The deployment of myth towards childhood representation in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There

Abstract

This article aims to explore Maurice Sendak’s response to the problematic of the depiction of childhood through the deployment of myth in his picture books Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Outside Over There (1981). Myths encourage children to employ their imagination in their attempt to make sense of the world and find their place in it, as they make their gradual and by no means painless transition from childhood to adulthood. As a writer and illustrator of children’s stories, Sendak was devoted to the truthful representation of the joyous but also the difficult and less pleasant aspects of a child’s life, questioning the pervasive myth of the idealized innocent child. Influenced by William Blake’s artistic style and his mythopoeia aiming at the interpretation of the conflicting psychological aspects of human existence, Sendak makes use of the mythic motif of the adventure journey to illustrate the challenges of the child’s course towards maturation. Max, the child protagonist in Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Ida, Max’s female counterpart and central character in Outside Over There (1981) set out for their private Odyssey, an exploration of the darker aspects of childhood and an act of balancing the contradictory forces constituting a concept of childhood inclusive of conflicting, heterogeneous features.

Keywords: myth, childhood, child-adult power relation