996 smith, Betty
condemned, and its perversion into a mechanism
of abuse and control shown to have devastating
effects.
Francie, the novel’s young protagonist, was born
of the strong attraction her mother felt for her father.
When the 17-year-old Katie Rommely danced for
the first time with the “young, slender, and shin-
ing” 19-year-old Johnny Nolan, she instantly knew
that “he was the man she wanted.” Four months
later they married, and Francie was born within a
year. Although Francie’s birth was the beginning of
Johnny’s decline into alcoholism and penury, Katie
stays with him; as her sister Sissy reminds her, “You
married him because you wanted him to sleep with
you but you were too religious to take a chance
without a church wedding.” Katie protests, saying
that “there are other things” that make a marriage,
but Sissy insists: “It was the sleeping.”
Sissy should know. She is an unabashedly sexual
woman who takes up with men without worry-
ing about the sanction of church or community.
Although she has several “husbands”—men she
lives with but never officially marries—she also
has a “succession of lovers.” Sissy is a warm, loving,
healthy woman, Francie’s favorite. Her greatest desire
is to have a child, but until a doctor intervenes by
providing her newborn infant with oxygen, she has
10 stillbirths before she is 37.
Sissy works, the narrator tells us, in a “rubber
factory,” a discreet way of telling her 1943 audi-
ence that Sissy makes condoms. But the discretion
breaks down later in the novel when Sissy leaves a
small decorated package to distract Francie and her
brother. The children are instructed not to open the
box, but of course they do; and though the narra-
tor does not name what they find, the astute reader
knows. The children hang the condoms to a string
and and “trail... the string out the window,” causing
a neighborhood scandal. In shame, the Nolans move,
all because of “stark raw sex.”
Here Smith makes explicit a theme she devel-
ops throughout the novel: the sexual hypocrisy
and jealousy that deform social relations. The most
painful example is the treatment of young Joanna,
a neighborhood girl who bears a child out of wed-
lock and refuses to hide her “shame.” The “good
housewives” of the community are enraged, but the
narrator understands the pain that is at the root of
their cruelty:Many of these good women . . . hated the
husbands who lay by their sides at night.
There was no longer any high joy for them in
the act of love. They endured the love-mak-
ing rigidly, praying all the while that another
child would not result. This bitter submis-
siveness made the man ugly and brutal. To
most of them the love act had become a
brutality on both sides; the sooner over with,
the better. They resented this girl because
they felt this had not been so with her and the
father of her child.The “good women” stone Joanna and force her
retreat.
Other problems emerge from the perversion of
healthy sexuality. Smith portrays unmarried women
teachers whose “starved love instincts” make them
“neurotic” and cruelly authoritarian. She also shows
pedophiles who prey on little girls, focusing on a
“prowling sex fiend” who rapes and kills a seven-
year-old; when the man attacks Francie, Katie
shoots him in the genitals.
Perhaps the most powerful—and daring for
its time—celebration of sexuality occurs toward
the conclusion of the novel when the 16-year-old
Francie asks her mother if she should have spent
the night with a young soldier whom she had met
just the day before. “As a mother,” Katie says, “I
say it would have been a terrible thing for a girl to
sleep with a stranger. . . . But as a woman. . . . I will
tell you the truth as a woman. It would have been
a very beautiful thing.” With these words, Betty
Smith challenges her mid-20th-century—and per-
haps even her 21st-century—audience to consider
the redeeming power of that “fierce love hunger” she
so boldly portrays.
Joyce ZonanaSocIaL cLaSS in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
From its opening paragraphs, A Tree Grows in Brook-
lyn reveals its concern with social class. On the first
page, we are introduced to its central protagonist,
11-year-old Francie Nolan, ensconced on her fire