39 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Halloween Tree
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The History and Traditions of Halloween
Halloween is a holiday celebrated on October 31 in the Western world and places influenced by the West, The word “Halloween” derives from “All Hallows’ Eve,” the day before the Christian feast of All Saints, which is celebrated on November 1 and commemorates all deceased persons who lived holy lives. However, a number of elements from pre-Christian folk religions have also influenced the modern celebration of Halloween, particularly the Celtic festival of the dead, known as Samhain (pronounced “sow-in”). To mark the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, the Celtic peoples lit bonfires, donned masks, and made predictions about the future. In many ancient traditions, the souls of the dead were believed to be present on earth during this time of year and to mingle with the living. The modern practice of children donning costumes and masks and going trick-or-treating is believed to derive from the custom of poor people begging for food on Halloween.
Bradbury draws on many of these aspects of Halloween for The Halloween Tree, which could be described as a tribute to the holiday, as part of his exploration of The Difference but Connectedness of Cultural Traditions. In addition to highlighting the Celtic/Druid origins of Halloween, Bradbury goes back further to ancient Egyptian beliefs about the dead to illustrate humanity’s broader preoccupation with death and its relationship to the meaning of life. Bradbury also gives special attention to the customs surrounding El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), the Latin American version of All Hallows’ Eve, in which people visit the graves of their departed loved ones.
Bradbury emphasizes that all Halloween traditions center around the fear of death, respect for the dead, and a desire for the sunlight to return after the dark days of winter, which reflects a longing for the renewal of life. He also incorporates the holiday’s ties to witchcraft and other supernatural beliefs, as well as to symbols of death such as bones and skeletons.
Authorial Context: Ray Bradbury's Childhood and The Halloween Tree
In The Halloween Tree, Bradbury explores the joys, fears, and insecurities of childhood, and in particular boyhood in a small town in the Midwest. Such themes reflect Bradbury’s own experiences, which he often wove into his fiction. According to biographer Jonathan Eller, Bradbury wrote stories “from his own experience, his own sense of the passions and fears and hauntings of the typical Midwestern child” (Eller, Jonathan R. Becoming Ray Bradbury, University of Illinois Press, 2011). Bradbury’s other young adult novels include Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).
Bradbury was born and spent the first 11 years of his life in Waukegan, Illinois. Although the time period of The Halloween Tree is unspecified, it could well be the 1930s of Bradbury’s childhood (the 1993 animated film version includes cars from this era). The novel is set in a small town in a Midwestern state that is eventually identified as Illinois. The main characters are a group of young boys who stick closely together and roam freely; no adults ever appear outside of the “fantasy” portions of the book. The “unsupervised” nature of the youngsters might reflect childhood in the 1930s or the 1970s of the book’s publication.
Details of the town and its surroundings also echo Bradbury’s experience. One of the writer’s earliest stories described a ravine near his home in Waukegan, which represented “a borderland where town and nature struggled to control the landscape—an ambiguous borderland between the rational and irrational, between life and death” (Eller). The ravine the boys explore in The Halloween Tree likewise functions as a dark and frightening place and a portal to the unknown. The wilderness surrounding the town similarly suggests the fear of the unknown that drives the novel’s plot, tied into the Halloween setting.
Other elements that contribute to the work’s atmosphere reflect Bradbury’s childhood as well. The Victorian Gothic style of Moundshroud’s house is typical of homes traditionally found in Midwestern towns. Carnivals frequently visited Waukegan during Bradbury’s childhood, and the encounter that made him decide to be a writer happened during such a festival. It is therefore notable that the kite that the boys construct is made of abandoned circus posters. Finally, Bradbury attended horror movies as a child (including the 1939 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame), which may have inspired the macabre elements of the novel, including the references to the character Quasimodo. Bradbury uses all these elements from his experience to build up an authentic story world for The Halloween Tree.
Literary Context: The Personification of Death
Various personifications of death inform Bradbury’s characterization of Moundshroud. Most familiar is the folk character of the Grim Reaper, a tall and shadowy male figure wearing a hood and carrying a scythe who gathers the soul of an individual at the end of their life. However, personifications of death have a long history in literature beyond this archetype. In ancient Greek mythology, Thanatos was the spirit of death and accompanied the deceased person to Hades, the Greek underworld. Death in the Greek tradition was considered inevitable and a gentle release—a passage to another form of existence. By contrast, the Christian tradition tended to see death as purely evil and a result of sin. Thus, personifications of death became more menacing and frightening. The Book of Revelation, for example, personifies death as a horseman wielding a sword. Horrifying personifications of death became particularly popular during the late Middle Ages, reflecting people’s experience of death during the bubonic plague. The “dance of death” became an allegorical motif in art and literature, depicting dead people (in the form of skeletons) rising from the grave and inviting living people to join them in a dance to the death.
The character of Moundshroud displays several traditional tropes, including a skeleton-like appearance and the fact that he is in charge of summoning people at the end of life, much like the Grim Reaper. However, Bradbury is careful to imbue Moundshroud with more friendly and humorous characteristics as well to make him an approachable figure to children and balance his macabre aspects. Moundshroud could be described as a combination of the Grim Reaper and the more comforting Thanatos, supporting the novel’s message about The Need to Recognize Mortality.
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