The Cat in the Hat use of the term "cat" to refer to jazz musicians. According to Nel, "Even as [Geisel] wrote books designed to challenge prejudice, he never fully shed the cultural assumptions he grew up with, and was likely unaware of the ways in which his visual imagination replicated the racial ideologies he consciously sought to reject." Geisel once called the fish "my version of Cotton Mather", the Puritan moralist who advised the prosecutors during the Salem witch trials. Betty Mensch and Alan Freeman support this view, writing, "Drawing on old Christian symbolism (the fish was an ancient sign of Christianity) Dr. Seuss
The Cat in the Hat he discovered that it "couldn't have "legs" or a "beak" or a "tail". Neither a "left" foot or a "right" foot." On his approach to writing "The Cat in the Hat" he wrote, "The method I used is the same method you use when you sit down to make apple stroodle [sic] without stroodles." Geisel variously stated that the book took between nine and 18 months to create. Donald Pease notes that he worked on it primarily alone, unlike with previous books, which had been more collaborative efforts between Geisel and his wife, Helen. This marked a general trend in