“What did you do?” she asks them when she returns home, knowing that the children cannot put the same question to her without disclosing their own violation of domestic taboos. Possibly the mother has engaged the cat herself, in order to throw the burden of suspicion onto the children. It raises our anxiety level as well, since it keeps us from doing what we really want to be doing, which is accompanying the mother on her murderous or erotic errand. The cat’s pursuit of its peculiar idea of fun only cranks up the children’s anxiety. This is the fish’s continually iterated point, and the fish is not wrong. Next to that consummation, a cake on a rake is a pretty feeble entertainment. They take no joy in his stupid pet tricks, and they resent his attempt to distract them from what they really want to be doing, which is staring out the window for a sign of their mother’s return. The mother’s abandonment is the psychic wound for which the antics of the cat make so useless a palliative. He was, after all, a cat.Įvery reader of “The Cat in the Hat” will feel that the story revolves around a piece of withheld information: what private demons or desires compelled this mother to leave two young children at home all day, with the front door unlocked, under the supervision of a fish? Terrible as the cat is, the woman is lucky that her children do not fall prey to some more insidious intruder. This is less surprising than it may seem. He was both its creature and its nemesis-the unraveller of the very culture that produced him and that made him a star. But he also stands in an intimate and paradoxical relation to national-security policy.

His value as an analyst of the psychology of his time, the late nineteen-fifties, is readily appreciated: transgression and hypocrisy are the principal themes of his little story. The Cat in the Hat was a Cold War invention.

The cat and the hat returns