One of my favorite childrens book is The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. The Cat brings a cheerful, exotic chaos to a household of two young children one rainy day while their mother leaves them unattended. Bringing with him two creatures appropriately named Thing One and Thing Two, the Cat performs all sorts of wacky tricks. And to make up for the chaos he has caused, he cleans up the house on his way out, disappearing seconds before the mother arrives. There are a few things that are very interesting to me 1. The mom leaves the kids at home alone and a weirdo comes into their house and she didn't lock the door. 2. Another possibility is that the cat has a striped hat. Perhaps this is symbolic of the striped suits that are commonly worn by prisoners. In other words, they were making the cat out to be a real psycho.He then makes the children do things that they're uncomfortable with, telling them that it's "fun" even though they obviously don't enjoy it. They're worried the entire time that their mother will find out because of the mess he's causing.
At the end, they tell him to please go away and take his things with him, because their mom is coming home. He covers up his wrongdoings and leaves, just as the mother arrives. Then, the narrator asks "Would you tell your parents if it happened to you?" That's the part thats really creepy.
I have come to believe that this story is actually about poor parenting and/or a instance of abuse. Of course, it might just be a completely innocent children's story.
What do you think the meaning behind this book is?
3 comments:
Dear Jim,
I feel like this story really was designed to teach kids to stand up for themselves. It could be trying to teach kids that when they get a sense that something bad is happening, that they have the option and should even have an inclination to prevent such a thing from developing. I don't think this is a "completely innocent child's story" as you said earlier, because most childrens books were designed to have a message to teach kids a valuable lesson, as well as to give them an entertaining story.
That's a really interesting interpretation of Cat in the Hat. When I think of Cat in the Hat, it reminds me of a children's movie called 'In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Waggle Wozzie Woodle Woo' which is essentially about a kid in his bedroom using his imagination to go on adventures while his mom is downstairs. This kid's imagination gets himself in to all sorts of trouble at home/school, and makes his room a mess while he's imagining things. I always thought Cat in the Hat was sort of like that-- the Cat (their imagination) does all of these bizarre and wonderful things for the kids, but the kids are worried about getting in too much trouble so they don't enjoy it as much as they could.
But in the children's movie I mentioned, when the kid tells his imagination to go away, everything gets scary and dark for him and his magical powers go away. Similarly, before the cat comes in Cat in the Hat, the two children are just sitting in front of the window watching it rain.
While I think the parenting theme is interesting, I think the book is more about choosing to follow the rules vs. imaginative/destructive fun, I don't think the book's purpose assumes from the start that the imaginative part is abuse. (but it really depends on how you interpret who the Cat in the Hat is).
Your striped hat and prison clothing interpretation is really interesting, the kids were home alone and "imprisoned" in a way, I guess. I think that the meaning behind the story has to deal with family in general and dependence on family, like you pointed out. Teens like us are becoming more and more detached from our parents and perhaps Dr. Seuss was trying to slow or prevent that process.
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