"It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak’s work."

December 31, 2018 7:48 AM

In the Night Kitchen is Maurice Sendak's most-banned work (#24 on the ALA's top-banned/challenged list for 2000-2009), and certainly the most censored. In classic Sendak fashion, the 1970 book revels in its absurdity, featuring a city skyline made from pantry items and a plane fashioned out of bread dough (both seen in this 2013 Google Doodle). It also features frontal nudity of young Mickey, the book's protagonist, leading at least one school librarian to burn the book; Sendak's legendary editor, Ursula Nordstrom, replied with characteristic grace and wit.

Why Read Kid Lit: Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen
In The Night Kitchen's visual homages to Little Nemo in Slumberland
James Gandolfini reading In The Night Kitchen at an 80th birthday tribute to Sendak (YouTube)

posted by duffell (20 comments total)

This is the way of the world: the mob pursues the little dicks with ferocity and yet lets the big dicks do as they please.
posted by chavenet at 8:08 AM on December 31, 2018 [13 favorites]

leading at least one school librarian to burn the book

I realize that it ventures well into No True Scotsman territory but I would have written this as "leading at least one person posing as a school librarian to burn the book" because how can you truly be a school librarian if you are willing to burn books?
posted by Nerd of the North at 8:12 AM on December 31, 2018 [18 favorites]

Even more shockingly, fully half the book's readers have their own penises which they can view at any time. Somebody oughta do something.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 8:25 AM on December 31, 2018 [13 favorites]

It's such an awesome book to read, one my favorites to read to my kid at bedtime. Kids really don't care about the naked part, and adults need to get over themselves.
posted by emjaybee at 8:50 AM on December 31, 2018 [6 favorites]

I remember hearing about this controversy when I was a slightly older kid. For some reason, perhaps not unrelated, I couldn't seem to find a copy of the book, and I wondered what could have been so wicked about it. I knew Sendak could be scary, after all. When I finally read it years later, I was struck by its dreamy innocence. Was this the book that upset people so much? In the seventies, when kids could wander off along train tracks or get picked up by serial killers after school?

It reminds me of something that I've only just noticed I noticed in the past few years. Before the internet's plethora of pet pictures, I never paid attention to the genitals of pets. They were not within my scope of interest. But because some folks feel the need to place privacy hearts or stars on the pictures of their belly-up dogs, I notice them now every time. I am not enriched by this.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:01 AM on December 31, 2018 [18 favorites]

You'd think parents would be more upset that poor Mickey almost gets baked into a cake!
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:02 AM on December 31, 2018 [7 favorites]

The Night Kitchen is my mom's favorite Sendak book. She quotes it frequently. She just gave my kid a copy of it for Christmas and they love it. The dough plane is every kid's dream. I forgot about all the nudity, so I can see why people challenged the book. Really though, I wouldn't want to eat the morning cake baked by bakers who were going to bake a small child in it.
posted by kendrak at 9:05 AM on December 31, 2018

I adore Sendak, and was super sad that I missed his--by all accounts--dark and weird staging of the Nutcracker in Seattle before they changed it to something more "cheery" and "upbeat". Boooooooo!
posted by k8bot at 9:35 AM on December 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

The Stephen Colbert interview wit Maurice Sendak ( go to 5:36 for the in the Night Kitchen bit) .
posted by Pendragon at 9:35 AM on December 31, 2018 [6 favorites]

This has always been a favourite of ours. When you are a parent of a small boy, maybe because we never made a big deal of nudity, you're gonna see penises a lot. So it was never much of an issue for us. For awhile there I think I read it so many times I had it memorized and would recite it from time to time.

Though i have always wondered what exactly morning cake was - muffins?
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:47 AM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

"The Stephen Colbert interview" is priceless.
posted by Twang at 11:40 AM on December 31, 2018

Agreed, Ashwagandha; especially once you've been through potty training, penises become very much not a big deal. And the nudity in In the Night Kitchen isn't dwelt on at all or treated as anything but matter-of-fact, so it's hard to see what reason, besides priggishness, there would be to object to the book on that account.

