I have an odd confession to make, even odder in that I’m making it on the day of Maurice Sendak’s death. I didn’t like Where the Wild Things Are as a child. I didn’t want anything to do with Max, and the story was somehow…unsavory. I read it, but it never took a place in my heart the way so many books have over my life.
From where I stand now, not liking Max is perfectly understandable. He is everything that is least likable about small children: egotistical, demanding, pointlessly cruel. There isn’t much to like.
Still, that isn’t why the book left me cold. No, that happened because it just flat-out confused me.
There’s an irony for me that child “experts” of the time thought Sendak’s book would be too disturbing for small children because Max was sent to bed alone and without his supper. Frankly, that was the part of the book I understood best. Max was a miserable child and was mildly punished for it. End of story.
Only that was where the story began. Then it went places where I just couldn’t follow.
The miserable child escaped and went on adventures. Monsters didn’t scare him but…but did what he wanted them to do. They listened to him. They put him in charge. They all misbehaved together, joyfully.
Then, despite all that, despite finding a place free from fear and from rules that weren’t made for small children, Max decided he preferred his home. And his home turned out to be a good place to be. The miserable child was rewarded not just with adventures, but with treatment that was better than all of those adventures put together.
It made no sense at all.
I was a far better behaved child than Max, and I got a far worse deal. My punishments weren’t revoked. The monsters that lived in my room would not be stared down. I never got to tell the world how it should work.
I could, perhaps, have taken the lesson that bad behavior was what brought rewards, but I knew, with the kind of knowledge that can only be beaten or ground into you, that that was dangerous thinking. Nothing else, however, could make that book anything but a puzzle.
Nothing but time and the perspective to understand that what confused me was exactly the point of the book. Yes, small children are horrid little monsters in many ways. No, that shouldn’t mean that their inability to act like adults should cost them dearly and continually. Even at their worst, they should still be loved, in obvious ways.
It turns out to be a very good book. The limitations were all in me and in my circumstances. Somehow, that makes me extra sad today.
I am sorry that you are extra sad today. I didn’t have much of a refuge or safe place either but still found those monsters so fascinating when I first read that book. It wasn’t until I saw my own sons reading and responding to that book that I understood Sendak’s genius in remembering how out of control a child can feel–behaviorally, physically, emotionally, mentally–and how he created a world that the child controlled, only for the child to find that he wanted to return to that safe, structured place he came from. In a way, it makes me sad to understand that because that place scarcely exists for many children.
A lot of Sendak’s work is about the control issues that little children face. Even a simple counting story like “One was johnny” is really all about Johnny asserting his control over his own space over the array of interlopers that invade it.
WWWTA isn’t my favorite anyways, it’s “In the Night Kitchen”. gonna read that one to the Grommit tonight.
Although my reaction to “Where the Wild Things are” was different (actually, I never had the book. We only read it in kindergarten and it kind of drifted in and out of my memory for years until I re-discovered it), I can relate so much to the rest of your experience.
Being angry was never something that I was allowed to be. Being angry meant that I needed to come to my senses, see the error of my ways and apologize and damn how hard it is dealing with me because actually, what’s wrong with me anyway?
It took me a complete breakdown, therapy and the Pharyngula Horde (thank you, folks) to realize that if I am angry that it’s because I have a reason to be, not because I’m broken and need to be fixed.
There’s a saying about children:
Love them the most when they deserve it the least.
Whatever my kids have done, once I’ve calmed down (yes, I’m allowed to be angry, too) I make sure to go to them, relate to them, hold them, make them feel safe in my love.
Probably no cake, though.
So…here’s the entirety of what I got out of “Where The Wild Things Are”: Monsters, like on Sesame Street, are not scary.
Am I the only one who sees the “escape” and “adventure” as a metaphor? I’m thinking the whole “king of the monsters” thing happened inside Max’s head. Yeah, it was a journey, an adventure, but it was an internal journey, Max learning to rule over his own “monsters”.
WMDKitty, I definitely saw it as an internal journey, but I didn’t see it as a metaphor. Of course, that has no bearing on what Sendak meant. 🙂
[…] death has brought much expression of support and admiration for the man, along with some admissions of confusion over the book. I remember that Where the Wild Things Are was a different kind of book. This was […]