#16 Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (1975)
87 points
Imagine coming upon a fountain of youth in a forest. To live forever–isn’t that everyone’s ideal? Babbitt asks profound questions about the meaning of life and death, and leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the perfect cycle of nature. Intense and powerful, exciting and poignant, Tuck Everlasting will last forever–in the reader’s imagination. – Kristi Hazelrigg
A beautiful story about mortality. Gets you thinking without being morbid. – Nicole Johnston
Wise and engrossing. The writing burns from the first page. – Emily Myhr
I did not think that I liked Tuck Everlasting when I was a kid. I was a sensitive child, which is to say, a wimp. Happy endings were far preferable to unhappy. Life was to be tied up in a neat little bow, thank you very much. None of this moral complexity business. And unhappy children’s literature? Every time I met an ambiguous ending or one that didn’t ascribe to my strict sense of how-a-story-should-end (Stuart Little stands out in the mind) I was perturbed. Seriously perturbed. Tuck Everlasting perturbed me. Yet even as I lamented the lack of a joyous finale as well as the fate of the poor eternal toad at the end (the true victim of the book, in my eyes) I was fascinated with this story. Couldn’t stop thinking about it. Here was a book that brought up an issue that humanity has grappled with since the dawn of time. I couldn’t look away. I still can’t.
The plot from American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction reads, “The heroine of Tuck Everlasting, Winnie Foster, is an overprotected child who inhabits a no nonsense house guarded by ‘a capable iron fence.’ Unaware that the spring of eternal life quite literally bubbles in the nearby wood, Winnie has lived in the protected oasis of her home for ten years. When she finally ventures into the woods, she is kidnapped by the Tuck family, who have innocently drunk from the fountain of youth with pernicious results. They learn that immortality without growth, change, or death is an infernal paradise–a curse, not a blessing. The Tucks realize that their secret has cosmic implications, that it must be guarded from the villainous ‘man-in-the-yellow-suit’ at all costs. When this evil person threatens to use the secret to acquire wealth and power for himself and to use Winnie as a freak, after he forces her to drink the water, Mae Tuck kills him in an act of violent retribution. While the act resembles the swift justice of a folktale, it has complicated consequences. Winnie in her turn must act to save Mae, whom she loves, and to protect the secret, which she is not sure she believes. Eventually the reader learns that Winnie has embraced her mortality and affirmed her humanity, her place on the wheel, by choosing to become ‘Winnie Foster Jackson, Dear Wife, Dear Mother’.”
Back in 2000 Betsy Hearne interviewed Natalie Babbitt in the March/April 2000 issue of Horn Book about the book for its 25th Anniversary. About the story’s creation Babbitt said, “It was hard to find the right way to begin it. There were a couple of other beginnings that aren’t around anymore, because there were so many piles of paper that I finally gave everything to the University of Connecticut. But once I got started it was easy–partly because of the setting, which is a real place. It’s always fun to write about a real place. In upstate New York we had a cabin on a pond, exactly like the Tucks’. . . . Everything about that place in the book is true
My sketch is just a lead-in to our theme of immortality--and seeking a presence of eternal, youthful beauty.
Mythic energy in fiction may be hard to define in words, but we usually recognize its presence when we engage it in a work of fiction, whether as a reader, or a writer. When a fiction writer recognizes his story has mythic undercurrents, he would probably do well to sharpen the plot to exploit such material. Fiction that gets published and lasts generally touches on universal themes, stuff that excites emotional resonance in our DNA, and the stuff of myths typically does this for everyone.
Take a classic in YA literature, Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt. The story tells of the Tuck family, in rural, early America, where family members share the secret of a spring that contributes to their immortality. Another myth of the fountain of youth, tells of a search for it in Florida by an earlier, Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon. Tuck Everlasting is beautifully written, with wonderful pastoral scenes, but it was the mythical undercurrents of immortality, aging, and related secrets, that gave the story its power.
I recently finished a contemporary best-seller that exploits the same theme: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell. In this story of Dutch traders in 1700s Japan, a Japanese woman, a midwife, whom Jacob has fallen in love with, is abducted by a powerful noble, and is forcibly confined in a secluded temple under his control. Ostensibly, the temple mission is to rescue destitute, often disfigured, women, and provide a place of refuge for them. (Spoiler Alert on reading following!) However, under the trappings of goddess worship, the women are made to bear children for the monks. The children are soon removed from the women, presumably to be given to good families on the outside, but actually the children suffer a terrible fate in the quest for the immortality of the noble and his monks. Again, an interesting background story of the Dutch East India Trading Co. activities and its people in early post-Edo era Japan, but with a bizarrely fascinating overlay of a search for immortality.
The yearning for immortality also comes to mind as a theme in Wagner's cycle of The Ring, a series of four operas based on Norse mythology. Our small town enjoyed live, closed-circuit video transmittal from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to our local movie-house for the first two operas of the cycle: Das Rhinegold, and Die Walkure. In the cycle, Wotan seeks to avert the twilight of the gods and preserve their immortality within a newer, and more resplendent Valhalla. In doing so he inadvertently entwines the fate of the gods with the heroic deeds of mortals. The music, staging, and drama has been superlative.
In conclusion, a universal, mythological underpinning has potential for breathing life into a work of fiction.
Yesterday I tweeted a top ten list of books for girls and young women compiled by arts and culture blog Flavorpill. Really I couldn't resist. Matilda! The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler!? Those books meant so much to me that just seeing... Read the rest of this post
First Book recently had the pleasure of speaking with author and illustrator Natalie Babbitt , the author of the classic ALA Notable Children’s book Tuck Everlasting and Newbery Honor Book Kneeknock Rise, among many other titles for children. She is also a member of the board of directors of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, a non-profit organization whose primary focus is to make issues related to young people’s literacy, literature, and libraries an ongoing priority on our national agenda.
Click below to hear our conversation with Ms. Babbitt about the mysteries of her home state of Ohio, the joy of illustrating, and her latest work, “Seven From Ohio,” featured in the new book Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out just published by Candlewick Press!
P.S. Don’t forget — if you plan to be in the Washington, D.C. area on September 27th, don’t miss other contributors to Our White House when they discuss its creation at the National Book Festival on the Mall!
