Gender, Sexuality, and Vulnerability Theme Analysis

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith explores the importance of sex in women’s lives but notes how sex also undermines women, due to social expectations that they comply with male desire while denying their own. Shame undergirds most sexual relations between men and women in Francie’s 1912 Williamsburg neighborhood. Shame also fosters an environment in which girls are routinely sexually abused and compelled to keep their violation a secret. Smith explores the intimate lives of women and girls to illustrate the everyday misogyny that exists in Francie’s world—a behavior that Francie and many other women internalize and perpetuate only to the benefit of men, many of whom mistreat them. Smith illustrates how gender and sexuality complicated the lives of poor, working-class women at the turn of the century, revealing the hypocrisy, misogyny, and shame that shrouded Americans’ attitudes toward sex.

The main concern among women in Francie’s world is pregnancy. In families that can barely afford to feed their existing members, the prospect of an additional family member, particularly from an unmarried daughter, is met with horror. Through Francie’s observations of Lucia, Joanna, and even Katie Nolan’s experiences, Smith depicts how, during a time without safe birth control, women often had to resign themselves to pregnancy and accept that they would be mothers, whether they wanted to be or not.

Joanna is a local teenager who gives birth out of wedlock. Instead of hiding herself and her child in shame, Joanna freely walks with her baby in the street. The local women are enraged by this and hurl rocks at her but hit the baby instead. Smith uses the classic trope of throwing stones to demonstrate how the women try to make themselves appear more honorable by declaring Joanna a shameful and undesirable member of their community. They had the “decency” to marry the men whom they wanted to sleep with, while Joanna chose pleasure over obligation.

Lucia, a sixteen-year-old Sicilian immigrant girl, does not face condemnation from the neighborhood but from within her own family after a married man impregnates her. Lucia’s father shuts her up in her room and feeds her only bread and water, as though she has committed a crime by having sex out of wedlock. Smith complicates Lucia’s “sin” by strongly suggesting that it was Steve, Aunt Sissy’s third “John,” the nickname that Sissy gives to all of her lovers and husbands, who may have impregnated Lucia. When Sissy then adopts Lucia’s baby, the public “sin” of illegitimacy helps Sissy to fulfill her desired, and socially acceptable, role as a mother.

Aunt Sissy herself is unapologetically sexual and defiant of social norms. Others perceive this attitude as an aspect of her naivete and lack of education. However, it is more likely a reflection of Sissy’s insistence on personal satisfaction, which eludes many of the Williamsburg women who feel shame in response to their bodies and their desires.

Sissy develops the body of a thirty-year-old woman when she is ten. Boys come after her and Sissy “[is] after all the boys.” She consequently develops a scandalous reputation. However, no one passes judgment on the men who take advantage of her sexuality. Thomas Rommely’s outrage over her courtship with her soon-to-be first husband, Jim, who is twenty-five when Sissy is fourteen, has less to do with the psychological damage that such a relationship could cause Sissy than it does with Thomas’s concern over the relationship’s impact on the family’s reputation.

Sissy leaves Jim (without divorcing him) when she becomes frustrated after giving birth to four stillborn children. Though they separate, Sissy visits him occasionally at the firehouse when she gets “lonesome for a man.” This “lonesome” feeling is unsatisfied sexual desire. Sissy takes sex from men when she wants it and leaves them after her desire is satisfied.

Though Sissy’s girlhood relationships with older men are not regarded as sexual abuse, the parents in Sissy’s neighborhood live in fear of their young daughters becoming the victims of sexual predators. Criminal sex is the only kind that parents will mention, though timidly, to their daughters, while “normal sex” remains a mystery. This attitude toward sex, which wavers between horror and secrecy, makes it difficult for girls to develop a healthy sexuality, leaving them to associate sex more with violence and shame than intimacy and pleasure.

One day, a seven-year-old girl from Francie’s block, remembered as “quiet and obedient,” is found dead, “lying across a busted-down doll carriage in the cellar of a nearby house.” Her dress and undergarments are torn, and her shoes and “little red socks [are] thrown on an ash heap.” The image of the dead little girl lying on the doll carriage goes further than evoking a sense of lost innocence; it shows the reader that someone believed that the girl’s life was disposable. Though the little girl’s death evokes sorrow from people in the community, that feeling is not extended to teenage girls, like Lucia, who get pregnant by older men. Instead, those girls are blamed. Though the community rightfully regards the child molester as a threat to their safety, he is perhaps partly a product of a general disregard for the lives of women and girls.

Though everyone suspects that the child molester who killed the seven-year-old girl has a preference for small children, he eventually attacks Francie, who is fourteen at the time, in her building. Katie thwarts him by shooting him between the legs, and the predator is soon sent to prison. The adults’ method of helping Francie cope with her trauma is to tell her that it is all a bad dream. The tactic succeeds in pushing the incident to the back of her mind, but it also makes her slightly mistrustful of older men, such as Jim McGarrity. The lie that the attempted rape was just “a bad dream” reinforces the notion that sexual assault is not something to be discussed and that mention of it will only cause the girl and her family to revisit a shame that should only belong to the perpetrator.

Smith’s exploration of sex criticizes Americans’ misogynistic and hypocritical attitudes at the turn of the century. A microcosm of the United States at this time, Williamsburg is a community that wishes to preserve an illusion of innocence while contending with the unavoidable problems of modern urban life—sex crimes, the lack of birth control, and women who are divided between their traditional roles and their growing wishes for sexual freedom and expression.