Twice in Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, the wild things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” The first time, it is done in a threatening way, and Max must tame them. The second time, it is out of sadness – they do not want Max to go home.
[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_2″][et_pb_image src=”https://www.benhoare.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/RoarTerribleRoars.jpg” _builder_version=”3.14″] [/et_pb_image][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row _builder_version=”3.0.48″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.14″ background_size=”initial” background_position=”top_left” background_repeat=”repeat”]There is a symmetry to the whole book. It begins and ends in Max’s bedroom. Indeed, the adventure takes place in his room, where “the walls became the world all around”. Banished from the rest of the house, Max is able to conjure up an entire world inside his room. Time is also stretched here, for Max gets in a boat and sails “off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year” – then, at the end, sails “back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room”.
This apparent symmetry emphasises what has changed. When he is sent to bed without any supper, it is still daylight outside and the moon is only faint. In the final picture, the moon glows in a dark night sky, and Max’s supper is on the table. The food is still hot, which suggests not much time can have passed, but the subtle changes are important.
The wild things seem to be Max’s way of externalising his own wildness. Unlike the film, where we understand Max’s motivations and feel sorry for him, the book offers no explanation – parading around with weapons and tormenting the dog, Max in his wolf suit really is wild. When he meets the wild things, we see that he is like them. In fact, he’s “the most wild thing of all” and becomes their king. Max joins the wild things in a “wild rumpus”.
Eventually Max becomes lonely and wants “to be where someone loved him best of all.” He smells “good things to eat” and returns home, leaving the wild things behind. Max chooses domesticity, with its nurturing love and hot suppers, over dancing with the wild things – even though they love him, too. At the beginning of the book he is an outcast, denied his supper. But he returns accepted, his food waiting for him in his room. By externalising his wildness, Max has been able to leave it behind.
But it is a resolution that does not ring true – at least, not for me. The film ends with Max reunited with his mother, and shows us a close-up of her nurturing face in what seems to be an echo of an earlier scene with K.W., the most maternal wild thing. That the film ends with the mother’s face is significant, for in the book we see no adults at all. His mother speaks once, but she is off stage – we only see Max alone in the house. At the end of the book, nothing has changed – his supper is there, but still we see no mother.
At the end of the book, just like the beginning, Max is alone.
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