Taming the wild things - Maurice Sendak and child psychology

Taming The Wild Things

Twenty-five years ago the Caldecott Medal, awarded annually to the most distinguished American picture book for children, was presented to Where The Wild Things Are, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

This book has sold over a million hardcover copies and over two million paperback copies in the United States and continues a best seller. It has been reprinted in many foreign languages, including Danish, Japanese, Afrikaans and Welsh. Recently it was made into an opera, and the Glyndebourne Festival Opera version is available on videocassette. Wild Things' publisher, Harper and Row, has marked its 25th year with an anniversary edition of the book and an anniversary poster of wild things and the wild-boy tamer, Max.

Where The Wild Things Are (1963)[1] is a warm and witty fantasy, sparse in words (338 in all), enriched by formidable drawings in which the wild things grow larger and larger as the plot thickens. It marks a critical point in American literature for children because it dares to present openly anger, conflict, and rage, and because it resolves these issues satisfactorily for the child, so that he is reconciled with himself and his world.

The book begins with the boy, Max, making mischief of one kind and another. This provokes his Mother to call him "wild thing." Max retorts, "I'll eat you up." His Mother responds by sending him to bed without supper.

Luckily for Max, in his modest bedroom a forest grows, and grows, and an ocean tumbles by with a private boat, in which Max sails off to where the wild things are. Max tames the wild things by staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once, becomes their King, directs their wild rumpus, and sends them to bed without supper.

But despite grand and wonderful adventures with the wild things, Max becomes lonely and wants to be where someone loves him best of all. So he gives up being King of the Wild Things and returns into the night of his own room. He returns to Mother, and Mother shows her love by bringing a hot dinner, complete with a slice of chocolate cake, to his room.

Although this book received the coveted Caldecott Medal for its enchanting blend of text with illustration, it did not immediately win universal applause from parents, educators and librarians. Some of these caretakers of children worried that Max's bad behaviors would invite young listener/viewers to emulate him, and that the wild things would induce nightmares. Publishers Weekly opined that the illustrations would frighten children.

In his Caldecott acceptance speech, Sendak discusses the character of Max:

"Max, the hero of my book, discharges his anger against his Mother, and returns to the real world sleepy, hungry, and at peace with himself...

"What is too often overlooked is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions...fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives ... they continually cope with frustration as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things.

"It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood--the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of all Wild Things--that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have."[2]

In another setting, Sendak expounds further on the importance of fantasy for a child:

"Fantasy is so all-pervasive in a child's life: I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young. Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do ...

"Wild Things really is the anxiety and pleasure and immense problem of being a small child. And what do children do with themselves? They fantasize, they control fantasies or they don't control fantasies."[3]

Child development experts agree with Sendak. The distinguished child psychologist, Bruno Bettleheim, writes that today, as in times past, the most important task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in life.[4] Many experiences are required to achieve this, for the child, as he develops, must learn step by step to understand himself better. With this knowledge he becomes more able to understand others and eventually to relate to them in meaningful ways.

As a therapist of severely disturbed children, Bettleheim's main task was to restore meaning to their lives. He was confronted with the problem of finding out what experiences in a child's life are most suited to assist him in finding meaning in life and concluded that the most important experience was the impact of parents and others who care for the child. Next in importance was the impact of his cultural heritage, which, when children are young, is best communicated by literature.

In looking at literature for children, Bettleheim was deeply dissatisfied with preprimers and primers designed to teach necessary skills, irrespective of meaning, or with other child literature designed to entertain, irrespective of substance. To Bettleheim, nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to the child as fairy tales because they deal with inner problems of human beings and with useful solutions to their predicaments.

From another vantage point, educator Sara Zimet, in looking at primary reading texts, faults them for not dealing directly with people's aggressive drives.[5] Depiction of complexity in personality, of negative as well as positive emotions, helps the child-reader better to understand both the direction diverse drives can take him and the direction in which he can take them. Zimet cautions that unless we are successful in affording children more meaningful reading materials, we cannot expect them to want to read or to prepare themselves well in school for active participation in their society.

Before The Wild Things

Earlier productions of Maurice Sendak, those which he wrote and illustrated and those he illustrated, also deal with the child within and with conflict and conflict resolution. Kenny's Window (1956) is the first book he authored. In the middle of a dream, Kenny wakes up and remembers a lovely garden and a rooster in the garden. The rooster has given him a list of seven questions and Kenny hopes that if he answers them all, he will be able to live in the garden. Can a broken promise be fixed? "Yes, if it only looks broken, but really isn't." What is a narrow escape? "When someone almost stops loving you." Do you always want that which you think you want? "I thought I wanted to live in the garden with the moon on one side and the sun on the other, but I really don't."

Dream and reality intermingle throughout the book, and Kenny comes to the realization that it is not necessary to discard a dream or a hope because it is unachievable at the moment. "A wish," the rooster tells him, "is halfway to wherever you want to go."

The Sign on Rosie's Door (1960) is a spunky story of a young girl out to change her life and her neighborhood. Rosie is trapped in a dull existence in Brooklyn, where everything is drab and boring. Rosie places a sign on her door, "If you want to know a secret, knock three times."

