A few thoughts...
So I stumbled upon this children's book "Where the Wild Things Are", written and illustrated by the American author, Maurice Sendak, back in 1963. When I started digging into the story of the story, I discovered that it too was pretty 'wild'.
"Where the Wild Things Are" is, in short, about a young boy named Max who gets sent to bed without dinner and who then runs away from home (in his dreams) to a mysterious island inhabited by terrifying wild beasts. The beasts crown him their king and hold a Wild Rumpus in his honour. In the end, though, Max smells “good things to eat”. His mother has made him food, and he says goodbye to his new friends and returns to his home, where he finds his supper waiting for him.
As soon as the book was released, it was banned in several states in the US. Readers believed that the story was psychologically damaging and traumatizing to young children - due to Max's inability to control his emotions and because of his punishment of being sent to bed without dinner.
There was especially one person, the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who warned against the book and his criticism ended up haunting Sendak for years. Bettelheim’s criticism came more than five years after “Where the Wild Things Are" was published, and it appeared in the March 1969 edition of “Ladies’ Home Journal”, where he answered mothers’ child-rearing questions in a monthly column.
“What’s wrong with the book is that the author was obviously captivated by an adult psychological understanding of how to deal with destructive fantasies in the child. What he failed to understand is the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper, and this by the first and foremost giver of food and security—his mother”, Bettelheim wrote.
For 20 years or longer, Maurice Sendak claimed that Bettelheim’s attack caused his book significant damage. However, a while after Bettelheim’s column had been printed, Bettelheim admitted that he wasn’t familiar with the book and that his comments “may be very unfair.” Later, he would even confess that he had never read it and that his judgment was based purely on the mothers' descriptions.
Although Bettelheim was speaking negatively about Sendak’s book, it hardly affected its popularity considering the grand reception it enjoyed. In March 1964, it received the Caldecott Medal for the best American picture book, the most prestigious prize of its kind, and today, there are over 19 million copies of it in print around the world. In 2009 it was even made into a movie.
Here’s to you, a Handful of History - 5 exciting things on history I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy!
Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson has been studying the grave of a high-ranking Viking warrior found in the 19th Century. For more than 100 years, everybody assumed that the person buried was a male since the tomb was filled with weapons and other objects connected to a warrior’s life. But when Hedenstierna-Jonson and her team had a closer look and carried out a DNA test, they revealed that the bones belonged to a biological woman. The discovery shook the academic world. “People were angry”, Hedenstierna-Jonson says. However, her studies has had an essential impact since they inspire other archaeologists to be more careful when interpreting their findings. In the radio program "Women Digging for Answers From the Ancient Past" Hedenstierna-Jonson joins a discussion on how our modern-day gender biases influence how we look at women’s lives in ancient societies.
Two movies on books. “The Booksellers” - A documentary which takes viewers inside antiquarian booksellers' "small but fascinating world, populated by an assortment of obsessives, intellects, eccentrics and dreamers.” And the feel-good movie “The Bookshop”- “Florence Green, a free-spirited widow, puts grief behind her and risks everything to open up a bookshop - the first such shop in the sleepy seaside town of Hardborough, England. But this mini social revolution soon brings her fierce enemies.” I recommend both.
As a child, the US artist Michael Rakowitz was visiting the British Museum in London when his mother, who is of Iraqi-Jewish heritage, asked him a troubling question: why were priceless Assyrian artefacts displayed here, of all places? Rakowitz realised that the museum was not just a building with exciting artefacts exchanged between cultures in peace; it was also a crime palace. In this video, he tells about his ongoing project, ‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’, which he has been working on since 2006. In this project, Rakowitz creates artefacts that the US looted from the National Museum of Iraq after their invasion in 2003. The pieces Rakowitz creates he sees as ‘ghosts’ that have returned to haunt the halls of Western museums.
Happy pantaloons from 19th century China, cherry stockings from 1870-France, a pink corset 1904-05, and a cotton and horsehair bustle from Australia 1873. Ceci n'est pas un fashion blog; however, I still encourage you to take a look at these exquisite accessories of the past.
A long while ago, I watched the spy thriller series “The Americans”, but I was cut off the last season for unknown reasons. Now I have found the missing episodes, yay, and I see once again how great it is. The series follows two Russian KGB agents who pose as a married couple living with their two children in a suburb of Washington, D.C. On the outside, they act like ordinary Americans, but their real job is to spy on the US government. The story takes place just after Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981 and ends in December 1987. There is an excellent 1980s music playlist to the series (on Spotify, for example).
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Majken xx
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