Winnie-the-Conservationist: Tuck Everlasting, Ecofeminism, and Children’s Literature

Treat the earth well:it was not given to you by your parents,it was loaned to you by your children.

—Native American Proverb (qtd. in Smith 41)

In their 2004 anthology Wild Things: Children’s Culture and Ecocriticism, Sidney I. Dobrin and Kenneth B. Kidd compile a series of essays on the relationship between Anglo-American children, the culture created for them, and nature (both real and represented). They identify Dr. Seuss’s 1971 picture book, The Lorax, as “the canonical text of literary environmentalism” (11), both in its focus on conservation and its call to children to facilitate this urgent cause. As Theodor Geisel once told an interviewer, “The best slogan I can think of to leave with the kids of the U.S.A. would be ‘We can … and we’ve got to do better than this’” (qtd. in Henderson, Kennedy, and Chamberline 129). Another text to appear in the early stages of the contemporary environmental movement was Natalie Babbitt’s 1975 children’s novel, Tuck Everlasting, the story of a young girl who, while wandering through her family’s wood, comes across a mysterious family, the Tucks, who unknowingly became immortal when they drank from a spring therein. Winnie, with the assistance of this family, resists attempts by the ominous Man in the Yellow Suit to pump and market the spring water, and in the process, Winnie learns the value of living and friendship. Babbitt’s novel has surprisingly received limited ecocritical attention, but, as I will show, the book features various problematic “inter-being” relationships worthy of further discussion.¹ To flesh out these contradictions, I employ the critical paradigm of ecofeminism, which coincidentally emerged as a movement around the time of the novel’s publication, and, in the process, I intend to demonstrate what ecofeminism might bring to the academic and pedagogical study of children’s literature. While calling the novel “ecofeminist” in its ideological posturing would be anachronistic, I believe ecofeminism and Tuck Everlasting mutually inform each other in fruitful ways.

Though the roots of ecofeminism have been traced back to the work of nineteenth-century women naturalists, outdoorswomen, and activists (Gaard, “New” 646), ecofeminism today may be credited to the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, marine biologist Rachel Carson’s landmark indictment of pesticides and pollution that many credit with also spurring the contemporary environmental movement. As a methodology, the first major proponent and, in fact, coiner of the phrase “écoféminisme,” was the French feminist writer Françoise d’Eaubonne, who defined it as efforts “to eliminate gender inequalities and hierarchies in a way that value[s] the environment and articulate[s] parallels between women’s and environmental exploitation” (qtd. in Gardner and Riley 24). Much like ecology itself, ecofeminism—or its common variant, “ecological feminism”—is holistic in its scope; Karen J. Warren explains this function as “the position that there are important connections between how one treats women, people of color, and the underclass on one hand and how one treats the nonhuman natural environment on the other” (xi). Further landmark work by Gretchen Legler (1997) and Patrick D. Murphy and Greta Gaard (1998), among others, introduced ecofeminist principles into the study of literature to uncover, as Legler asserts, “how representations of nature are intertwined with representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality by analyzing uses of language, desire, knowledge, and power” (227). Just as black feminists powerfully had done in the Combahee River Collective Statement in 1974, ecofeminism highlighted the interconnectedness of oppressions in an effort to underscore the shared struggle of the marginalized while avoiding isolation of individual oppressions from the larger system. By extension, ecofeminist literary criticism provides students and teachers alike the politically urgent opportunity to analyze and evaluate the ongoing exploitation and oppression of women and nonhuman entities. In the process, ecofeminism operates to underscore the hegemony of a destructive authority that is both patriarchal and capitalistic.

The continuing emphasis on interconnectedness resonates throughout the ecocritical project in literary studies, as seen in Timothy Morton’s 2010 monograph, The Ecological Thought. Yet ecofeminism and its influence in...