ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a small number of classic picture books that deal explicitly with bedtime and that have long been read to children to ease the tensions that attend the transition into the world of sleep and dreams. Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen is a book that also thematizes bedtime as exclusion from parental intimacy, but the point of view is distinctly masculine. Gender accounts for important differences between the way Mickey, the protagonist of In the Night Kitchen, and Frances, the protagonist of Bedtime for Frances, choose to cope with and master their respective situations. The two books both separately and together comment on our different modes of socializing boys and girls. Before leaving the topic of night and of these children’s books, one final point deserves emphasis, namely that, when love is felt to be secure, children can allow themselves to be curious about the world, to explore mentally, to learn, to grow, and to dream.
