Memory and Desire in the Landscapes of Sendak's Dear Mili

Shortly after the publication of Dear Mili, Maurice Sendak spoke at the University of Washington about the creative process that led to his pictures for “Dear Mili,” a fairy tale by Wilhelm Grimm discovered in 1983. The story is prefaced by a letter of consolation Grimm wrote to a little girl named Mili. The unnamed girl of the story is, therefore, referred to as “Mili.” Mili lives at the edge of a great forest with her loving but impoverished mother. Suddenly a great war threatens to engulf them and the mother sends her child for three days into the safety of the woods. Deeply frightened, Mili prays. God does not desert her. The wilderness changes into a gentle scene that leads her to the cottage of St. Joseph who takes her in, gives her meaningful work, and lets her enjoy his garden where she meets a little girl who had been her guardian angel. After three days, the saint reminds her that she needs to return to her mother. Mili is reluctant and leaves only after St. Joseph gives her a rosebud with the promise that she will return when the rose blooms. In human time, Mili’s mother has waited for 30 years and joyfully welcomes her little girl. Both fall asleep “calmly and cheerfully.” The next morning neighbors find them dead, “and between them lay Saint Joseph’s rose in full bloom.”

In the course of his rather personal lecture “The Creative Process,” Sendak declared, “Dear Mili is a book about landscape, through which she runs.” He described Mili as moving through the landscapes of three experiences: a “dark wood” experience, a “paradisiacal” experience and a “nostalgic” experience. The landscape of Dear Mili is thus clearly symbolic, but not only because the story is suffused with the supernatural aids characteristic of the mode of romance, for Maurice Sendak accomplishes much personal work in Dear Mili. To some extent his pictures parallel Grimm’s text, but they also tell an altogether different story. It may well be that Sendak the artist projects in these pictures a personal selva obscura, a dark wood of loss and acknowledgment at life’s midpoint. The artist of the landscapes in Dear Mili acknowledges and grieves over the Holocaust.

Selma Lanes points out that Sendak became aware of the Holocaust at his bar mitzvah in 1941 (23). His paternal grandfather and eventually all his relatives in Europe died in the Holocaust. However, it was not until after he had been asked to illustrate “Dear Mili” that Sendak began to face what the Holocaust meant to him. He admitted during his talk that he did not want to do these pictures nor did he know how to do them. Besides, he had to go to Amsterdam to design the set for two short operas. During his stay there Sendak decided that this time he would not avoid visiting the Anne Frank house. He did not mention in his lecture the effect this visit had on him. Instead, he highlighted how his creative process was stimulated by Van Gogh’s paintings in the Amsterdam museum and by the artist’s letters to his brother Theo. Sendak had already read Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition when he was working on Outside Over There and admitted that the critical study stimulated his creative process (Doonan 94). Rosenblum argues that the romantic landscapes of artists such as Friedrich and Runge and, after the interlude of Realism, the landscapes of Van Gogh and even the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko transpose traditional religious imagery to nature and sheer color and thereby achieve “a kind of Protestant meditation upon the mysteries of the great beyond” (22). Van Gogh’s landscapes made Sendak realize that “the emotional impact comes from the landscape” (“Creative”). However, in spite of his fascination with Van Gogh’s search for religious meaning through the imaging of landscapes, Sendak found himself still troubled over the challenge of creating pictures for such an overtly Christian tale as “Dear Mili.”

The issue of Christian themes was solved for...