Feminist Critique: How The Grinch Stole Christmas
How The Grinch Stole Christmas is a popular children's book by Dr. Seuss. This book is about a man - The Grinch - who hates Christmas and hatches a plan to 'stop it from coming' and then 'saves Christmas' after essentially being the reason the holiday needs to be saved in the first place. Like many of Dr. Seuss' books, there is an underlying theme or political statement, in this case the superiority of man. The man himself is a well known racist and bigot, due to his series of political cartoons which depicted racist images (Cross-Section of The World's Most Prosperous Department Store made for Judge Magazine, and his book The Sneetches for example), and antisemitism (The Sneetches is once again an example). To start things off in this particular case, there are barely any female characters. Every character - aside from Cindy-Lou Who - from the Grinch to his dog, Max, are male. To add insult to injury the only girl in the book, Cindy-Lou, is described with words like small and tiny and sounds like 'the coo of a dove'. Now this wouldn't be that big of an issue (considering Cindy-Lou is only two years old), if it wasn't for the fact that Cindy-Lou being the only girl in the story implies that all girls are suppposed to be small, tiny, sound like a dove and, essentially, are inferior when compared to men (Cindy-Lou compared to The Grinch). Dr. Seuss also uses Cindy-Lou to show that women are weak minded and easily manipulated while men are “so smart and so slick”. He does this by making Cindy-Lou ask only about what she sees in front of her, 'Santy Claus' taking the family Christmas tree. Cindy-Lou is seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of the decorations and all of their food, has been stolen and she wholeheartedly accepts a lie that she is told by a strange man that is clearly not Santa Claus (which, once