Tuck Everlasting

“The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

Winnie’s family owns the wood where the spring is located. The question arises as to whether land can truly be owned and, if so, what part of it belongs to someone. This passage foreshadows the impending interest of the land on which the spring sits, sought after by the man in the yellow suit. His desire for the land and the spring leads to his attempt to exchange Winnie, circling back to the question of what land ownership means and how far ownership of it will motivate some people.

“But in another part of her head, the dark part where her oldest fears were housed, she knew there was another sort of reason for staying at home: she was afraid to go away alone. It was one thing to talk about being by yourself, doing important things, but quite another when the opportunity arose. The characters in the stories she read always seemed to go off without a thought or care, but in real life—well, the world was a dangerous place. People were always telling her so. And she would not be able to manage without protection. They were always telling her that, too. No one ever said precisely what it was that she would not be able to manage. But she did not need to ask. Her own imagination supplied the horrors.”

Winnie’s reflections speak to the difference between reality and fiction. In a story, characters have grand adventures, and readers can enjoy them secure in the knowledge that the book will likely end with all well. Her thoughts also show the power of imagination. No one ever tells Winnie what to be afraid of, but they don’t have to for her to fear. Her mind creates objects of fear that are worse than any stories. It also illustrates the sheltered world in which Winnie lives, where she is told she can’t manage without someone to protect her, the implication being parents and, later, a husband. This combined with the fear Winnie’s mind creates has kept her from stepping out of her comfort zone, and the fact that she does venture beyond the yard shows her bravery and willingness to try.

“Winnie herself was speechless. She clung to the saddle and gave herself up to the astonishing fact that, though her heart was pounding and her backbone felt like a pipe full of cold running water, her head was fiercely calm. Disconnected thoughts presented themselves one by one, as if they had been waiting their turn in line. ‘So this is what it's like to ride a horse—I was going to run away today anyway—what will they say when I'm not there for breakfast—I wish the toad could see me now—that woman is worried about me—Miles is taller than Jesse—I'd better duck if I don't want this next branch to knock me off.’”

These lines come while Winnie is being kidnapped by the Tucks. The juxtaposition of Winnie’s physical and mental reaction shows the complexities of her fear. Winnie’s body is afraid in the typical sense with coldness and a pounding heart. By contrast, her thoughts come into sharp focus, allowing her to consider the implications of her situation and avoid further danger, such as the branch.

“And Winnie, laughing at him, lost the last of her alarm. They were friends, her friends. She was running away after all, but she was not alone. Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she'd always wished she had. And all at once she was elated. Where were the terrors she'd been told she should expect? She could not recognize them anywhere. The sweet earth opened out its wide four corners to her like the petals of a flower ready to be picked, and it shimmered with light and possibility till she was dizzy with it. Her mother's voice, the feel of home, receded for the moment, and her thoughts turned forward. Why, she, too, might live forever in this remarkable world she was only just discovering! The story of the spring—it might be true!”

Winnie’s new discoveries are likened to a flower opening for the first time. This moment marks the beginning of Winnie’s character arc and growth. She believes she is past fear and revels in her new-found freedom. Her carefree nature also demonstrates how events don’t always come to pass in expected ways. Winnie planned to run away, but she pictured doing it alone. Rather, she runs with new friends into a greater adventure than she believed.

“Winnie had grown up with order. She was used to it. Under the pitiless double assaults of her mother and grandmother, the cottage where she lived was always squeaking clean, mopped and swept and scoured into limp submission. There was no room for carelessness, no putting things off until later. The Foster women had made a fortress out of duty. Within it, they were indomitable.”

This passage comes while Winnie tours the Tuck’s house. She compares their messy home to her own and is amazed to learn people live differently than she does. The state of the Winnie’s home reveals the place of women in society in the 1800s and Winnie’s rejection of her own role in her household. Winnie’s mother and grandmother spend their days keeping the house in pristine condition, and Winnie is expected to do the same in preparation for being a housewife.

“It had been different when they were out-of-doors, where the world belonged to everyone and no one. Here, everything was theirs alone, everything was done their way. Eating, she realized now, was a very personal thing, not something to do with strangers. Chewing was a personal thing. Yet here she was, chewing with strangers in a strange place.”

Following the grand adventure on the road, Winnie sits down to dinner with the Tucks, and in the quiet, the next phase of her character arc begins. On the road, the world felt open and free because that land belonged to no one, referring to earlier discussion of who really owns land. Within the Tuck’s house, Winnie is enclosed by unfamiliarity. At home, she knows her routine and how she is expected to always act. Eating in a strange place feels wrong, somehow, which makes her question whether there really is true freedom.

