The Pink Stain
The center of the conflict during the Cat’s second visit is a “A big long pink cat ring! It looked like pink ink!” The story was written during late fifties when American culture was dominated by the Red Scare, the Communist Witch Hunt and the Blacklist. The pink ring is considered the horror of horrors by the two kids and the entire tale is devoted to errors to eradicate it. One can interpret this as imagery of the need to eradicate “pinkos” from American influence. Or, alternatively, one can view this strictly from a creative artist’s perspective in which trying to get past the “stain” of being labeled a “pinko” resulting from being blacklisted literally meant the different between life and death for writers, actors, musicians and other artists.
The Impact of Blacklisting
One bit of imagery which tends to favor the later perspective is situated in the very first tactic the Cat uses to try to clean the pink stain from the tub. He uses a white dress belonging to the mother of the two kids. The stain caused by an outsider—the Cat—has now directly impacted somebody not involved at all. Someone who was not even there at the time. A white dress has been besmirched by the pink stain. White dress…black list…get it?
The Snow
On the other hand, the impact of all the little cats which come out from the big cat’s hat is to transform the perfection of the natural world outside covered in snow into a horror show of pink. Entire pages of the book dominated by pink. It is everywhere with the imagery suggestive of not the anti-communist danger to America, but the threat of communism itself. The whole world seems to gone pink as a result of the influence of all those little cats supposedly working for the benefit of the kids.
The Voom
Pages 58-59 of the original book is dominated by the illustration of the Voom. As the narrator admits:
“Now don’t ask me what Voom is.
I will never know.
But, boy! Let me you.
It DOES clean up snow!”
The visual art of this two-page spread is the word “VOOM” surrounded by mushroom clouds and associative imagery of a massive explosion. By the next page, the snow is pure white again. “Voom” rhymes with “boom” and not many people at the time could have told you how a nuclear weapon works, but they could very well you what it does. Seuss is presenting an apocalyptic vision here in which both communist infiltration and anti-communist hysteria inevitably leads to the same result: the job will be accomplished, but at what cost?
