IIt's been 60 years since Julie Andrews sang about the energizing potential of a kitten's whiskers, and the fetishization of the cat shape has only grown stronger. Earlier this year, Somerset House opened a Hello Kitty cafe as part of its Cute exhibition. Of course, for balance, there is also a tongue-in-cheek online culture about the unspeakable evils of cats. These are the people who intentionally sabotage your printing presses or post video diaries commenting on the futility of your dating life. But beyond this dualism, there is a more nuanced story about cats as figures who derive virtue from complexity and ambiguity. So perhaps we should think of cats as anti-establishment, oblique, even radical.
Rudyard Kipling best captured this attitude in his 1902 series of whimsical origin myths, Just So Stories. In his The Cat Who Walked Alone, Kipling tells how wild dogs were the first animals to venture into Stone Age man's caves, attracted by the smell of roasting mutton. The dog becomes the couple's “first friend”, a devoted and helpful hunting companion, and a guard willing to submit to the collar of domestic labor. Wild cattle and wild horses soon follow, working hard in exchange for lots of hay. At last the ocelot came, walked up to the entrance of the dwelling, and began to present his terms. “I am neither a friend nor a servant. I am a solitary cat who wants to enter your cave.”
Over time, the cat warms up enough to form a trading relationship with the human. Instead of giving milk, they keep their caves away from rodents and sometimes play with their babies. But that bond remains contingent and fragile. Kipling concludes by saying that “when the moon rises and night falls,” the cat roams in the woods and on the roofs, “near the wild one.” No one knows if he will come back. Beneath his eccentricity, Kipling was responding to a new understanding of deep time revealed by The Origin of Species, published in 1859. According to Charles Darwin, thousands of years of crude selective breeding had accomplished wonders in changing the stock of common animals. They have turned into specialized breeds: soft-mouthed dogs that retrieve prey, sausage-shaped dogs that dig into holes, broad-shouldered horses that plow fields, and elegant hunters that transport gentlemen over hills and valleys. Cats, by contrast, have stubbornly resisted attempts to breed them as useful (otherwise we'd have cats the size of Labradors and dachshunds roaming the streets today. Deaf).
From the point of view of genetic engineering, Darwin regarded cats as a lost cause, stating that “despite being so cherished by women and children, it is rare to see a distinct breed maintained for long.'' No,” he said. He also hinted at the reason. In fact, the cat's promiscuous sex life marked him out as an irredeemable subversive of the norms of bourgeois society. A female cat meows from the roof, letting the neighbors know that she is in season and wants to interact with as many cats as possible. The kittens arrive a little over two months after her, each with a different father. This explains why littermates often differ significantly in coat color. French naturalist Alphonse Toussnel explained that cats are “by nature anti-marriage.”
For Victorians, such spectacular orgies were deeply contrary to their notions of moral order. Birth rates were declining in developed countries. Once the couple may have had up to 10 children, now she had 4 children. In contrast, unless neutered, a single cat could theoretically produce more than 2 million kittens over an eight-year period. Here was a Malthusian nightmare in which an unregulated lower class threatened to outstrip an ever-shrinking bourgeoisie.
In the face of such a catastrophe, it seemed imperative to undertake culling. In the mid-1880s, welfare groups lobbied the government to introduce permits for cats as a way of distinguishing between “owned” animals and the majority of animals that could be destroyed as mere pests. However, this proposal proved unfeasible, primarily due to cats' “right to roam” which exists to this day (possible prosecution if domestic dogs cause harm to life or limb). However, we are not responsible for the kitten's mischief). This tendency for cats to do their own work is something that the Belgians failed to consider when they tried to employ cats as postmen in his late 1800s. Even today, it's hard to imagine a cat agreeing to the role of a service animal, kindly guiding a blind person across the road or alerting a bomb disposal officer to an IED. Sho.
This refusal to obey orders explains why, in 1909, the Industrial Workers of the World, a global trade union, chose to incorporate a cat into its logo as a warning to refuse to be imposed. The threat of a wildcat strike posed a powerful threat if collective bargaining failed. A modern equivalent might be the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot has staged a series of protests against President Vladimir Putin, highlighting his ties to Russia's Orthodox leadership and the suppression of LGBT rights.
It was American historian Kathleen Kette who declared cats to be “the anti-pets of 19th century bourgeois life.” She was referring to how avant-garde artists and writers adopted (and adapted) cats as symbols of their own resistance to inherited cultural narratives. The most spectacular example is Edouard Manet's 1863 adaptation of Titian's Sacred Venus of Urbino (1534). In the scandalous Olympia, Manet changed the central nude woman from a goddess to a prostitute, and replaced Titian's devoted dog with an unfaithful cat.
Even from a purely practical point of view, all-night intellectuals valued cats for fitting seamlessly into their syncopated lifestyles, so different from the steady beat of bourgeois domestic life. Instead of a dog's demands for walks and regular meals, cats were content to stay quiet in the background “as if afraid of being distracted or a nuisance,” wrote French poet Théophile Gauthier. is reminiscing. At the end of the day's creative work, French novelist Jules Barbay d'Aurevilly's cat (her name was Demonette, which means “devil girl”) would help her hatch eggs. , said he was happy to sit on the growing manuscript. masterpiece. In contrast, a dog would chew it up to get attention.
when a cat does that Let's have an adventure, it was convenient for me.Poet Baudelaire invented this word flâneur Describes a new type of person spotted on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. Here was an “enthusiastic spectator moving through the crowd'' and “a prince who, though at the center of the world, was content to remain hidden in the ebb and flow of movement, rejoicing in secret.'' It would be hard to think of a better description of the cat, an animal Baudelaire knew intimately. His scandalous collection of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), includes a poem that compares his passion for a cold mistress with his passion for an equally indifferent cat.[My woman’s] Gaze / Like your own charming beast / Deep and cold, cutting like an arrow. ” On the other side of the Channel, this penchant for anonymous street-walking was often associated with men looking for other men. “Pussy Bachelor” was one of the names given to mysterious uncles and brothers who lived apart from their bourgeois families in England.
And then there were the cliches about single women and cats. Based on the medieval association of witches and their cat familiars, by the Victorian era it was thought that an unmarried woman was automatically associated with her one or two cats. At a time when statistics showed that women outnumbered men by more than one million, the issue of “surplus women” was urgently debated in newspapers and parliaments. Finding work wasn't the only problem for these unfortunate husbandless women. Where did all that female nurturing energy go? The easy and derisive conclusion was to splurge on cats. Cats were women's pets. She was cheaper to own than a dog and was just as obsessed with grooming herself and making herself look good. The image of the single, frustrated “cat lady” who pours out too much emotion into a creature that forever remains the size of a newborn baby has now been undone.
This association between cats and social and sexual dissonance continued into the 20th century. In 1940, DC Comics introduced Catwoman (originally known simply as The Cat) as Batman's newest enemy. Since then, she has been played on the big screen by Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, and Anne Hathaway. Meanwhile, the late Karl Lagerfeld publicly doted on his white Birman Choupette, who was rumored to have two maids, a chauffeur and a social media manager. Choupette's apparent lack of gratitude serves to recall Baudelaire's lament about the painful asymmetry involved in loving a pet cat that doesn't love you back.
Still, no one understood cats' refusal to be liked better than Freddie Mercury. The musician, who is famously devoted to his cats (mainly rescued moggies), dedicated: From his 1985 solo album “Mr. Bad Guy” to “My Cat Jerry, and Tom, Oscar, and Tiffany.” From here, the dedication expands to include “every cat lover in the world,” and ends with “ruining everyone else,” a reward that can only be described as very cat-like. finish.