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In his psychoanalytic exploration of fairytales, The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim (1976) declares that “To decide whether a story is a fairytale or something entirely different, one might ask whether it could rightly be called a love-gift to a child” (p. 27). If we use this simple criterion, it becomes easy to designate the works of Maurice Sendak, the popular writer and illustrator of children's stories, as contemporary fairytales. Contemporary they are, of course, in the sense of having been created within the last 30 years, but they are timeless as well, for these love-gifts deal, on deeper levels, with the universal fears and fantasies of children which remain, everywhere and always, approximately the same.
In his review of Selma Lanes' monumental biography, The Art of Maurice Sendak, Hilton Kramer (1980), art critic of The New York Times, takes the biographer to task at one point, noting that
The profound role played by psychoanalysis in both the life and the work, for example, is mentioned but is not really explored. This is important, for the vision of childhood experience that is conjured up in Mr. Sendak's stories and drawings is deeply indebted to the psychoanalytic mode. Yet the curtain is drawn on any psychoanalytical revelations, (p. 69)
It is doubtless past time to part the curtain.
Sendak himself early acknowledged, for instance, the sexuality of children by being the first illustrator to draw them naked with their genitals in full view. In the illustrations for George Mac-Donald's The Light Princess, he presented the royal girl baby to the public in innocent frontal nudity. Some years later, in his own In the