Maurice Sendak’s Nutcracker
Critic Marcia B. Siegel wrote that “…the only people without preconceived notions about The Nutcracker are four years old.” In 1988, I was four years old, and my mother took me to see The Nutcracker at Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle. This reimagining of the holiday classic had eschewed the traditional Balanchine choreography and cartoon-colored design for a dark, dreamlike German Romantic resuscitation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s original material in the story Nussknacker und Mausekönig, or Nutcracker and Mouse King.
It was a story that hadn’t done particularly well for itself; even Hoffmann was frustrated by his own inability to balance childish and adult elements in the telling. But in the 1890s Marius Petipa (of the Marinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg) decided he needed a new ballet, and adapted The Nutcracker from the saccharine retelling Alexandre Dumas père had made of Hoffmann’s work. Petipa worked with his Sleeping Beauty collaborator, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and while their original ballet had only middling success (the Tzar liked it; the critics did not), after the Revolution the Marinsky’s dancers scattered to the free corners of Europe, and took Nutcracker with them. In 1940 Disney’s Fantasia included huge swaths of Tchaikovsky’s score, and then the San Francisco Ballet’s 1944 U.S. debut of the ballet cemented the piece as a holiday classic. Just about every company in the U.S., Australia, and Europe performs a Nutcracker in December these days.
PNB’s Nutcracker—that I saw—debuted in 1983, the year before I was born, helmed by PNB’s new directors Francia Russell and Kurt Stowell. For a fresh look, and a collaboration that would honor all of the darkness, weirdness, and Romanticism of Hoffmann’s original story, they turned to children’s book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. The story already had a lot of Sendakian elements: children escaping their everyday lives to fantastical, if slightly anarchic, fantasy lands; flying; children enraged; large-headed, sometimes enchanted babies; the persistent dark pressure of the realm of dreams; the perilous boundary between childhood and coming of age, and child abductions. (Sendak was, famously, obsessed with the Lindbergh Baby.) In his design and in negotiations with Russell and Stowell, Sendak worked in or emphasized more of his favorite lodestones: Mozart, Wild Things, ambivalent mothers. In fact, Stowell added a Mozart piece in the Stahlbaum/Silberhaus party scene in Act I, in which three dancers act out a chamber dance of the Story of the Hard Nut, Hoffmann’s often disregarded story-within-a-story. Mozart’s bust presides over all family activities from the top of the toy cabinet, an acknowledgment of his godlike status to Sendak as well as his reverential admiration by Hoffmann.
My mother made me a new dress to wear to the ballet—it was grey silk, with puffed sleeves if I remember correctly, though I don’t think any pictures of it survive today—and I had to kneel on the floor and hide my face in the seat of my chair when the cannons sounded during the Battle scene.
I loved it. I had been taking dance lessons that year, and continued for another 5 years after; in 1993 I danced a toy soldier role in a smaller production of Nutcracker. I returned to the story again and again—first as a child, then as an adolescent curious about the story’s murky corners, then again as an adult. Although a lot goes wrong in this story from a literary standpoint, there’s something there, and it has been a lifelong obsession with me.
What was there was a horror story that had plucked some tightly-wound string inside my heart as a child. When I read the book again as an adult, and—indeed, no matter how I see the ballet staged anymore—what I find is a story of a predatory old man, jealous for the attention of a very young girl, who manipulates this girl and grooms her into a fever pitch of adulation for an object/man of his own creation and family. The old man, her godfather, allows her—indeed, causes her, and in many ways accompanies her—to be carried away from the safety of her home into a coming-of-age ritual as murky and dreamlike as it is worrisome.
The problem is muddled, of course, by the wild inconsistencies in the heroine’s age we see people producing as a result of their discomfort with the source material. In the Hoffmann book, and in the text of the Sendak illustrated volume, Marie (Clara in the ballet) is seven. Ballets will often cast an older girl—somewhere between nine and twelve, or on the cusp of adolescence—to play her in the first act, and magically transform her (as PNB’s production did) into an adult dancer for the more romantic scenes like the pas de deux. Or they have the Sugar Plum Fairy dance the pas de deux with the Prince. Or (as in some George Balanchine productions) they cast an adult woman to play the girl from start to finish. What none of them successfully erase is the leering predation by the heroine’s godfather; they simply ease our alarmed feelings by aging her up into the realm of nascent sexuality.
But don’t take my word for it. References to the predatory, inherently erotic undertones in The Nutcracker are in nearly everything you can read about Nutcracker that acknowledge the Hoffmann source material. With them are interesting rhetorical slights of hand that minimize the obvious and necessary conclusions one ought to draw from putting these pieces together about the sinister nature of Drosselmeier’s feelings for his goddaughter, his manipulation of her into relationship with himself and the Nutcracker (who, surprise! is his cousin). Take the following examples.
