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The Giving Tree
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jadelennox, I learn that The Giving Tree, one of my beloved books from childhood, has a great deal of controversy around it and is actually reviled by some children's literature scholars, herself included.
I find the controversy both surprising and interesting, but I think this is the first time I've seen a book I hold so dear (there are very few) get attacked like this. I put up a little defense for it in that thread, but seeing all the other commenters pour righteous scorn on it makes me feel queasy, as if all these people were rushing in to talk about how my Aunt Jan was actually a pirate who molested them as children or something. Bad news.
jadelennox, I learn that The Giving Tree, one of my beloved books from childhood, has a great deal of controversy around it and is actually reviled by some children's literature scholars, herself included. I find the controversy both surprising and interesting, but I think this is the first time I've seen a book I hold so dear (there are very few) get attacked like this. I put up a little defense for it in that thread, but seeing all the other commenters pour righteous scorn on it makes me feel queasy, as if all these people were rushing in to talk about how my Aunt Jan was actually a pirate who molested them as children or something. Bad news.
no subject
I was going to argue that the gender issue is irrelevant because you could swap the gender roles and the story would be just as bad (which is true) but in fairness I think the thing that irritates me about the gender-based analysis is that I have yet to see anyone arguing that the story is bad because it promotes the view that males are fundamentally dependent and incapable creatures (I haven't read the full wikipedia article, so maybe I'm missing that somewhere). If you swap the gender roles you'll see that if the boy was a girl and the tree was portrayed as male, the first gender-based critique that leaps to mind is one about female dependence.
A gender-fair analysis would be quick to make the same point about the boy in the story as written, and anyone who knows college-age men who can't cook a meal or do laundry or keep house knows that the presumed incapacity of men is an important real-world gender issue, albeit not as important as the millenia old traditions of "glory" that have put so many millions of young men into anonymous graves.