The Child-Adult Relationship in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are through Clementine Beauvais’s Reconceptualisation of the Notion of Power

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the power dynamics of the child-adult relationship in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are through the deployment of Clementine Beauvais’s reconceptualisation of the notion of power as the cornerstone of aetonormativity-centred criticism of children’s literature. It is argued that the examination of the complex relationship between the child and the adult character in the text, as well as the child reader and the adult author in a theoretical framework, which provides the space for the renegotiation of the notion of power and its properties, effectively serves a twofold purpose: it delineates the complications in the representation of childhood subjectivity in the picture book, and, simultaneously, illuminates the theoretical issue to which Beauvais The Mighty Child refers as “the inherent problem of adult ‘power’ in children’s literature” (4).