The secret is that Rosie isn't Rosie anymore. She is now Alinda, the exotic and lovely lady singer. Alinda's fantasies carry her as well as the neighborhood children through a set of madcap successes where there is opportunity for everyone to act out their secret desires and be who they wish. When the fourth of July rolls around, and their Mamas refuse to allow firecrackers, Alinda and friends wish to become firecrackers. And there are pages of children phizzing and whizzing and crackling, going BOOMM, BOOMM-BOOMM-AWHISHHH all around. This book has been expanded into a musical play format.

Another of Sendak's works, Pierre: A Cautionary Tale (1962), deals with Pierre's indifference to his parents. To his parents' overtures, Pierre has but one response: "I don't care." His Mother asks him if he wants some cream of wheat. "I don't care." His Mother asks him to sit forward in his chair. "I don't care." His Mother invites him to join his parents on a trip to town. Same response. So his parents leave him home.

As night begins to fall, a lion pays a call. The lion looks Pierre right in the eye and asks him if he'd like to die. Pierre says, "I don't care," so the lion eats him. In due course his parents return, discover what has happened, and take the lion to the doctor. The doctor shakes the lion upside down, and Pierre falls on the floor, hale and hearty. His first utterance is, "Yes, indeed I care," and he rides triumphantly home on the lion's back.

After The Wild Things

After Wild Things Sendak wrote and illustrated two books which, with Wild Things, are viewed as a thematic triology. In The Night Kitchen (1970) is Sendak's favorite book. In it he tackles the mystery of nighttime. Nighttime, with the accompanying dark, is a terrifying time for some children, a frustrating time for all children. Sendak remembered from his own childhood an advertisement for The Sunshine Bakers, which boasted, "We Bake While You Sleep." As a child he felt it was unfair for them to bake while he had to go to sleep. He would have preferred staying up and watching them. The book, Sendak states, is a sort of vendetta to get back at the Bakers and to say that he was old enough to stay up at night and know what was happening in the night kitchen. Speaking of the book, he says, "It comes from the direct middle of me."[6]

Mickey, the child in this story, hears a thump in the night as he lies sleepless in bed. "Quiet down there," he shouts, and he falls through the dark, past his Mama and Papa sleeping tight, into the light of the night kitchen and the bakers who bake until dawn.

The bakers mix Mickey in batter in order to bake a delicious Mickey-cake. But what they need is milk, not Mickey, in the batter. Mickey climbs out of the batter, explains to the bakers their error, forms an airplane out of batter, and climbs up and over the top of the Milky Way in the night kitchen to obtain a cup of milk. After solving the bakers' problems and seeing their work, he slides back into the night of his own bed.

Outside Over There (1981) is a haunting story about sibling rivalry. Ida has been charged with the care of her baby sister. Papa is away at sea; Mother pines for him in the garden. Ida plays her wonder horn to comfort her sibling, but fails to notice the goblins who come and steal the baby away.

When Ida realizes the monstrous crime, she puts on her Mother's rain cloak and climbs backward out her window, into outside over there. She finds the goblins and charms them with a captivating tune. The goblins dance slowly at first, then faster until they can't breathe and quickly churn into a dancing stream. Baby sister is found in a cozy eggshell, crooning and clapping as a baby should. Ida picks up the baby and brings her home. Again, a child returns from a frightening situation, at peace with herself and her world.

Sendak in recent years has illustrated a number of folk tales of famed storytellers, such as the Brothers Grimm, Randall Jarrell, George Mac Donald and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Most recently he illustrated a newly-discovered tale from Grimm, Dear Mili (1988), a story which deals with human struggle, separation and reunion. The pictures in Dear Mili are very reminiscent of those of Outside Over There. Sendak's watercolors go beneath the surface of the story and create stunning images of a guardian angel gradually growing up and taking an active role in the tale, and of war sweeping through the land as fire in the heavens.

Sendak provides the child-reader with a world in which all children are not obedient and polite, all parents are not saintly and hardworking, and all social orders are not firm and fixed. In letting loose the wild things within and around the child, Sendak demands attention. He brings the child face to face with fear and anxiety, with conflict, with choice. He allows the child to participate in the wild rumpus and to have mastery over it, to dream and to act in meaningful ways.

PHOTO : --detail from the cover of "Where the Wild Things Are."

PHOTO : --back cover of "In the Night Kitchen."

PHOTO : --detail from the cover of "Outside Over There." [1]Where the Wild Things Are, and all other Sendak books mentioned, with the exception of Dear Mili, were published by Harper and Row. Dear Mili was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [2]M. Sendak, Acceptance Speech for Caldecott Medal, in L. Kingman (Ed.), Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-65, Boston, The Horn Book, 1965. [3]M. Sendak, in Virginia Haviland, Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, 1972. [4]B. Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York, Random House, 1975. [5]S. Zimet (Ed.), What Children Read in School: Critical Analysis of Primary Reading Textbooks, New York, Grune and Stratton, 1971. [6]S. Lanes, The Art of Maurice Sendak, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1980.

Mary Lystad, Ph.D., is Chief, Emergency Services Branch, Natioanl Institute of Mental Health, and the author of several articles and books on literature for children.

COPYRIGHT 1989 U.S. Government Printing Office
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