Maurice Sendak's trilogy: disappointment, fury, and their transformation through art

An overlooked yet central developmental theme of Maurice Sendak's major works is that of resilience. Resilience reflects a child's capacity to transform otherwise crippling traumatic circumstances into his (or her) very means of survival, growth, and positive maturation. An implicit credo of these works is the adage: "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." The embedded rhetoric of three of Sendak's most important books "argues" that it is by means of a poetic function, of creative imagining, and ultimately through art itself that children may overcome the traumatic circumstances omnipresent during development. The most traumatic circumstances-according to Sendak--are the rages children feel toward the very persons whom they love and depend upon, rages that threaten to disorganize themselves and disrupt vital sustaining relationships. Sendak has said that he is obsessed with one and only one question: "How do children survive?" His answer, engagingly expressed in his trilogy of Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There, is that children survive by their exercise of creative imagination, of reverie, dream, poetry, music, and exquisite visual representation. Art was Sendak's means of "recovery" from his own childhood; his published works represent his gift to all children.