Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night...

Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There The three titles of Maurice Sendak’s famous picture book trilogy, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, name what Judith Butler calls â€Å"zones of uninhabitability,† places of abjection that form the borders of the self as both its constitutive outside and its intimate interior. These are dangerous places in the geography of childhood, places where the child’s very life and sense of self is threatened. More frightening still, they are present places, places that exist in the same time that the child inhabits, rather than the once upon a mythical time of fairy tales and legends. Hence they are places that beckon the†¦show more content†¦However, I would not go so far as other critics have done in claiming that this developmental narrative is the journey of a single everychild. That is abject logic indeed, since it frames itself as a monolithic story of what constitutes a clean and proper childhood, absent particulariti es. No, Sendak’s characters are individuals who experience their bodies, their drives, and their desires as their own; their boundaries and borderlands are distinctly personal landscapes wherein they act their own particular corporeal dramas. Nor is the lesson regarding the abject monolithic across the trilogy. Sendak’s vision in the first two books involves more than a once-for-all setting of the boundaries between self and other; the children learn the possibilities and limits of embracing alterity within themselves, or at least of mapping the space of and for otherness as part of their own psychic landscape. But in the third and final book, the book that signaled the end of Sendak’s career as a children’s book writer and illustrator and the beginning of his work in theater, Ida’s encounter with abjection is more profound, less jubilant, and more in keeping with the general logic of abjection under which the adult subject is constituted. In the first book, Where the Wild Things Are, Max wants to be a â€Å"wild thing,† that is, he wants to live his body in a raw, socially unacceptable way. His mother is at first complicitShow MoreRelated Maurice Sendak: Through Controversy To Success Essay1301 Words   |  6 PagesMaurice Sendak: Through Controversy To Success â€Å"These are difficult times for children. Children have to be brave to survive what the world does to them. And this world is scrungier and rougher and dangerouser than it ever was before†Ã¢â‚¬â€Maurice Sendak Throughout the past fifty years, Maurice Sendak has been a challenging and inventive voice for children’s literature. His work will continue to be entertaining and educational for young children and adults alike for many years to come. Sendak