Where the Wild Things Are and Into the Wild

Time to rethink a childhood classic.

Every child’s fantasy. Don’t indulge it. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

If Where the Wild Things Are had been written today, we can be sure that the misbehaving main character, Max, would not have been sent to bed “without eating anything” but would have been celebrated by his parent (“mother” no longer being allowed) for his original genius. Still, 1963 was not a good year, and Where the Wild Things Are is yet further testimony of that fact. This book did nothing if not contribute to the birth of the “beautiful snowflakes” that flutter around us today. 

An American classic that many of us (myself included) had on our shelves as children, this book deserves a reassessment (thank you to my reader who suggested this book for inclusion in my Top Worst Books list).

Supposed to have been sent to bed hungry for his misbehavior, Max, in the end, receives his dinner nice and hot from his dutiful mother, demonstrating to him (and to your children, dear reader), that behaving nicely is not all that important.

Where the Wild Things Are shows us that by the 60’s, the era of child-rearing using real, follow-through-on-your-word consequences is coming to a close. (This may explain a lot about the boomer generation that has wreaked so much havoc on society, but that is for another post). 

As I considered this children’s story, another book came to mind, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. If you haven’t read it, Into the Wild is the true story of Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating college, gives away the $24,000 remainder of his college savings to Oxfam America and hits the road on a very Rousseauistic journey of self-discovery into the wild. It ends (and the book opens with) his death in the remote Alaskan Wilderness. He perished a mere 113 days after he had arrived.

While different in obvious ways, these two stories—one for children and another for adults—have parallel messages, and both derive from the same type of romantic imagination.

Both stories tell us of a journey into an isolated wilderness, where the main character hopes to escape from the onerous constraints of society.

In Where the Wild Things Are Max flies away on the wings of his imagination after his mother gives him his due. Having hammered into the wall, menaced the the family dog, and told his mother, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”, Max goes to his room and imagines his escape. He leaves the known world entirely to a place devoid of humanity. In his daydream, the island he sails to is full of beasts, fellow violators of civility. Max is in good company, he must assume. For a time, Max enjoys his absolute freedom and absolute power, all bequeathed to him for nothing. 

Christopher McCandless, on the other hand, does not dream of being a king in the same way, but he is equally susceptible to a romantic arrogance. Tired of a society governed by consumerism, hypocrisy, and control, McCandless decides to give up his earthly possessions and to retreat to unsullied nature. One can certainly sympathize with this young man, who sensed something very dehumanizing and empty about modernity. 

Eventually a vagabond entirely, McCandless makes his way to a very remote part of the Alaskan wilderness. His journey from college to the wild is one of increasing distance from civilization. He finds himself making friends with hippies here and there but eventually he feels the need to live entirely alone in order to find his identity and to find meaning. 

I’m not unsympathetic with this poor lad. His instincts to rebel against a sterile, consumerist, and suburban modernity are right. Unfortunately, the sentimental humanitarianism à la Rousseau, to which he turns, cannot help him.

Paradoxically, both of these protagonists must conquer nature. Max’s first act when he arrives at the island of wild things is to tame them with his “magic trick” of staring into their eyes. Then, they make him their king. Thus, Max has begun to create the very thing that he left behind—government and order.  

The romantic is quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater of civilization but the first thing he decides to do is to create a society of his own making. See Rousseau’s Social Contract for the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon. Rousseau would set to fire all of the preexisting society, including its religion, morals, etiquette, and laws, and yet he quickly realizes that all of this is necessary. He even devises his own formula for a civil religion to replace the Christianity that he so despised.

In Into the Wild, McCandless, too, understands that he must subdue nature in order to enjoy, or at least survive, it. But he is unable to do this, and he dies because of his errors. McCandless never plants the garden that he had intended to cultivate. He botches the smoking of the meat of the bear he kills (he laments this terribly, calling it his greatest mistake—not because it proves to be the death of him that winter but because he wasted the bear’s life). McCandless’s final mistake that ultimately caused his death of starvation was to store potato seeds improperly, allowing the growth of a toxin in these potentially deadly seeds (when stored improperly, from my understanding). The toxin caused paralysis, making him unable to hike or forage.  

