When Uncles and Aunts were the Wild Things

“Where the Wild Things Are” : book,  animated short, children’s opera, film, video game,  and oh dear  novelisation. Are we in the process of seeing it become a modern fairy tale: scary, weird, and thoroughly commoditised?

To the flurry of discussion about whether the film is suitable for children (see here for instance), the book’s author has given a robust response:

What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

Because kids can handle it?
Sendak: If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.

But in an  interview recorded back in 1986 with America’s National Public Radio, Sendak said of his book:  ‘children are not afraid of them [the monsters] because Max is not afraid of them.’

I thought the interview made fascinating listening. Sendak had a sickly childhood, relatively unprotected by immigrant parents who were themselves vulnerable, but even so he was surely not completely unusual in finding adults ‘awful.. mostly dreadful’ and that ‘being a child was even worse… a creature without power, without pocket money, or escape routes’. He saw Peter Pan and detested it as sentimental – ‘The wish is to get out [of childhood]‘. He denies that his books have morals – he seeks to amuse, entertain, distract.

As a child, he himself was terrified of the vacuum cleaner (the way that bag inflated..) and of the Invisible Man because how could you be reassured that he wasn’t actually there? He recalls his childhood perspective: those Uncles and Aunts, seen with a child’s eye, are potential monsters. They say things like ‘How big you are, how fat you’ve got, we could eat you up.’ And how ugly the relatives are! Children can be ‘monstrously cruel about physical defects.’

And if all this doesn’t scare you,  try taking a look at the Wild Things  fashion collection.

Instruction or inspiration?

“What children’s book changed the way you see the world?”

This was the starting point for Everything I need to know, I learned from a children’s book: Life lessons from notable people from all walks of life . As reviewed here I was most struck by this claim :

William C. DeVries, who performed the first successful artificial heart transplant, has vivid memories of the Tin Woodsman in THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF OZ pleading, “I will bear all the unhappiness without a murmur, if you will give me a heart.”

No, I’m not sure I believe it either. But it makes a good story in itself.

On reading Hunt’s ‘Instruction and Delight’

Peter Hunt is great at challenging any assumptions we might have about children’s literature, isn’t he? I got a bit lost in the richness of this essay. Then I tried substituting the notion of  toys for that of children’s literature. How far does the analogy work?

The range of toys is huge. Toys have been marketed for children for ?  250 years. They can be looked at from the point of view of their creators’ purposes (to instruct or delight). They could be studied as an escape to more innocent times, but their representations of childhood should be viewed unsentimentally and critically.

Toys are important. They reflect cultural, educational and social thinking. They are manufactured and marketed. They relate to children’s play and to their personal development. But we cannot assume, as adults, that we know what is happening when children play.

There are basic concepts to clarify. What do we mean by the ideas of quality, value or toys? Even a cardboard box can be a toy, in the eyes of a child. Essentially, the definition must relate to an idea of the child or of childhood. Is it perfectly obvious when something is a toy? Or is it more subtle than that? The simplest toy (say, a peg doll) relies on symbols that the child must interpret (painted features represent the human face). Is a toy created to amuse a child, or sometimes to amuse the adult and engage them in playing with the child? Who judges which are the ‘best’ toys – are these the ‘classics’ such as the beautifully crafted doll’s house or  train set; or is that the thinking of a self-declared elite, and in fact even an everyday toy (a ball, for instance) is precious in its way?

We can consider how children actually use toys and games, and compare how adults expect them to be used. The role of adults in producing toys is complex: what is their motivation; their ideology? The could be manipulating children; or idealising them. They are certainly producing toys and games as a commodification of childhood activity.  Adults are also involved in questions of the suitability of particular toys for children, and this can involve a complex of social values.

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I admit that the analogy is a bit thin. In particular, there’s not the same complexity (where’s the crossover for adults?) Perhaps if I included games. It seems to me that games are a bit like fairy tales: origins lost in the mists of time, for adults and children, now (computer games) massively commodified…