It’s hard to imagine the unease that adults felt about Where the Wild Things Are upon its release. While so much was changing across the spectrum of society in 1963, how could a now-beloved children’s book ruffle so many feathers? To understand the climate of that time, we must consider the popular children’s books that preceded Sendak’s revolutionary work.
“Significantly there were fewer child protagonists than child surrogates in the forms of animals and mechanical personalities,” wrote children’s librarian and scholar Sheila Egoff in 1981. “But when children did appear, there was no question as to the tone of security, affection, and familial comfort that surrounded them.” The mere fact that Max was a mischievous child, rather than a monkey or a duck, represented a subtle break with the prevailing order. Egoff paints us a picture in her fascinating collection of writings, Thursday’s Child:
The picture books of the first two-thirds of this century reveal a single vision of a secure childhood and an abiding social order. So sure did the society of the time feel about its values– safe, placid, and hopefully enriching– that creators of books for very young children could depict them implicity rather than explicitly. The picture books show a gentle control, usually played out with animals as exemplars. H. A. Rey’s monkey, Curious George (1941) ends up in a zoo because of his pranks, but it is pictured as a pleasant, happy playground where George can indulge in his monkeyshines. Marjorie Flack’s duck Ping in The Story about Ping (1933) receives a gentle spank on his tail for being late. Both animals have an order to return to after their escapades: George to “the man in the yellow hat” and Pink to “the wise one-eyed boat.” The concept of order in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline (1939)–”twelve little girls in two straight lines”–gives a feeling of reassurance and security rather than regimentation.
Above all, children were to be protected, and writers and illustrators, however different their themes and styles, were unanimous on this point. That these protectors were sincere is unquestionable, but, even more importantly, their views were reinforced by the adult world in general. This consensus was shattered in 1963 with the appearance of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and it would appear today that not “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could restore that phallanxed viewpoint.
While the illustrations disturbed those adults who saw the “Wild Things” as ferociously threatening rather than humorously subservient to Max’s will, the extreme reaction to Sendak’s work intimated that there was more at stake than a matter of interpretation of the pictures. As it turned out, this as yet unformulated anxiety was justified. Sendak’s underlying theme that a child has unconscious needs, frustrations, and fears unsettled society’s hitherto conceived ideals of early childhood and the book itself broke the stereotypic mold that had held for almost a hundred years.
What made Sendak an innovator was that he expressed this catharsis for the preschool children through their own medium, the picture book. He also caught, very early and creatively, a general trend of society which was to rise to the fore over the next two decades: an acceptance that the very young child matures more by sharing in the real and emotional world around it than by being protected from it.
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great post Graham! You nailed it, and I believe that this article coupled with Maurice’s interview with Spike really capture the essence of what the movie will bring to light in it’s own fashion.
-Scott
my children were raised on ‘where the wild things are’
18 years ago i could recite it in the dark when needed
i never realised, though, that the book was nearly as old as i am!