Clea Simon - The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats

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Contents

In memory of Cyrus T Cat.

our eminence gris

Preface

This is a love story. This is a love story between a woman and a cat, between women and cats, between all women and all cats. This is a love story that has lasted through history, since before history, and this is a love story that is being played out as you read this. This is a love story that cannot last. But this is a love story that renews itself and begins again, full of life and joy and promise, because this is a love story that will never end. This is a love story that has no beginning and no end. This is a love story.

My chapter in this love story began seventeen years ago, when I first met a small gray kitten. Not yet old enough to leave his mother, this small gray kitten would grow to be the companion of my single adult years, the sole emotional support of my post-college life as I built a career, found friends, and finally met and married a kind and decent man. Our part of this story ends, as all lives end, with gradual weakness and decline, with tears and denial, and finally heartbreakingly as such friendships must, with love and kindness and with promises kept. This is a story of myself and my cat, and by extension of all women and all cats, and it is a story that has already begun anew. This is a love story for all of us, for this is our story, about the bonds we forge and the unspoken connections that hold us together in warmth, in affection, in loyalty, and in sympathy, us and our feline companions, complements to each others natures, fellow creatures. This is a love story. This is our story.

A CAT OF ONES OWN

Will I ever find someone to love? I remember asking my therapist that about ten years ago, not for the first time and not for the last. Will I ever be able to sustain a relationship, I mean one with someone other than my parents, for more than six months at a time? For whatever reason that week, I was feeling particularly desperate.

You already have, my shrink, a petite woman packed full of wisdom, told me. Ive seen you, learning and growing together. Allowing your lives to come together. I waited, wondering who I had forgotten. But for better or worse, this relationship is with your cat.

I remember feeling a little peeved with her answer. Wasnt she taking me seriously? But then I flashed back to a few years earlier. My then-roommate Susan had come home to find me, as usual, seated by the window, cuddling Cyrus, the gray mixed-breed longhair Id adopted the year before.

He really is beautiful, said Susan, a big, smart woman with a big, smart grin. Hes clean and elegant, sensitive to your moods, and, in his own way, he is utterly devoted to you. I was, of course, the one who fed him, I thought, but I didnt want to interrupt.

Hes got the long hair you like, and the brilliant green eyes. She let her phrases casually roll. Hes got that smooth way of walking down the hall. One of these days, youre going to pick him up and kiss him. And hes going to turn into a handsome man, with the same beautiful hair and the same striking eyes. And for once hell be able to take you in his arms and embrace you right back.

And then hes going to say to you, Arent you sorry you had me fixed?

At this point Cyrus squirmed to be let loose, and Susan, flashing that big easy smile, followed him out of the room. In the years that have followed, I have wondered if my roommate knew how much her good-natured ribbing touched on the truth. I have since married a terrific man, a cat lover like myself. And in some crucial characteristicsthe loyalty paired with a sense of self, the healthy pride, the green eyes, though not, I must note, the surgeryhe does resemble the cat who now shares both our lives. Her lighthearted prediction came true, after a fashion, and Susan and I had a good laugh over this when she came East for my wedding. But since then I have had reason to question the apparent coincidences my deceptively easygoing roommate pointed out. For although these memories make me smile, shes sharp enough to have alerted me to their more serious shading as well, bringing me back as good friends will to some basic lessons about the nature of love and growth, of what I need for myself and what I canor want toshare of my life, that I first learned and that I continue to explore through my relationship with my cat.

It can seem strange, at first, to think in such profound terms about this most domestic of relationships. But if we allow ourselves to consider it seriously, we will see that there is great power and great potential here, built up in the closeness of our bond and the special understanding that can exist between female human and feline. A sympathy exists between us, a sense of common cause between the petting and the purr that allows us to grow and dream, that allows us, the human half of the equation, to draw upon previously untapped parts of ourselves.

Consider, for a start, just how easy it is to make light of this relationship in any of its stages: the lonely single woman who sees her cat as her mistress, her lover, or her boss is the stuff of endless jokes and urban legends. As is the depressed wife who confides in her cat, rather than her husband, or the crazy old cat lady who collects felines like her peers collect porcelain knickknacks. Cat and woman, bound to each other and often separated in some essential way from the world, this pairing has provided material for myriad parodies. As long ago as 1801 playwright George Colman used the name Lucretia McTab in his comedy The Poor Gentleman to signal to readers that this character, a confirmed spinster, was tabby-cat like, a stereotypical cat woman. To fulfill the caricature, he made her foolishly proud, so deluded about her own worth that she snubs her benefactors because they are of lesser blood. She was followed in the British popular press by Old Dame Trot and her Comical Cat in 1806 and Dame Wiggins of Lee in 1823 who cohabited with seven fine cats, both early cartoons that won their laughs at the expense of similarly single cat-loving women of a certain age, and there are many who accept these characteristicsthe pride, the aloofness, the antimale biasabout all of us cat women and look no further.

The basis for the easy humor, the stereotypes that serve as fodder for office jokes and TV sitcoms, lies in our recognition of a type. We can all envision the classic witch, a hag with a scary cat. We have also grown accustomed to its contemporary equivalent, caricatured in Nicole Hollanders cartoon Sylvia: the neurotic thirtysomething who pampers her pet because she lacks a man or a baby. These stereotypes live on because they are so immediately recognizable, theyve become a form of social shorthand to signify maladjusted women. But these simplistic images acknowledge a larger truth. In their negative way, the proliferation of such images serves as evidence of the connection between feline and female.

The language of metaphor reveals the depth of the bond. Think of cats and how they are described: as sleek and graceful, to use some of the more positive words. Slinky or fluid or poised. Or as duplicitous and sly, by those who dislike them. But always, essentially, in terms ordinarily reserved for feminine attributes. And think of the colloquial language used to describe women, whether we are catty or kittenish, cat fighting when we turn on each other, or catting around when we play the field. Whether we be idealized into the sexy nighttime prowler who is Catwoman or dismissed as simply pussy, women and cats are so closely identified as to be, in our descriptive language at least, almost interchangeable, particularly when either of us retreat behind our essential personal mysteries. We are feline; we epitomize sensuality. We radiate cool: Two tricks over the years have taught me how to conceal my tears, wrote Colette, the most feline of French authors. That of hiding my thoughts, and that of darkening my mascara. Compare that enigmatic, elegant image to the kohl-rimmed eyes of the calmly staring tabby, and remember that the cat is the basis for the riddling sphinx. Catsto the rest of the world at any rateembody both our worst and our best traits.