Tender Study Guide

Cate Kennedy was born in England, where her father was stationed through the Air Force, but grew up living in several different states in Australia. As a young adult, she attended the University of Canberra and the Australian National University. After college, she had jobs in various career fields, but notably taught creative writing and served as a community arts worker in Victoria, Australia. In her 30s, Kennedy moved to Mexico for two years to teach literacy in underserved communities through an Australian volunteer organization. She also worked as a freelance writer and for the Australian Customs Service, an experience which would later inspire her short story “Habit.” Though Kennedy is primarily known for her short stories, she wrote nonfiction and poetry throughout her young adulthood. In 2002, she won the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, a literary award that provided her with the opportunity to teach in Ireland. Today, Kennedy lives in a remote region of northern Australia, and continues to write, publish, and participate in speaking engagements.

Among other topics, “Tender” addresses the movement to maintain a more natural lifestyle in a contemporary environment filled with disposable products and technological advances. In the story, Christine and Al’s beliefs on sustainability reflect increasing uncertainty about the long-term effects of plastics and various other chemicals that abound in daily life. Growing concerns over pollution and climate change in recent years have pushed the balance between convenience and environmentalism into public consciousness, a conflict that Christine experiences intensely as she struggles to reconcile her principles with the chaotic reality of raising children and getting treatment for a tumor.

The emphasis on resisting modern technology and embracing nature in “Tender” hearkens back to 19th-century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Transcendentalism encouraged appreciation for nature and natural beauty, as well as rejection of industrialization and capitalism. Literary works such as Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walden highlighted nature’s spiritual power and humans’ inability to fully accept nature because of temptations and pressures from society and civilization. In her appreciation of natural beauty as well as her struggle to accept some of nature’s unpleasant elements, Christine undergoes the kind of spiritual journey described by Transcendentalist authors.