"The Cat in the Hat for President"

Dr. Seuss: American Icon, by Philip Nel. New York: Continuum, 2004.

I began working on this review as the nation celebrated what would have been Dr. Seuss's one hundredth birthday. According to the New York Times, the good Doctor was to be getting a postage stamp, a statue, and his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As Random House's official website (www.seussville.com) celebrated the "Seusscentennial," it was receiving 100,000 hits a day. There is no question that Dr. Seuss is, as the subtitle to Philip Nel's impressive new study calls him, an "American icon." The second full-length critical study of Dr. Seuss (Ruth MacDonald's 1988 Twayne book was the first), Dr. Seuss: American Icon is consistently lively, engaging, and impeccably researched. Its seventy-two-page annotated bibliography alone will prove indispensable to future Seuss researchers and useful for students and scholars of twentieth-century American children's literature and culture.

Nel's study is divided into six chapters that consider Seuss as a poet, a political cartoonist, a visual artist, a children's writer informed by "adult" sensibilities, an entrepreneur, and an icon in the American public imagination. This last category (as the book's title indicates) informs the book throughout, and in an epilogue Nel makes explicit the connection between Seuss's iconic status and his iconoclasm. For the most part, the book is successful in appealing to both a general audience and a more scholarly one. While sometimes the scholar in me becomes impatient with what seem to me to be unnecessary explanations, they are probably necessary for most readers. Nevertheless, at times the explanations are gratuitous, as in Nel's "brief note on method":

. . . while the precepts of American Studies and Cultural Studies underwrite the book as a whole, I have allowed the analytical method of each chapter to develop from its particular approach. No chapter draws exclusively on a single methodology, but the dominant method in each is as follows: Chapter One (Formalism), Two (Historicism), Three (Art History), Four (Biographical Criticism), Five (Cultural Studies), and Six (American Studies).

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This description doesn't sound very appetizing and reminds me of those "introduction to critical approaches" casebooks in which one has a text followed by Marxist, feminist, deconstructive readings, and so on, with the implicit expectation that students will "apply" these perspectives in their own writing; in my experience with students, what these casebooks demonstrate is that a little learning can be a dangerous thing.

Nel, however, is learned—an expert on Seuss—and, as his previous book, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity, demonstrates, he also knows a great deal about twentieth-century American culture. This isn't a biography; for that, one may turn to the consistently entertaining Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel by Judith and Neil Morgan. Rather, it is an examination of Seuss's work in the context of American culture over much of the twentieth century. We are treated to many Seusses: Seuss as political cartoonist during World War II; the inheritor of modern artistic styles from Surrealism and Cubism to Art Deco and cartoons; an advocate for respecting children's intelligence, who refuses to condescend to his audience despite a culture given over to nostalgic ideas about childhood; a "political fabulist" and promoter of (mostly) liberal causes; and, most tellingly, in the best chapter of the book, "The Disneyfication of Seuss," a simultaneous participant in and critic of the postwar consumer culture. Both during his lifetime, and especially after his death, Nel argues, Seuss became a trademark, and his name, characters, and especially his words have been put to ever more dubious uses. A particularly egregious example, Nel notes, is the collection of Seuss aphorisms Seuss-isms for Success: Insider Tips on Economic Health from the Good Doctor (1999), in which the Doctor's subversive power is rendered bland and his politics is deliberately misrepresented. This collection literally "capitalizes on Seuss's penchant for aphorism...