“But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing. But it's passing us by, us Tucks. Living's heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it's useless, too.”

Tuck delivers these lines to Winnie while they’re out on the pond. The paragraph is part of his larger lecture about keeping the spring a secret, and these lines dig at the heart of the book’s most major theme—how life without death isn’t really living. Life is like the wheel introduced in the prologue. The wheel continuously goes around, and creatures jump on and off as they are born and die. By contrast, the Tucks are stuck on the wheel, forced to watch the coming and going of all other life. For Tuck, it feels unnatural because there should not be birth without death.

“But Winnie did not sleep at all, not for a long, long time. The cushions of the sofa were remarkably lumpy and smelled like old newspapers; and the chair pad Mae had given her for a pillow was thin and hard, and rough under her cheek. But far worse than this was the fact that she was still in her clothes, for she had firmly refused the offer of Mae's spare nightgown, with its seeming miles of faded cotton flannel. Only her own nightgown would do, and the regular bedtime routine; without them, she was painfully lonely for home.”

This passage continues the part of Winnie’s character arc started during dinner. Like eating, preparing for sleep is a personal activity, and Winnie realizes here that freedom comes with a cost. Having adventures is all well and fine, but they mean sacrificing the comforts of a singular place and the routines associated with a stable lifestyle and her childhood. Winnie’s inability to find comfort mirrors the relationship between life and death. The Tucks live one long adventure, but they’ve lost the ability to truly settle anywhere. The Fosters will eventually die, but in the meantime, they have a house, land, and comfortable living arrangements.

“He lifted a hand then, ignoring their exclamations, and began to smooth the thin hairs of his beard. ‘You know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I've come a long way, looking for a wood exactly like the one you've got next door here. It would mean a great deal to me to own it. And how pleasant to have neighbors like yourselves! […] ‘We'd be good friends, I think. Why, the little girl and I, we're friends already. It would be a great relief to see her safely home again, wouldn't it?’ He clicked his tongue and frowned. ‘Dreadful thing, kidnapping. Isn't it fortunate that I was a witness! Why, without me, you might never have heard a word. They're rough country people, the ones that took her. There's just no telling what illiterates like that might do. Yes,’ he sighed, lifting his eyebrows and smiling again, ‘it looks as if I'm the only person in the whole world who knows where to find her.’”

The man in the yellow suit demonstrates psychopathic tendencies as he dangles his knowledge of Winnie’s whereabouts over her family. He is willing to withhold Winnie’s safety for a plot of land, and he does not feel the emotions his facial expressions convey. Additionally, Winnie’s family does not have a strong role in the story. Rather than a two-sided conversation, the Fosters discuss their missing family member through the man, making him the focal point of the chapter.

“She had been kidnapped, but nothing bad had happened, and now it was almost over. Now, remembering the visits of the night before, she smiled—and found that she loved them, this most peculiar family. They were her friends, after all. And hers alone.” 

Winnie’s thoughts here come the morning after her difficulty sleeping. At night, all her problems seemed so great, and her stress was high. With daylight, Winnie resolves her fear and confusion, and the worst feels behind her. This paragraph harkens back to the lines from Chapter 5, where Winnie feared venturing into the world without protection. Her worst fears came true, and she came through them. Her optimistic outlook on how the kidnapping will resolve reveals her lack of maturity, despite the lessons she’s learned on the adventure so far.

“‘Remember I told you I had two children?’ he asked. ‘Well, one of 'em was a girl. I took her fishing, too.’ His face clouded then, and he shook his head. ‘Her name was Anna. Lord, how sweet she was, that child! It's queer to think she'd be close to eighty now, if she's even still alive. And my son—he'd be eighty-two.’ […] ‘Afterwards, I thought about going to find them. I wanted to, heaven knows. But, Winnie, how'd it have been if I had? My wife was nearly forty by then. And the children—well, what was the use? They'd have been near growed theirselves. They'd have had a pa close to the same age they was. No, it'd all have been so mixed up and peculiar, it just wouldn't have worked. Then Pa, he was dead-set against it, anyway. The fewer people know about the spring, he says, the fewer there are to tell about it.’”

This conversation between Winnie and Miles shows yet another complication of the Tucks’ unchanging natures. Miles’s lack of aging has isolated him from his family, and separated him from them for eternity, illustrating the consequences of living forever.

