Blog Post #6: “Wild” in Literature and “the Wild” in Literature

In both Hemingway’s The Good Lion and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, “wildness” is conveyed in both, but with separate meanings.  In Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, wildness is depicted as animalistic and imaginative. In the beginning of the story, Max’s mother calls him a “wild thing” with which he responds “I’ll eat you!” This implies his wildness is mischievous and daunting. Later when he reaches the mysterious island, he finds that it is infested with “wild things” or beasts. In the picture book, they have fangs and claws, ready to demolish and destroy anything in their way, yet Max was able to tame the wild beasts. The repetition Sendak uses of the “wild things” is also noticeable as well. The type of wildness portrayed in this book is animalistic as seen with the creatures Max comes across, but there is also wildness in his imagination- as his bed room turned into a forest, he sailed on a boat for a year, and was able to tame their wild creatures. On the other hand, Hemingway’s The Good Lion depicts wildness in a conceptual way demonstrated through good versus evil. The good lion escapes the dangerous lands in Africa which are full of evil lions that just want to kill him. Instead, the good lion is a “past-eating lion” that has no intentions of killing for food. The wildness is also portrayed in the fact that a lion has wings, which ultimately help in his escape from the bad lions. The bad lions were seen as less than and “uncivilized” because of this therefore making a massive differential between good and evil. The wildness portrayed in The Good Lion is more hidden, more between the lines compared to Where the Wild Things Are as wildness here is used repetitively to describe the imagination and animalistic tendencies.  

~Audrey Wines