In the Night Kitchen (1970) proved controversial on its release, as several well-meaning librarians and teachers reacted to Mickey's nudity by removing the book from the shelves and/or covering the child's offending genitalia with marker, tape, or other method of obscuring it.  The book continues to appear on lists of banned or challenged books, somewhat to the consternation of those who can find nothing disturbing or "sexual" in the nudity of such a young child as Mickey appears to be.
    Sendak himself has said that he did not intend to be controversial with this book; his concern was more aesthetic, to avoid the "mess" that would result from Mickey's falling into the batter with his clothes on.  A strong case can also be made that the absence of clothes in a visual symbol of the psychological nakedness one may feel under the stress of powerful emotions (Cech 196).  Night Kitchen is the middle book in the author's "trilogy" (Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There) which are conceptually united in that each addresses intensely powerful emotions that may affect a child (and which certainly did affect Sendak himself as a child).
    Still, the would-be censors are picking up on an element that is present in the book.  The delight that Mickey takes in his nakedness, the emphasis on milk (bodily fluids?), the aggressive manipulation of the dough to create an airplane by which Mickey is able to ascend to triumph in the Milky Way, the phallic nature of the milk bottle itself, and Mickey's exultant crowing after merging with the milk bottle ("I'm in the milk and the milk's in me!") all support a reading of the book as a celebration of childhood sexuality or a masturbation fantasy.
    That is only one possible interpretation, of course.  The imagery that Sendak retrieves from his 1930s childhood and the dreamlike nature of the story suggest powerful archetypes operating, and as frequently occurs with such symbolism, the images may have more than one context.  As he was writing Night Kitchen, Sendak experienced a sense of his own mortality (a heart attack in 1968) and the loss of several intimates (his beloved dog, his mother, and the terminal cancer that afflicted his father), and he has said that he recalled a strong fear of death in the night sounds he heard as a child.
    One of the major inspirations for Night Kitchen, Winsor McCay's surrealistic comic strip of the early 1900s, Little Nemo in Slumberland, may offer further support for the reading of Night Kitchen as a symbolic grappling with death.  Sendak's book echoes McCay's playful violation of the "rules" of comic-strip art, and its plot trajectory duplicates McCay's stock situation.  Mickey, like Nemo, begins the story in bed, is disturbed and passes into a fantastoc adventureland, and returns at the end of the story to awaken in his bed.  McCay's dream explorations have been interpreted as explorations of death.
    Insofar as Mickey's adventure involves an initial descent into a perilous realm, followed by an ascension, it is somewhat compelling to view it as a type of Christ's sacrifice in Christian thought: like the crucified Christ, Mickey "dies" as he passes into sleep; he falls into a dangerous place, but is able to overcome the peril through his unique identity ("I'm not the milk and the milk's not me.  I'm Mickey!"); in ascending triumphantly, Mickey becomes a culture hero, the one to whom we should be grateful for our morning cake, just as Christ's journey results in the promise of resurrection for all humanity.
    Despite the deceptively simple, "cartoony" style of the book, then, Sendak's In the Night Kitchen contains significant psychological and sociocultural material, material dredged up from the writer-artist's own unconscious and connecting with the unconscious of his readers.

Back to Maurice Sendak: Life
Back to Wally Hastings' Children's Literature Page
Back to Wally Hastings' Home Page