“‘Hey!’ cried Miles. ‘Look there! You got a bite. Fresh trout for breakfast, Winnie.’

But just as suddenly the pole whipped straight again and the line went slack. ‘Shucks,’ said Miles. ‘It got away.’

‘I'm kind of glad,’ Winnie admitted, easing her rigid grip on the butt of the pole. ‘You fish, Miles. I'm not so sure I want to.’”

These lines come after Miles catches a fish and throws it back because Winnie can’t bear to watch it die. After all the talk of immortality and how death is natural, the process still frightens Winnie. When Winnie almost catches her own fish, she fears having to watch another creature fight for survival. Her reaction speaks to the circle of life and whether there are forms of justified killing. If animals (including humans) kill to survive, they do so for their own wellbeing. Winnie and the Tucks don’t need fish for breakfast, and the unnecessary death hurts Winnie.

“‘It will be very, very expensive. But who wouldn't give a fortune to live forever?’

‘I wouldn't,’ said Tuck grimly.

‘Exactly,’ said the man in the yellow suit. His eyes glowed. ‘Ignorant people like you should never have the opportunity. It should be kept for…certain others. And for me. However, since it's already too late to keep you out, you may as well join me in what I'm going to do.’”

This passage comes from the longer conversation when the man in the yellow suit tells the story of his childhood. Again, he shows psychopathic tendencies by so calmly disregarding the existence of people he believes to be beneath him. The man also reveals his closed-mindedness. He sees only the benefits and money-making opportunity of the spring. He doesn’t consider the negative side effects of living forever, and he dismisses Tuck’s opinion because it is counter to what he wants.

“And then Winnie said something she had never said before, but the words were words she had sometimes heard, and often longed to hear. They sounded strange on her own lips and made her sit up straighter. ‘Mr. Tuck,’ she said, ‘don't worry. Everything's going to be all right.’”

Here, Winnie completes her growth and character arc. Though only a day has passed since the story’s beginning, she has grown far beyond her years. She understands the power of reassurance and her own desire for it from others. After being coddled all her life, she’s now the one offering compassion to someone else.

“Winnie pulled her little rocking chair up to her bedroom window and sat down. The rocking chair had been given to her when she was very small, but she still squeezed into it sometimes, when no one was looking, because the rocking made her almost remember something pleasant, something soothing, that would never quite come up to the surface of her mind. And tonight she wanted to be soothed.”

The rocking chair in this passage represents the unique comfort of childhood and how people cling to that feeling as they grow. Winnie knows sitting in the chair can’t and won’t fix anything, but sitting in it makes her feel better because it reminds her of a time before she understood hardship existed. The chair itself can only do so much in terms of replicating that feeling. Winnie can’t reverse or unlearn what she knows about the world. All she can do is sit in the chair and be reminded of its comfort. Her self-soothing here again demonstrates her character growth and an increased sense of maturity.

“Well, thought Winnie, crossing her arms on the windowsill, she was different. Things had happened to her that were hers alone, and had nothing to do with them. It was the first time. And no amount of telling about it could help them understand or share what she felt. It was satisfying and lonely, both at once.”

Winnie’s thoughts come while she sits in the rocking chair and gazes out the window. She realizes that she’s changed, and that change is a personal and private matter. Though she understands how she’s changed, she can’t explain it to anyone because no one has had her exact experiences. The feeling is satisfying because it lets Winnie know she’s growing and coming into her own. It is lonely because it can’t truly be shared. Her maturity deepens as she realizes her own agency apart from her family.

“Next morning Winnie went out to the fence directly after breakfast. It was the hottest day yet, so heavy that the slightest exertion brought on a flood of perspiration, an exhaustion in the joints. Two days before, they would have insisted that she stay indoors, but now, this morning, they were careful with her, a little gingerly, as if she were an egg. She had said, ‘I'm going outside now,’ and they had said, ‘All right, but come in if it gets too hot, won't you, dear?’ And she had answered, ‘Yes.’”

These lines echo Winnie’s realization that she’s changed. Though her family can’t understand the exact details of her change, they are aware of the transformation, which they make known by how they treat her. Her parents and grandmother understand that they must treat Winnie differently because she is growing, and so a tentative new phase of the family dynamic begins.

“It was the longest day: mindlessly hot, unspeakably hot, too hot to move or even think. The countryside, the village of Treegap, the wood—all lay defeated. Nothing stirred. The sun was a ponderous circle without edges, a roar without a sound, a blazing glare so thorough and remorseless that even in the Fosters' parlor, with curtains drawn, it seemed an actual presence. You could not shut it out.

