentiment. Regardless of any political spin a reader might make, the sadness one feels for the rejected tree is genuine. We see that "the tree [is] often alone"; in one simple yet evocative picture, her boughs are crossed in solitary embrace.

The pattern of double-page spreads accompanied by brief text is broken when the tree at last speaks to the boy-now a man-after he comes to her again. The tree asks him to play with her and be happy, but the boy no longer seeks happiness in simple joys. He wants money "'to buy things and have fun'". While the tree has no money, she offers him her apples to sell. He does so, and she is happy for a while, but the boy doesn't come back for a long time.