Tuck Everlasting and the tree at the center of the world

Abstract

Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, is a meaningful and moving account of a girl reaching an important stage in her spiritual and moral development. It is a simple story that deals effectively with its complex theme because of its tight interweaving of structure and symbolism, both of which are borrowed from fairy tale and mythology and displaced only slightly in this folkloristic novel. The fairy tale journey, seen through female eyes, is an apt metaphor for Winnie Foster's discovery of her responsibility to herself and to others, and her growing understanding of the forces of life and death is rendered more powerfully because the mythic symbols used to illuminate her journey summon these forces into the novel. Babbitt uses the forms and devices of folk-tale to depict Winnie Foster's struggle to understand her place in the world, and at the same time Winnie's journey to self-fulfillment becomes a metaphor for the understanding of mortality that Tuck, and Natalie Babbitt, are trying to teach.According to Max Liithi, the cardinal characteristic of fairy tale style is the "absence of all desire to describe unessential details." Removing the unessential details from Natalie Babbitt's story makes clear the fairy tale nature of its plot. A young girl lives in a cottage by the edge of a wood, where she is treated with great strictness by her mother and grandmother. One day she decides to run away. Following an animal guide--in this case a toad, who had "bounced itself clumsily off towards the w o o d " the day before--she enters the magical forest. Reassured by the toad's presence she explores the wood and soon encounters one of the guardians of a magic spring.