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Death of a Wild Thing
Russell D. Moore on Maurice Sendak & the Horror of a Domesticated Gospel
Maurice Sendak was, by all accounts, a lonely, misanthropic, cynical, homosexual atheist. But he managed, with his dozens of children's books, to unite a generation around a sense of wonder and creativity. When I heard, a few days ago as I write this, that he died, I lamented not only his passing, but all that he has to teach a church he never embraced.
Sendak's most famous work, of course, is his children's book Where the Wild Things Are. It's about a boy named Max, who is sent to his room for telling his mother he'll eat her up. My sons love this story. Whenever I read it, they start shifting around in their seats as they hear about his room becoming a forest, and about his encountering scary, teeth-baring "wild things."
My boys aren't unusual. I loved that story as much as they do, when I was their age. And when I talk to people about my age, I find that this book has struck, and strikes, a particular resonance with at least two generations of American children, no matter what their racial, social, economic, or religious backgrounds. The root of that lies, I think, in the fact that Sendak had a more realistic view of evil than many Christians do, at least when it comes to our children.
Wildness Without & Within
Sendak said that the "wild things" originated with his fear and loathing of his grownup extended family, and their trying to hug and kiss him and "eat him up." But I think there's more to it than that, more that causes this story to persist.
If, as both ancient and contemporary wisdom tells us, stories exist to help us categorize our fears and aspirations, then "wild" children's stories remind us of what we see everywhere in human art, from cave paintings to country music to the Cannes Film Festival. We're afraid of the wildness "out there" in the scary universe around us. Whether we fear saber-toothed tigers or Wall Street collapse or malaria or our parents' impending divorce, there are frightening, threatening forces out there that seem outside our control.
But Sendak also, at least in his artistic imagination, recognized something the Christian revelation tells us clearly. Worse than what's "out there" is the uncontrollable "wildness" inside of us, those passions and desires and rages and longings and sorrows within our psyches that seem to be even scarier because they're so hidden, so close, and so much at the core of who we are. The wildness within us doesn't seem to end, either. It just morphs throughout one's lifetime: from toddler-age tantrums to teenage hormones to midlife crises to, well, sometimes a lonely, cynical elderly person facing death.
A Dark Book for a Dark Universe
At the end of Wild Things, the book puts the rambunctious hero right back in his own room after the journey is over. It's the same room his mother had sent him off to, for his wildness, without his supper. But after his time with the wild things, he finds his supper waiting for him. "And it was still hot," the book concludes.
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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