Winnie's mother and grandmother sat plaintive all afternoon in the parlor, fanning themselves and sipping lemonade, their hair unsettled and their knees loose. It was totally unlike them, this lapse from gentility, and it made them much more interesting.”

Winnie’s family succumbs to the August heat, and rather than the stalwart dedication to order, the women sit and relax because it is too hot to do otherwise. This change is interesting to Winnie because it is so different from the family she knows and because it reminds her a bit of the Tucks, and visually puts her family on equal footing with the immortal family for once.

“Beneath her excitement, she was thick with guilt. For the second time in three short days—though they seemed many more than that—she was about to do something which she knew would be forbidden. She didn't have to ask.

Winnie had her own strong sense of rightness. She knew that she could always say, afterward, ‘Well, you never told me not to!’ But how silly that would be! Of course it would never occur to them to include such a thing on their list of don'ts. She could hear them saying it, and almost smiled: ‘Now, remember, Winifred—don't bite your fingernails, don't interrupt when someone else is speaking, and don't go down to the jailhouse at midnight to change places with prisoners.’”

Winnie waits for midnight and shows another way in which she’s grown. In the past, she has done things she wasn’t supposed to do, but they were always within the realm of things her family thought to warn against. Here, she prepares to do something outside the scope of her family’s understanding. Before, Winnie never would have thought to go to the jailhouse for any reason, and so her family never thought to tell her she couldn’t. Winnie thinks of what she’s about to do in terms of what her family does and does not approve of, and her growth is shown by her recognition of how ridiculous a warning would be.

“The big glass windows here were lidded eyes that didn’t care—that barely saw them, barely gave them back reflections. The blacksmith’s shop, the mill, the church, the stores, so busy and alive in daylight, were hunched, deserted now, dark piles and shapes without a purpose or a meaning.”

Winnie and Jesse hurry down the road toward the jailhouse. This is the first time downtown Treegap is revealed, and the quiet town is personified with an ominous feeling. In earlier descriptions, Treegap is the kind of place where little of note ever happens, which is reflected here by the buildings staring blankly and hunching without care. With its averted eyes, the town approves of what Winnie is about to do.

“Then the four of them crept to the back of the building. Here, too high for Winnie to see into, was a barred window through which, from the room in front, light glowed faintly. Winnie peered up at it, at the blackness of the bars with the dim gold of the light between. Into her head came lines from an old poem:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage.

Over and over the lines repeated themselves in her head till they were altogether meaningless.”

The lines Winnie remembers here come from Richard Lovelace’s 1642 poem “To Althea, from Prison.” Lovelace wrote the poem from prison, where he served time for protesting a bill from Parliament. The line implies that walls and bars, by themselves, are not a prison and are not what holds a person captive. Rather, these are constructs that keep a physical being in place, but they can be thwarted. The thwarting of such obstacles is seen in the Tucks’ escape and Winnie’s adventures beyond the fencing of her family’s home.

“Still, this side of the affair was not without its benefits, at least for Winnie. Though she was confined to the yard indefinitely and could go nowhere, not even with her mother or her grandmother, the other children wandered by to look at her, to talk to her through the fence. They were impressed by what she had done. She was a figure of romance to them now, where before she had been too neat, too prissy; almost, somehow, too clean to be a real friend.

Winnie sighed and plucked at the grass around her ankles. School would open soon. It wouldn't be so bad. In fact, she thought as her spirits lifted, this year it might be rather nice.”

Winnie reverts to a life of captivity once she has served as an accomplice to the Tucks’ jailbreak, and this rebellion serves as an attraction to peers who deemed her as too elitist for them. Winnie’s concerns about her future in school and the relationships she is struggling to make foreshadows her decision to refrain from drinking from the spring.

“The sign said WELCOME TO TREEGAP, but it was hard to believe that this was really Treegap. The main street hadn't changed so very much, but there were many other streets now, crossing the main street. The road itself was blacktopped. There was a white line painted down its center.

Mae and Tuck, on the seat of a clattering wooden wagon, bumped slowly into Treegap behind the fat old horse. They had seen continuous change and were accustomed to it, but here it seemed shocking and sad.”

Treegap has changed from the last time the Tucks were there. The addition of many more roads symbolizes progress and change, the exact opposite of the unchanged Tucks. Tuck and Mae are saddened by the change because it reminds them how long it’s been since they were there and how their lives were enriched by Winnie’s presence.