Maurice Sendak & Gay Identity
Coming out in “Outside over There” (from Horn Book)
Jonathan Cott’s new book There’s a Mystery There(Doubleday) is a terrific examination of what its subtitle calls “The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak.” It accomplishes this by focusing on a single book, Sendak’s masterpiece, Outside Over There (1981), winner of a Caldecott Honor and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. And Cott’s objective is to identify every possible understanding of this celebrated picture book.
Sendak himself had offered clues, noting, for example, how the kidnap of a child (which sets in motion the action in Outside Over There) arose from his childhood obsession with the Lindbergh kidnapping, and how its story of a changeling was inspired by the Grimms’ tale “The Goblins.” Critics, too, have puzzled out additional meanings and supplemented our growing body of insights. There’s a Mystery There extends that endeavor through interviews with four experts (two psychoanalysts, an art critic, and a friend of Sendak’s), providing even more to our multivalent understanding of Outside Over There.
That said, to my way of thinking there is one thing missing in Cott’s otherwise comprehensive discussions of the book: how Sendak’s story takes up his identity as a gay male, albeit in a deeply symbolic way.
