Tim Wolf of Middle Tennessee State University wrote an article for the Children's Literature Journal, identifying continuing parental rejection themes in the works of Dr. Seuss. According to Wolf, Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins is rife with "psycho-sexual implications of a father-figure who is threatened by something on the son-figure that 'always pointed straight up in the air.' " Then there is "the father-figure's decision to solve the problem by 'cutting off' Bartholemew's head, a suggestion of castration and Oedipal revenge."

The theme continues in Green Eggs and Ham, where the top-hatted creature who constantly says "I do not like that, Sam-I-Am," represents parental rejection of the "anarchic and inventive child figure." And Sam-I-Am's repeated offerings of the green eggs and ham is itself symbolic of a child's attempt to win a parent's approval and "to ease adult gloom with the gift of imagination."

Perhaps most unsettling, Wolf says that children's literature is "an absolutely beautiful field for scholars."

[Ed.: The term 'Colonial Studies' usually refers to the legacy of dead white males who traveled to places they didn't belong and foisted their questionable values on the local populace, not to modern academics who do the same.]

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