Wild Outside in the Night: Maurice Sendak, Queer American Jewishness, and the Child
Creators: name: Moskowitz, Golan
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2071
Subjects: Maurice Sendak
Childhood
Children's Literature
Jewish Studies
Sexuality and Sex Roles

description: Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), widely credited for "wrench[ing] the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plung[ing] it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche," was perhaps the most emotionally profound and widely beloved children's book artist of the twentieth century. Born a sickly child to Polish Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, Sendak's work helped revise conceptions of modern American childhood by drawing from his experience of first-generation American acculturation, his alienation as a closeted queer person before the advent of mainstream "gay" identities, and his emotional proximity to WWII losses. Drawing from his own boyhood, which was suffused with his parents' memories of Old World Poland, the social conservatism of the Depression years, the frenetic energy of emergent popular culture and mass media, and the news of his relatives' deaths in Nazi Europe, Sendak's work embodied a perspective that challenged midcentury American culture's ideas about childhood. He insisted that children, like other marginalized people, were not as simple or frivolous as they were painted by the mainstream; rather, they were suppressed human beings capable of great seriousness, insight, emotional intensity, and perspective; and they deserved greater dignity in the wider culture. Based on Sendak's children's books, interviews, and extensive archival materials, this dissertation explores his artistic investment in the figure of the alienated, disenfranchised, and endangered child into whom he channeled his own emotional stance of apartness as a closeted, queer, first-generation Jewish American marked by coming of age in a socially conservative era and by secondhand experiences of WWII traumas. It seeks to illustrate how Sendak's work revised the image of the "generic child" with what Susan Sontag has identified as two important shapers of modern cultural sensibilities: Jewish moral seriousness (a concern for maintaining justice, honesty, and empathy) and gay irony (attention to the constructed and performed nature of seemingly natural social realities). Speaking from his own childhood experience, Sendak insisted on the artificiality of middle-class childhood ideals and proclaimed that children are not blank, innocent angels on whom to project adult aspirations, but real people who face difficult emotional and material challenges in a sometimes hostile, competitive world. To better understand and contextualize Sendak's vision, this interdisciplinary study situates him in the broader histories of modern Jewish immigration and acculturation; the evolving American-Jewish family in the twentieth century, which invested greater resources toward its children; the evolution of mainstream Holocaust memory; and the popular culture of New York from the 1920s through the early twenty-first century. It represents the first study to explore the intersectionality of Jewish, American, and queer subjectivities in Maurice Sendak's children's books, as well as the contribution of these factors to evolving ideas about modern childhood.