The Wikipedia reference for the film adaptation of PNB’s Nutcracker refers to the heroine’s “inner conflict and confusion, as well as the beginning of her sexual awakening, as she approaches adolescence,” noting that in the ballet, the girl is “noticeably uncomfortable around Drosselmeier, who keeps looking at her,” and later, the Nutcracker Prince and the Pasha of his royal court “who strongly resembles Drosselmeier, develop a rivalry over” the young girl. No commentary on how odd it is that two grown men have developed a rivalry over a young girl. Twice, the same page refers to her dancing with the Prince “romantically.” The article quotes the film’s director as saying, “I particularly changed the nature of the relationship between Clara and Drosselmeier. In the ballet, he’s a mischievous sort of dirty old man, always playing tricks on people. I tried to make him a kind of anti-social guy with no family who is obsessed with making toys. His only relationship is with this little girl. I tried to make him sympathetic.” The slight of hand here is more obvious: if he isn’t a dirty old man, we can forgive his obsession with a small girl. We can sympathize with him instead of worrying about Marie.
Jerry Griswold, who was a friend of Sendak’s and a journalist, also commented on the heroine’s coming-of-age and burgeoning sexuality, writing for the LA Times Book Review of “the transformation of the Nutcracker into an attractive boy” and signaling her “entrance into adolescence.” But calling the Prince an “attractive boy” signals the lie: in both Sendak’s illustrations, as well as in the ballet for which he designed, the Nutcracker Prince is a grown man, often portrayed with facial hair, always towering over the young heroine.
Ellen O’Connell, a writer who also danced Nutcracker for 11 years in various roles, wrote for Salon about how the heroine of the story “falls in love” with the Nutcracker, and of the girl’s “brainwashing,” noting that Marie “is a specter of a character, a girl who exists only to take care of her imagined prince, a girl who vanishes, disempowered and subjugated, to a kingdom ruled by dolls.” Not all readers take Marie that way, but it’s worth noting that someone who’s given it years of thought sees the heroine through the lens of helplessness and victimization. She notes, too, that PNB’s Nutcracker “includes a pedophilic godfather Drosselmeier, who… lustfully pouts when she falls in love with the doll rather than with him.” O’Connell is the only woman writer I have seen provide commentary on this relationship, and hers is the most blatant in its accusation.
Maurice Sendak himself told NPR that the heroine of Nutcracker “is overwhelmed with growing up and has no knowledge of what this means. I think the ballet is all about a strong emotional sense of something happening to her, which is bewildering.” The passive voice Sendak uses here is crucial. And in the introduction to his illustrated volume (from which most of the images in this essay are drawn), he declares, “It was essential that the peculiar relationship between Clara and Drosselmeier be clearly drawn.”
But as I mentioned before, Nutcracker is just another entry in a litany of Sendak works that explore similar themes; for instance, his Outside Over There features a girl taking on too-adult responsibilities with nearly disastrous consequences, trying to rescue her baby sister from the goblins. This volume, written only a few years before Sendak’s work on Nutcracker, was a direct inspiration for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth; and who hasn’t thought that Sarah Williams wasn’t, at fifteen, a bit young for Jareth to be romancing?
Persistent in both Nutcracker and a lot of Sendak’s work, too, is the idea that children won’t necessarily be believed, though they’re telling a fantastical sort of truth; some of his characters intuit this and keep the truth to themselves. Marie tries, in the Hoffmann, to tell her mother—that Drosselmeier scared her, that he orchestrated the conflict between Nutcracker and Mouse King and therefore, inadvertently, her own injuries and involvement in the situation. She is written off as ridiculous (and feverish, and a liar, eventually). Here, too, is an uncomfortable reality that the ballets try to resolve against the source material, usually rendering the events of the night a dream from which Clara awakens at the end. But George Balanchine didn’t agree: “Actually, it’s not a dream, it’s the reality that Mother didn’t believe.” The implications of this dynamic given the child’s age and the story’s overt eroticism are harrowing.
