My Hat, My Rules: Breaking Moral Scripts in I Want My Hat Back

Jon Klassen’s I Want My Hat Back is the first book in a trilogy of picturebooks loosely connected by a central theme: hats and the animals that love them. What sets these animal stories apart from others and cements them as worthy of comment, however, is the way they thwart the moral scripts that picturebooks are expected to follow.

I Want My Hat Back follows the story of a bear who is searching for their hat. When they finally discover the hat thief, their response is to squash the culprit (a rabbit) beneath their considerable behind, and reclaim the hat. The art presents this act of violence fairly plainly: the bear sits atop the rabbit with its pointy red hat firmly back atop their head. The text recto reads: “I love my hat.” This feels shocking to readers, because picturebooks often follow behavioral scripts that lead ultimately to story resolutions that emphasize “altruism, resilience, or self-awareness” (Stephens 142). These often reach past obviously didactic messaging and into moral attitudes that are “sustained by ideologies which frame notions of how to live well” (Stephens 142). Caring for others, selflessness, altruism, and social behavior build expectations around how a book like this ought to end: a gentle confrontation, apologies, forgiveness, and perhaps either two hats or joint custody. This is the established script for a book that is confronting scarcity, competition, and theft, and the bear’s behavior is the opposite of this expectation. The bear chooses self-interest and antisocial behavior over altruism, and forgoes forgiveness in favor of retribution. This reads as a surprising subversion of picturebook moral scripting, and in its shock, it becomes comedic.

If one looks further though, the subversion of this moral scripting is fangless. It is not truly subverting the core ideologies that create the scripts it disregards, but rather enforces them by making them visible to the book’s reader. Readers, even children, are likely to recognize the bear’s behavior as bad, even if they do not have the language yet to explain why. The fact that the subversion feels comedic further establishes that the moral schema writing this script is present. It is not presented as a real, proper choice that a human would ever make, and therefore becomes funny in its outlandishness. Klassen makes the bear’s actions into a punchline with his simple illustration and single line of text, making this subversion one that must be given meaning by the reader. To assume the reader would reach for anything other than the moral scripts seeded by dominant ideologies about acceptable social behavior to interpret this moment does not seem to be Klassen’s hope, rather, he seems to rely on them doing just that to make the joke land.

Works Cited

Klassen, Jon. I Want My Hat Back. Candlewick 2011.

Stephens, John. “Picturebooks and Ideology.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kummerling-Meibaurer. Routledge 2018.

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