Childhood, Independence, and Maturity Theme Analysis

Tuck Everlasting introduces Winnie at the very beginning of puberty. She's still a child, but she also shows glimmers of maturity and the desire to explore the world, both of which the novel suggests are necessary precursors to coming of age. By illustrating how Winnie begins to come of age, Tuck Everlasting suggests that the process of reaching maturity is one that begins when a young person begins to understand complex realities and experiment with making independent choices in the face of that complexity.

When the reader first meets Winnie, she appears very much like a child. She hits the iron fence surrounding her family's cottage with a stick in a childish and thoughtless way, and she believes that she's going to grow up to be just like her mother and her Granny--that is, she'll grow up to inhabit a stuffy world of "proper" femininity, as modeled for her by these adult women. Winnie appears childlike here because she never questions what her future is going to look like; she blindly trusts the adults around her to guide her towards adulthood. Further, aside from suggesting that she’s not excited about the version of adulthood they represent, Winnie doesn't show any recognition that she has the power to make choices about her future. Despite these qualities that firmly establish Winnie as a child, the novel also suggests that she's at a point in her maturation where she's ready to begin questioning reality. Though she thinks about running away from home and ultimately decides not to, contemplating doing so suggests that she craves independence and the ability to make her own decisions. Further, Winnie’s obvious attraction to 17-year-old Jesse, whom she meets when she wanders into her family's wood, suggests that her sexual maturity isn't far off either.

Winnie's decision to leave her fenced yard for the wild of the wood becomes a symbolic representation of her choice to begin her coming-of-age journey. While Winnie's home and yard signify the safe, controlled, and reliable world of childhood, everything outside of them introduces Winnie to the fact that her home and her way of life are only one way of living, an understanding that the novel suggests is essential to becoming a mature individual. However, though the novel suggests that beginning this journey is a simple choice that's as easy as opening a garden gate, what Winnie discovers outside of the gate paints the adult world as one that's simultaneously delightful and terrifying--in every case, it upends Winnie's expectations of what the world should be like. Winnie initially finds the wood extremely pleasant and wonders why she never chose to play in it before this first time. However, the wood soon turns into the setting of her worst nightmare when Mae, Jesse, and Miles kidnap her after she sees Jesse drink from the stream. Further, despite this fear, Winnie calmly observes that her nightmare isn't at all like she'd imagined it would be, which indicates that Winnie is beginning to appreciate that the adult world is more complicated than she'd imagined in her childish nightmares. Similarly, though Winnie's reasoning for not wanting to run away hinges on not wanting to be alone, she soon discovers that with the Tucks, she isn't alone--though she does vacillate between thinking that the Tucks are horrible criminals and dear friends. This impresses upon Winnie the adult world is confusing and scary, but it's also possible to find bright spots in that world even in unexpected places.

Once the constable returns Winnie to her parents after 24 hours away, Winnie has time to reflect on the journey she took and decide how she's going to move forward. Several things remind the reader that Winnie is still very much a child at this point. She again stays inside the fence, per her parents' request, and she seeks comfort from her mother and by sitting in a child-size rocking chair that's much too small for her. All of this suggests that while Winnie may be beginning her coming-of-age journey, she still has a long way to go. As she continues to grow, she will move backwards and forwards between childhood and adulthood, stepping out as she feels ready and retreating back into childish comforts when the world feels too big to handle. Importantly, however, Winnie notices that her parents treat her differently after her adventure, as though something important has happened to her, and she realizes that she now has the power to dictate the course of her own life. Her parents' treatment suggests that, after her journey outside the fence, Winnie is not just a little girl anymore. Having learned more about the world, she understands that she can step out of her comfort zone at any moment and in particular, she understands that stepping out has consequences: her actions changed the Tucks' lives dramatically, caused Winnie's parents to question Winnie's trustworthiness, and introduced Winnie to an entirely different way of living. Through these descriptions of Winnie’s dawning maturity, the novel characterizes coming of age as a process in which children discover their own agency and how it can affect the complexities of the world around them.