I want to be clear that I’m not accusing Maurice Sendak or Kent Stowell of gleefully victimizing a seven-year-old female protagonist; I believe they worked honestly with the source material they were given and did it justice, allowing many to see what was there in the Hoffmann tale all along. This remains one of my favorite illustrated books of all time, and I think it still makes an excellent holiday tale (but then, so does A Christmas Carol, and that’s packed with ghosts and murderous poverty). Hoffmann, on the other hand…
E.T.A. Hoffmann was a bit of a problem of a man. A German Romantic, failed composer, Mozart fanboy, occasional civil servant, music critic, and music teacher, he was extremely fond of drink and at one point had to be shuttled away from a government post because he fell in love with a married cousin. Later, a 16-year-old girl he was tutoring in music was quickly married off after he fell in love with her, too. (Hoffmann was married at the time. E.F. Bleiler details Hoffmann’s sense of “bitter” loss over this event in his excellent introduction to The Best Tales of Hoffmann.) He was chronically in debt, got into political pissing matches with people far more powerful than he, and died of complications from alcoholism and syphilis. These are only footnotes in an otherwise prolific but sad life until one acknowledges that Hoffmann served as “a prototype” for Herr Drosselmeier. Suddenly, Drosselmeier’s jealousies and horrible flirtations with a young girl seem reflective of a real man’s inappropriate longings. Sendak referred to Drosselmeier as a “half-child, half-man” and referred to Clara’s vision of her godfather as a “nightmare.” In this case, the nightmare had a solid basis in reality.
In the Hoffmann tale, and thus in the Sendak illustrated volume, Marie is a sensitive, empathetic child who is swept up in the excitement of Christmas and becomes enamored of a Nutcracker. Her godfather makes constant, uncomfortable comparisons between himself and the doll once he realizes how taken with the doll Marie has become, trying to draw the girl’s attention to his relative attractiveness. Marie insults Drosselmeier at one point and he burns with shame; her parents laugh heartily. At night, Marie stays up late to attend to the Nutcracker (broken already by her overzealous boor of a brother, Fritz) and encounters a clash between a mouse army with a seven-headed king as its leader, versus the Nutcracker and the household toys. She cuts her arm on the toy cabinet in all the hubbub and slumps into a faint, but not before recognizing her godfather as having directly orchestrated these events.
Marie awakens on Christmas day in bed, having lost a lot of blood from her injury. Her mother does not believe her version of the previous night’s events, even when Drosselmeier enters and Marie accuses him of having been there. He doesn’t deny her accusations; he chants at her a deranged rhyme, and then over the next few evenings tells her a bedtime story about the Nutcracker’s cursed origins, in which it is revealed that the Nutcracker is Drosselmeier’s cousin/nephew. The story succeeds in winning the rest of Marie’s loyalty and devotion to the Nutcracker, who of course was quite hard done by. Marie again tells the truth of all that has happened to her family; they laugh at her.
The mice come again and harass her nightly, stealing her Christmas sweets and threatening the Nutcracker’s life. Marie gives all her things to the mice to save him. The family is perplexed by the obvious mouse infestation in the house, but still show no sign of believing Marie’s stories (Fritz, closest in age, is the exception—who obsesses over the apparent cowardice of his toy soldiers in battle and is too much an idiot to care about the rest). Marie gets Fritz to give Nutcracker a sword, and finally, Nutcracker kills the Mouse King. He brings Marie a battle trophy of the Mouse King’s seven crowns. Marie is whisked away to the Prince’s magical domain, which in his introduction to the book Sendak describes as “an eighteenth-century seraglio, full of exaggerated glee and erotic conceits.” At one point Nutcracker’s sisters put her to work doing hard labor, pounding rock candy. And then she disappears in a mist, and she wakes up in bed. She tells her mother—again—about what has happened to her (about young Mr. Drosselmeier absconding with her to a seraglio in a land made of candy) and her mother calls it “nonsense.” She persists with her story and is called a liar. Her parents threaten her with punishments if she repeats her story again.
Then Drosselmeier’s nephew comes for a visit, cracking nuts and being exactly who you’d think he is, and asks the child for her hand. She betroths herself to him. They marry a year later. The parents apparently have no commentary to offer on the occasion of their eight-year-old’s marriage. I admit this version of the story sounds more like Nabokov than Balanchine, but it’s all right there if you read it. And Hoffmann is hardly alone in his sexualizing of little girls; Rebecca Solnit and many other writers have already done an admirable job detailing the ways in which the traditional masculine canon of literature routinely sexualizes and objectifies women and endorses their ill treatment.
For Marie’s part, and in her defense, I can only say that a little girl who is treated as foolish and dishonest at home will likely find her comfort and belonging wherever it is most kindly offered, particularly if she does not understand the details of what it is that’s being offered. But as a society, who are we to judge? Nearly 5 in 1000 15–17-year-olds are married in the United States, predominantly to adults far senior of them. It may not make for the most heartwarming Christmas tale in this light, but you can’t say it doesn’t have a wrinkle of truth running through it.
