Drawing the Line: The Giving Tree's "Adult" Lessons

When I was nine years old, having recently devoured Shel Silverstein's first book of children's poems, I discovered nude photos of the author in Playboy magazine. A neighbor had left a trunk full of Playboys with us (his wife objected to them), so naturally I snuck two or three of them at a time to my bedroom, where I could read them in private. I wasn't aware that "Silverstein in a Nudist Camp" was only one installment of many he wrote for Playboy, but I was struck by the similarity of the cartoons in the article to the drawings in his children's books. Several black-and-white photographs accompanied the cartoons, but the one that stuck with me was of a naked Silverstein walking down a wooded path away from the camera, flanked by women similarly unadorned, their rear ends the most prominent feature of the photo. I couldn't read Silverstein again without seeing that image.

I suggest that for scholars of children's literature, superimposing the "adult" Silverstein on the "children's" Silverstein is critically useful. In other words, seeing Silverstein's "backside" opens an intertextual reading that changes the way we see his writing for children, and Silverstein's "showing his backside" is an important aspect of his writing for both audiences. But with the notable exception of Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., who links them in his discussion of Silverstein's "Uncle Shelby" persona, little has been done to connect Silverstein's writing for children and adults.¹ Thomas urges readers of Silverstein to "read across genres, to put his work for adults beside his work for children, to read his poetry alongside his Playboy cartoons" ("Reappraising" 289). As I demonstrate in this essay, analyzing Silverstein's famous 1964 book The Giving Tree in conversation with his works that are clearly for an adult audience gives us insight into both types of texts. In fact, reading these works together—the ostensibly adult Playboy cartoons and the popular children's classic—brings into focus the performative work of the classification "children's literature," with all its attendant connotations and moral expectations.

Throughout this essay, I attempt to engage in what U. C. Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers call the "critical elasticity" that writing across the dual audiences "demands, yet seldom receives" (viii). Silverstein's "adult" cartoons, which play on human foibles and compulsive repetition, open up new critical possibilities for reading The Giving Tree and illuminate the role of categorization in the interpretive exercise. Further, juxtaposing Silverstein's "adult" cartoons with his "children's" book calls into question critical discrimination between the two and allows us to think critically about our individual and cultural engagement with children's literature.

In the pages that follow, I show how popular and critical reactions to The Giving Tree, a book whose intended audience is ambiguous, reflect and reify an artificial line between child and adult audiences. Paradoxically, attempts to transgress the artificial line reveal it further: like popular and critical responses to The Giving Tree, reactions that delight in "adultifying" children's texts are emotional responses that define and confine children and their literature. The line between children's and adult literature affirmed by policing, prescribing, or even transgressing children's literature interferes with understanding Silverstein's work; by ignoring the line and eliding the categories of children's and adult literature, we gain new insights about The Giving Tree.²

Because of its ambiguous audience, The Giving Tree is useful for exploring the way categorization of a book as "children's literature" affects its reception. Although it is widely received as a children's book, it is unlikely Silverstein wrote it with a child audience in mind. Ruth K. MacDonald writes that the book "was not designed originally for a young audience," and conjectures that its classification as a children's book stems perhaps from "the text's simplicity and the artwork's spareness" (8). Lisa Rowe Fraustino claims that because The Giving Tree requires reading against the text, it is "not for kids. They don't get it. Nor do most...