{"id":36612,"date":"2014-06-04T18:53:37","date_gmt":"2014-06-04T18:53:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36612"},"modified":"2016-09-09T17:42:12","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T17:42:12","slug":"was-the-cat-in-the-hat-black-exploring-dr-seusss-racial-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36612","title":{"rendered":"Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss\u2019s Racial Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss\u2019s Racial Imagination<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Children’s Literature<\/a>
\nVolume 42, 2014<\/a>
\npages 71-98
\nDOI: 10.1353\/chl.2014.0019<\/a><\/p>\n

Philip Nel<\/strong><\/a>, Distinguished Professor of English
\nKansas State University<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1955, Dr. Seuss<\/a> and William Spaulding\u2014director of Houghton Mifflin\u2019s educational division\u2014stepped into the publisher\u2019s elevator at 2 Park Street in Boston. As Seuss\u2019s biographers tell us, the elevator operator was an elegant, petite woman who wore white gloves and a secret smile (Morgan and Morgan 154). They don\u2019t mention that she was Annie Williams, nor do they say that she was African American (Silvey). Seuss was on that elevator because Spaulding thought he could solve the Why Johnny Can\u2019t Read crisis by writing a better reading primer. When Seuss sketched this book\u2019s feline protagonist, he gave him Mrs. Williams\u2019s white gloves, her sly smile, and her color. However, she is but one African American influence on Seuss\u2019s most famous character. One source for that red bow tie is Krazy Kat<\/em><\/a>, the black, ambiguously gendered creation of biracial cartoonist George Herriman<\/a> (Cohen 325). Seuss, who admired what he called “the beautifully insane sanities” of Krazy Kat<\/em> (qtd. in Nel, Dr. Seuss 70), also draws upon the traditions of minstrelsy\u2014an influence that emerges first in a minstrel show he wrote for his high school. The Cat in the Hat<\/em><\/a> is racially complicated, inspired by blackface performance, racist images in popular culture, and actual African Americans. The Cat\u2019s influences help us to track the evolution of the African American cultural imaginary in Seuss\u2019s work, but also, more importantly, to exemplify how children\u2019s literature conceals its own racialized origins. Considering the Cat\u2019s racial complexity both serves as an act of desegregation, acknowledging the “mixed bloodlines” (to borrow Shelley Fisher Fishkin\u2019s<\/a> phrase) of canonical children\u2019s literature, and highlights how during the 1950s\u2014a turning point for African Americans in children\u2019s literature\u2014picture books were a site where race, representation, and power were actively being contested.<\/p>\n

Decades before the birth of his Cat in the Hat<\/em>, racial caricature was an accepted part of Theodor Seuss Geisel\u2019s<\/a> childhood. D. W. Griffith\u2019s<\/a> acclaimed Birth of a Nation<\/em><\/a> (1915), released the month Geisel turned eleven, offered a popular and racist depiction of the Civil War<\/a> and Reconstruction<\/a>. The Jazz Singer<\/em><\/a> (1927), the first feature-length “talking picture,” starred Al Jolson<\/a> in blackface. One of Geisel\u2019s favorite childhood books, Peter Newell\u2019s<\/a> The Hole Book<\/em> (1908), follows a bullet\u2019s comically disruptive journey through its pages, including one where a black mammy points to the hole in the watermelon, and addresses, in dialect, a group of wide-eyed black children: “\u2018Who plugged dat melon?\u2019 mammy cried, \/ As through the door she came. \/ \u2018I\u2019d spank de chile dat done dat trick \/ Ef I could learn his name\u2019” (fig. 1). Seuss remembered this book so well that sixty years after reading it, he could still quote its opening verse by heart (Nel, Dr. Seuss 18). If, as Tony Watkins has argued, “books tells stories that contribute to children\u2019s unconscious sense of the \u2018homeland\u2019” (193), then these stories may have embedded racist caricature in Geisel\u2019s unconscious, as an ordinary part of his visual imagination…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: Exploring Dr. Seuss\u2019s Racial Imagination Children’s Literature Volume 42, 2014 pages 71-98 DOI: 10.1353\/chl.2014.0019 Philip Nel, Distinguished Professor of English Kansas State University In 1955, Dr. Seuss and William Spaulding\u2014director of Houghton Mifflin\u2019s educational division\u2014stepped into the publisher\u2019s elevator at 2 Park Street in Boston. As Seuss\u2019s biographers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20],"tags":[24944,17446,17444,4641,17445],"class_list":["post-36612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-cat-in-the-hat","tag-childrens-literature","tag-dr-seuss","tag-philip-nel","tag-theodor-seuss-geisel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36612"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47536,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36612\/revisions\/47536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}