Each of these characters believes that he can march into the isolated wilderness and master it. Max is only able to do this because it is the fantasy of his child imagination. McCandless must realize at the point that it is too late the consequence of his belief that he could conquer the Alaskan wilderness with so little preparation. 

For the child’s romantic fantasy, all is restored in the end and there are no consequences for having violated the law of society. In the real world, the consequences of this romantic fantasy can be dire. The reverberations of Rousseau’s idle fantasy continue to be felt politically and socially (and I should add, in Christianity) today. 

What is interesting about these two stories is the main characters’ preoccupation with food. Krakauer, who researched extensively before writing McCandless’s story, relates that his journals contained hardly any observations about nature or philosophy or “rumination of any kind.” His journal entries are “almost entirely about what he ate. He wrote about hardly anything except food.” In Where the Wild Things Are, Max finally decides to leave behind the wild rumpus because he was lonely and “he smelled good things to eat.” These two fellows, as much as they wanted to commune with nature, were just too hungry. 

In the end, we can’t have civilization or culture if we are starving. And oh what we wouldn’t do for food. Recall Edmund feasting on the Turkish delight given him by the White Witch in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Lewis contrasts this image with Edmund’s siblings, surviving together with their traveling companions on meager portions but grateful nonetheless. They mortified their hunger for a higher purpose. Lewis is aware of the war between the spirit and the flesh and he symbolizes this, in part, with food.

The “noble savage” life is ultimately a fleshly life. The romantic dreamer may envision escape into nature as a spiritual journey, but every farmer can tell you, growing food ain’t easy and husbandry takes knowledge and skill. As far as hunting and gathering, well, that does not leave much time for contemplation, as McCandless discovered. “The journal,” Krakauer says, “is little more than a tally of plants foraged and game killed.” All that’s left are the base instincts—no culture, no civilization, when the hours of the day must be spent foraging. North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park recalls being asked why the people of North Korea don’t rise up and start a revolution. Because, she says, they are too hungry.    

In these two books, each character retreats from the romantic dream, hungry. I think it is safe to say that it is a hunger not merely for food but for meaning, which requires genuine spiritual communion. In the margins of a book McCandless had read, he noted in the margin next to one of the passages, “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

The sigh of the romantic facing reality. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Modernity, to be sure, has induced many, young and old, to desire escape from its barrenness. But a romantic escape from reality is not possible, and it is not a vision that should be indulged. Fleeing from civilization and religion—literally or simply on the wings of one’s imagination—drives a new search for order and community. These are perennial longings that, ultimately, can only be satisfied by participating in the ultimate Order laid down for us by Christ.

Max was lonely, we are told at the end of Where the Wild Things Are, and wanted to be “where someone loved him best of all.”

Unfortunately for poor Max, without the right formation at home, he will continue to act like a wild thing and let his imagination indulge in unhealthy escapism. Like many other romantics, he will vacillate between unhappiness with reality and escapism.

Without a Christian framework to provide both order and hope for the individual and real communion in the mystical body of Christ, the individual is left, “naked and shivering,” in the words of Edmund Burke.  

In a way, Where the Wild Things Are (and Into the Wild, for that matter) meditates on the Aristotelian insight that outside of the polis man is either a god or a beast. In the end, the author shows, romantic escapism is fruitless. But like Rousseau, this author fails to offer something that is fruitful to the imagination.  

For that, we would have to turn to Lewis, whose Christian imagination shows us the effects of the romantic escape. Recall Edmund telling the witch that his siblings really were nothing special and there was no need to bring them to her castle. Lewis shows us the psychological effects of sin on poor Edmund. Because Edmund comes from a Christ-centered community and also because of something within himself, he is able to rise above his lower self and return to the happy society of his family and friends.

Lewis gives us an alternative vision for children to “escape” into.

For the unreformed romantic, there is little such hope, other than the grace of God, which of course should not be underestimated. 

Lewis and many other authors of the same cast of mind give young readers what the romantic authors cannot: a fuller picture of the possibilities and limits of this life. It is a disservice to our young folk to entertain them with Where the Wild Things Are, lest its romantic vision should put a stumbling block in their way of a realistic assessment of what this life is like.