Primal Postcards: Madeline as a Secret Space of Ludwig Bemelmans’s Childhood

1. A partial list: Millions of Cats, The Story of Babar, And to Think That ISaw It on Mulberry Street, Goodnight Moon, Moon Man, and Where the WildThings Are. Other picture books clearly motivated throughout by childhood trauma experiences are The Lonely Doll and CuriousGeorge, but I see these as being in such thrall to a punishing parental position that their emancipatory force, and thus their artistic stature, is compromised, though both books exercise a continuing fascination. On the other hand, The Snowman is a masterpiece, but too mournful even in its manifest content to qualify for the limited genre I'm considering here.