Abstract
This is an essay about cute furry little cats and kittens.1 If that statement, opening a scholarly essay in a volume on early modern ecostudies, makes you pause, or worse, squirm with discomfort, you would be in excellent company. Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World includes cats, as well as horses and dogs, among the “privileged species” that grew closer to humans than other animals than their wild or domesticated fellows, but where most serious historical and cultural criticism is concerned, the cat is not a privileged animal at all. There is a hierarchy of animals in the world of animal studies: dogs and horses are excellent subjects; monkeys, birds, wild animals, cattle are all acceptable, and even vermin are worthy of attention. Such a hierarchy reflects broader early modern cultural studies interests in human identity, status, disciplinary boundaries, global trade, economic change, and so on. Cats, for some reason, fall off this hierarchy, or perhaps simply vacillate within and without it—although they are ubiquitous in the literature, art, and quotidian experience of early moderns, they do not make much of an appearance in the scholarly record.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The title of this essay is borrowed from the Introduction to Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Boehrer’s work addresses the ways that early moderns “thought with” animals and represented nature and the human via animal imagery in dramatic writing. Boehrer and others working on animals in the period draw clear connections between the placement and understanding of early modern animals, and many of the patterns of thought that govern our own relationships with animals; where cats are concerned, there is perhaps less of a clear and direct connection, but it is that gap that I am attempting to account for here.
Susan E. Jones describes the cat fancy in the modern era as “vigorously inclusive,” and a “feminine domain” that allows women a unique experience of control, mentoring, professional competition, and even linguistic creativity, “Digging and Levelling in Adam’s Garden: Women and the International Cat Fancy,” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 49–62, 50, thus turning what many perceive as a negative into a strength for its women participants.
Donna Haraway remarks: “[P]eople, burdened with misrecognition, contradiction and complexity in their relations with other humans, find solace in unconditional love from their dogs. In turn, people love their dogs as children. In my opinion both of these beliefs are…in themselves abusive—to dogs and to humans,” The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm P, 2003), 33.
Exceptions include Erica Fudge, whose Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006) includes Boyle’s kitten experiments and Montaigne’s cat; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (New York: Penguin Books, 1984).
Topsell, Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, (1607), 104.
Stefano Zuffi, The Cat in Art, trans. Simon Jones (New York: Abrams, 2005), 116–19.
A.L.Rowse, Shakespeare’s Southampton, Patron of Virginia (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 165.
G.P.V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1978), 132.
Leslie Hotson, Mr. W.H. (New York: Knopf, 1964), 207–08.
For a more complete reading of Wriothesley’s cat, see Karen Raber, “From Sheep to Meat, from Pets to People: Animal Domestication 1600–1800,” A Cultural History of Animals, Vol. IV 1600–1800, ed. Matthew Senior (New York: Berg, 2007), 74–99. The cat can represent sexual promiscuity, effeminate nature, demonism, and a host of other things that form a part of the earl’s life story.
Gail Kern Paster, “Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, ed. Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004), 113–29, esp. 103.
William Baldwin, Beware the Cat: The First English Novel, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library P, 1988), 54.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 7. This quotation was used as the starting point for a panel discussion on speciesism at the 2007 meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS), in Chicago, Illinois. The panelists included Bruce Boehrer, Donna Landry, Garry Marvin, Laurie Shannon, Richard Nash, Robert Markley, and myself, and the panel organizer and chair was Lucinda Cole. Responses to the issue of Wolfe’s position on specieisism included challenges to the whole concept of a nonhuman-oriented “humanities,” the alienating nature of politically charged terms such as this one, its embeddedness in an enlightenment system we purport to want to supersede, its inadequacy to describe the range of animal-human relationships, and so on. I am deeply grateful to this excellent panel discussion for inspiring many of my thoughts here.
Marc R. Fellenz, The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2007), 141. Fudge and Wolfe are both aware of this problem: in “A Left-Handed Blow,” Fudge notes that “fragmentation” is not the “way forward” (15), and Wolfe remains aware of the implications of post-structuralist theory throughout Animal Rites.
Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2006), and “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Unexpected Return of the Elizabeth World Picture,” LiteratureCompass 1 (2003–04).
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (NewYork: Basic Books, 1999), 75, 99.
Dominick LaCapra, “Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre,” Journal of Modern History 60:1 (1988): 95–112, 95.
Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking P, 1978), 80.
Arnold Arluke, Just a Dog: Understanding Animal Cruelty and Ourselves (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006), 55–84.
George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) (Columbia, S.C.: The Newberry Library/U So. Carolina P, 1975), 215. Karen Edwards refers to this emblem among other information in her entry for “Kitten” in “Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary,” Milton Quarterly 41:2 (2007): 136–37.
Zuffi calls the boy “sadistic,” a stretch, but certainly the child is happy to watch the drama play out (210). Ronald Paulson quotes Kenneth Clark on the Graham children’s cat: “Hogarth enjoyed painting this cat so much that the Graham Children look hollow and lifeless beside her. She is the embodiment of Cockney vitality, alert and adventurous”; for Paulson, the cat is an emblematic reminder to the children “of the world outside this room into which they will shortly go,” in “Hogarth’s Cat,” Raritan 12:4 (Spring 1993): 1–25, esp. 2. The resonance between the boy and the cat, however, both engaged, sympathetically and cooperatively, in an act of predation seems to me the more important point made in the portrait.
Robert Boyle, “New Pneumatic Experiments on Respiration,” Philosophical Transactions 1665–1678 5 (1670): 2011–31, esp. 2018.
Malcolm R. Oster, “‘The Beame of Divinity’: Animal Suffering in the Early Thought of Robert Boyle,” British Journal for the History of Science 22:2 (1989): 151–80, esp. 162.
Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993; 2001), 10.
While the drive to understand animals more completely produces science that probes animal neurology and physiology, even animal sociology, and finds justification for anthropomorphizing animals in many instances (they really are doing those things we believe we are merely inventing on their behalf, such as mourning, meditating, analyzing, showing love, etc.), academics within the humanist disciplines have been stymied in some cases from taking full advantage of such advances. The fear of anthropomorphizing animals has in some cases been put in so much question by science, that a work such as Marc Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, Calif : New World Library, 2007) can speak with authority and the expectation of agreement; the fear of anthropomorphizing among humanist scholars, however, remains a ball and chain that prevents even empirical evidence from being read intelligently, often resulting in a disappointing “we can never know” conclusion, as in “we can never know what is our own projection and what is really inherent in the cat/dog/horse/cow/chicken etc.” For more on how the sciences have confronted this problem, see, in addition to Bekoff, Franz de Waal, “Anthropomorphism and Anthrodenial,” Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006), 59–68; and James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).
Alphonso Lingis’s brilliant essay “Animal Bodies, Inhuman Faces,” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003), 165–82, e.g., includes meditations on sea creatures, birds, insects, and the internal fauna of the human body. On the issue of “the Animal” Jacques Derrida remarks: “Whenever ‘one’ says, ‘the Animal,’ each time a philosopher, or anyone says, ‘the Animal’ in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be man…each time the subject of that statement, this ‘one,’ this ‘I’ does that he utters an asninanity [bétise],” “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369–418, esp. 400.
See, e.g., Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Random House, 1987); and Paul Patton, “Language, Power, and the Training of Horses,” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, 83–99.
Montagine, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. and ed. M.A. Screech (London: Penguin Books, 1987). The vanity of this same thought makes him equal himself to God; attribute to himself God’s mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures; and (although they are his fellows and his brothers) carve out for them such helpings of force or faculties as he thinks fit. How can he, from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden, inward motivations of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless beasts? When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? We entertain ourselves with mutual monkey-tricks. If I have time when I want to begin or say no, so does she.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Raber, K. (2008). How to Do Things with Animals: Thoughts on/with the Early Modern Cat. In: Hallock, T., Kamps, I., Raber, K.L. (eds) Early Modern Ecostudies. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37235-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61794-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)