Honestly, I think the rather obvious Holocaust reference (Mickey being sent to the oven by a trio of bakers with Hitler-esque mustaches) is more disturbing -- though of course little kids aren't going to pick up on that.

I always thought morning cake was something like coffee cake.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:15 PM on December 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

in the bay area a morning bun is like a croissant baked in a muffin pan.
posted by brujita at 1:21 PM on December 31, 2018

My five year old recently picked this up from the library. I thought we were going to end up having a discussion on nudity after reading it, but he didn't care about that. He just wanted to know about the "god bless milk and god bless me" line, which caused us to fall down a theological rabbit hole that we keep coming back to a month later.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 1:50 PM on December 31, 2018 [10 favorites]

No mention of child shrink Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote that fairy tales were really good for kids, but that Mickey falling through his parents' bedroom was a Freudian thing and not to be countenanced. (Note: Those Freudians of the 1940s and '50s often talked about the horrors of repression and then demanded more.) Anyway, Bettelheim was quite the big name at the time and often cited as an "expert" by wannabe censors. He didn't like Where The Wild Things Are, either. Said it was a bad model for kids.
posted by CCBC at 3:11 PM on December 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm no childcare expert, but I think the smart money these days is on doing the opposite of most everything Bettelheim did
posted by Countess Elena at 3:23 PM on December 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

As a parent who has read this book hundreds of times now, I find myself slightly disagreeing with some of these defenses of it, which in themselves seem a bit prudish in a mild way. That is, the main argument seems to be that the book is not "weird" (as per the final link) and that the penis is quite incidental to the story, except in the lurid imaginations of the censors. But that seems like a weak defense, implying that the incidentalness of the penis is a key part of establishing that the censors are misguided.

But the censors would be misguided even if the penis was not incidental. And it really isn't. It cannot be an accident that the most frontal image is next to a giant "Cock," a proud roostering moment. And prudes may not like it, but all that milk is not just milk. The sexual aspect is just one among many different meanings and threads weaving through this weird and wonderful story, but it is very much there, as acknowledged by recent critics and even, obliquely, Sendak himself. We don't need to banish sexuality in literature -- even adjacent to children, heaven forfend! -- in order to defend a great work from the censors.
posted by chortly at 10:51 PM on December 31, 2018 [5 favorites]

I was very threatened by this book. It gave me nightmares and it's easy to see why.

The horror of powerlessness is baked right into this book. It starts with a child being involuntarily stripped and pulled from bed without a way to resist. They're then placed in a horrific mass of enveloping constraining dough, surrounded by three meaty cannibals literally preparing to bake them alive. The dough stays with them while flying, and then there's the drowning sequence. And yes, I think I do remember a premonition of sexuality while this was being read to me, and good lord how fucked up is that. Naked in front of cannibals. Defiling the milk with your involuntary presence. And no real moral except I guess nightmares nightmares nightmares.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were a fair number of other kids who had the same experience as me out there. Which is not to say that it's a terrible book, I mean people loooove Where the Wild Things Are. Just, lets not pretend.
posted by tychotesla at 2:38 AM on January 1, 2019 [5 favorites]

Cash4Lead: Honestly, I think the rather obvious Holocaust reference (Mickey being sent to the oven by a trio of bakers with Hitler-esque mustaches) is more disturbing -- though of course little kids aren't going to pick up on that.

The bakers always reminded me of Oliver Hardy.
posted by dr_dank at 9:46 AM on January 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

No mention of child shrink Bruno Bettelheim

He wasn't a shrink. His doctorate, if he even had one, was in art history or something. But he certainly was a Freudian! We can credit Bettelheim with theorizing and propagating the belief we are still struggling against today that autism is the fault of the mother failing to bond with her infant.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:32 PM on January 1, 2019 [1 favorite]