Although many adults view children’s literature as unworthy of their time, given that, in their estimation, it yields no or limited intellectual stimulation, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) upends such a problematical mindset. Penned, illustrated, and published in 1963, the text argues for parents to center their parenting on the full humanity of their children.
Sendak, who also vividly and powerfully illustrates the book, introduces readers to the protagonist, Max, as he struggles to gain authentic visibility. Mother, Max’s mother, focuses her parenting praxis on discipline and punishment, ultimately decentering her child from her parenting in service of a conservative notion of parenting that gives more care and love to discipline and punishment than her son.
Recognizing that no parent is perfect, a close reading of Where the Wild Things Are can promote better parenting, especially as it exposes parental blind spots.
Discouraging Imagination in Where the Wild Things Are
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The story opens at night with Max sporting “his wolf suit” and “he made mischief of one kind and another” (p. 1-3). As is typical of any child, Max engages his imagination to discover its benefits and possibilities. Unfortunately, upon seeing him in the wolf suit, perhaps startled and irritated by it, Mother calls him “WILD THING!” (p. 5). This response attempts to limit Max’s imaginative expeditions, possibly foreclosing on him tinkering with any perceived villainous roles or characters.
While Mother’s label strives to bar or dissuade him from any fondness for associations with wolves, Max reveals a developing radical imagination and consciousness as he evinces critical resistance to allowing the domestic sphere to become a carceral space: “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” (p. 5). Outraged, Mother sends him “to bed without eating anything” (p. 5).
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault posited that people have become so accustomed to efforts to discipline and punish others that they often lack a genuine understanding of rehabilitation that does not include both. Instead of Mother promoting Max’s intellectual evolution, she viciously tries to gaslight him and control his intellect. Children are not their parents’ pawns and clones. Parents should encourage them to pursue their own creative paths.
Healthy Resistance to Harmful Parenting
Mother’s decision to send Max to bed hungry is cruel discipline and punishment in the Foucauldian sense, an unsettling act to produce a docile body that will conform to her troubling will. Employing a Foucauldian lens in reading Where the Wild Things Are permits one to interpret Max’s body as “the body of the condemned” sentenced to the prison of his bed.
Instead of letting Mother’s punishment defeat him, he uses his bed as a crucial source of strength to advance his burgeoning radical imagination. While Mother deploys Max’s bed to function as a prison, he resists this attempt to enclose him in a carceral world in his bedroom. Recognizing the power of dreaming, he enters a world where he experiences liberation from his mother’s oppressive rule.
Although one might interpret intentionally entering a dream world as an escapist move, given that one may view it as avoiding the realities of the natural world, such an interpretation misses the utopian energies in Max’s strategy. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson contended that even imagining an alternative to our extant capitalist realities exhibits vital utopian energies.
Radical Dreaming in Maurice Sendak’s Book
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Applying Jameson’s Marxist theoretical construct, the present writer asserts that Max uses dreaming as a tool to wage a bloodless revolution against the ruling order endeavoring to subjugate him. His dream world features him as a “WILD THING” who is the chief leader of all “WILD THINGS.” In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch argued that powerful utopian energies lie in imagining and anticipating a better world. Unwilling to surrender to Mother’s rule, Max finds hope in radical dreaming.
However, John Clement Ball asserted that Max’s dream does not represent Blochian and Jamesonian utopian energies, for, from his vantage point, it is a colonial fantasy that inspires Max to be a worse version of Mother. Ball reads Max as embracing colonialism and relishing authoritarianism in his dream. While, admittedly, Ball’s interpretation of Where the Wild Things Are is sophisticated, it functions in the same unfortunate way that Mother’s failed parenting does: it denies Max’s humanity and visibility.
Although not immediately, the “WILD THINGS” see him and recognize his humanity. Max desires liberty and belongingness, and his dream world offers them: “‘And now,’ cried Max, ‘let the wild rumpus start!’” (p. 22). Freedom motivates him—not domination. If Max is consumed with a thirst for power, as Ball contended, he would never want to leave this dream world where he can access such power. He longs for love and visibility that his supper represents in part.
Conclusion
In short, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are teaches effective parenting through negation. The text employs Mother as a literary device to expose what successful parenting is not, leaving commodious room for what quality parenting is and looks like in practice. For critics and readers who find no harm in the delaying of Max’s supper until he awakes from his dream, they lack a real commitment to justice, given that justice delayed is justice denied.
Mother would never have denied her son supper if she were a just parent. Sending him to bed without eating is inhumane. Too many parents believe discipline and punishment are essential to successful parenting. However, as Mother’s example shows, discipline and punishment can, as they often do, inflict violence on innocent children. Sendak’s book evidences that children’s literature has much to teach us.
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