![]() ![]() Let’s dwell, just for a moment, on the C in the H’s behavior. The un-Cat in the Hat, who’s feline nature is never revealed in the text or imagery, is not misidentified in this title. Personally, I think my daughter has stumbled onto a more appropriate title: Thing One and Thing Two Go Bump. She calls the book One and Two, referring to the Cat and the Hat’s partners in mayhem, Thing One and Thing Two. I noticed this after my toddler quickly picked up on the narrative misdirection. ![]() Seuss chose the words cat and hat because he knew that toddlers could pronounce them and then just drew whatever he wanted to draw. The Whatever-It-Is in the Hat has small ears, round eyes, no snout to speak of, only a handful of whiskers, and long snaking tale. Seuss’s motives won’t address the most problematic thing about The Cat in the Hat, namely that the Cat in the Hat is not a cat.Īnatomically, this should be obvious. These are all interesting points and the book warrants a close-reading, but insight into Dr. Seuss noted that he intended for the Cat in the Hat to represent a kind of revolutionary spirit and scholars have posited that Cat in the Hat represents Geisel himself. ![]() Reaching for a list of easy-to-learn words, Geisel grabbed “cat” and “hat” and was off to the blue-haired, red-suited races. Seuss himself, created The Cat in the Hat in response to boring grade-school books like Dick and Jane. ![]()
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