ABSTRACT

In Maurice Sendak's remarkably popular children's book Where the Wild Things Are, written more than forty years ago, the hero Max, grounded in his bedroom for a series of misdemeanours, watches in his wolf suit as the bare walls and ceiling sprout leaves and turn to a jungle overlooked by a silvery moon. He sails across an ocean, in and out of weeks and over a year, to a land where the wild things are. They gnash their terrible teeth and show their terrible claws, but he says, ‘be still’ and tames them with a stare. They become frightened and, perceptively, call him the most wild thing of all. After being crowned king of all wild things, the fun begins. But as time passes, he becomes homesick. Leaving the wild things, who gnash their terrible teeth in dismay, he sails back home to his bedroom and finds his hot supper waiting for him.