Out of all the titles in the Dr. Seuss canon, The Foot Book may well be the most misleading. The Grinch does at least attempt to steal Christmas and there is a certain Cat who definitely looks stylish in his chapeau. Horton cannot be accused of neither hatching eggs nor hearing Whos. Thidwick turns out to have a big heart and Bartholomew Cubbins does through exactly 500 hats. The problem with this particular tome is certainly not that feet are not present in great abundance. One cannot honestly accuse the book of not delivering on its title. The problem is that the subject being taught to young readers is not really feet, but the concept of opposites.
The very opening page situates this concept through the mechanism of feet. The left foot of the illustrated character sits just above the text “Left foot” while beneath his right foot are the words “Right foot.” So far, so good: it looks like feet are going to be subject just as the title promised. As the first few pages flip past, wet feet are juxtaposed with dry feet, front with back and slow with quick. The message pretty quickly becomes clear that feet are not the central concern here, but that feet are engaged for the purpose of placing objects in direct opposition to each other. Kids go on to learn being “well” is the opposite of being “sick” and that feet going up is the opposite of feet coming down. Everything is very direct, very clear, unambiguous and easily comprehended.
But then something strange happens around the half-way point of the book. A clown appears. The appearance of a clown outside the circus is always strange, of course, but what is strange about this particular clown is within the contextual span of a two-page spread, he is introduced as the counterpoint to both “up feet” and “down feet.” His arrivals is announced quite simply: “Here come clown feet.” Then he disappears and the next page juxtaposes the oppositional construct of small feet and big feet. On the right hand side of that two-page spread is another surprise: “Here come pig feet.” So all of a sudden, Seuss seems to have abandoned the entire strategic principle of what the book has been teaching. The clown is not related to the imagery of up and down except for making a rhyme in the same way that the pig isn’t related to small and big except for making the rhyme. And the clown is in no way related to the pig. What goes on here?
The tactic of introducing the clown as a rhyme for down and pig as a rhyme for big is subtle genius. Because the rhyme fits, the strangeness of the appearance of these two seemingly out of place characters is tamped down. Ultimately, they both make complete sense only because of the rhyme at first and that is good enough. Only when placed in context with how the book ends do the clown and the pig make full sense. The final two-page spread features an illustration of a house on a corner with a multitude of strange and unusual Seussian characters cavorting in a variety of differently colored socks. Accompanying the illustration is the end of the story:
“In the house
And on the street,
How many different
Feet you meet.”
Feet is thus finally identified as a particular kind of metaphor known as synecdoche in which one part of something is used to refer to the whole. “How many different feet you meet” is really saying how many many different types of people you meet. Within the conceptual construction of the book, the ultimate message is that there are lots of people in the world who may stand in complete opposition or at least be very unlike each other (like how a clown is very unlike a pig), but they should all be treated equally interesting and worthwhile. That is why the title is misleading. It could very appropriately be called “The Opposite Book” except that “opposite” is a much more difficult word for young readers than “foot.” On the other hand, it could equally well be titled “The People Book.” But then that would raise the very apt question: what’s the deal with all the feet?
