Cat Women E-Book

Alice Maddicott

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A fascinating journey of discovery for independently minded cat lovers. One summer, Alice Maddicott was adopted by a beautiful tabby called Dylan, and together they shared six years of loving friendship. Alice collected second-hand photos - orphan images - and in her sadness after Dylan's death, she pored over the old photographs of women and their cats. Cats in gardens, cats on laps, cats in alleys and on steps, accompanied by women who were diffident and affectionate, fierce and whimsical, young and old. What did these cats mean to the women who cared for them? Why have cat-owning women always been viewed with suspicion? And where did the Crazy Cat Lady stereotype emerge from, when other cultures revere rather than fear this relationship? Examining these questions and many more, Cat Women is a moving exploration of wild natures and domestic affections. 'This whimsical project is so satisfyingly of a piece with its subject.' Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

Leseprobe

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First published in 2020 by September Publishing

Copyright © Alice Maddicott 2020

The photos on page 6 and 144 are the author’s own. Other photos are orphan images, sold in shops and online without any copyright or subject details. If you have any information about them, please contact the publishers direct on [email protected].

The right of Alice Maddicott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Design by April

Fabric on cover: Handtryck, KATTOR by Vicke Lindstrand © DACS 2020. Photo from Greta Lindström/Nationalmuseum.

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by L&C Printing Group

ISBN 978-1-912836-21-5Kindle: 978-1-912836-20-8ePub: 978-1-912836-21-5

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

In Loving Memory of Dylan and Hazel Granny

Introduction

I

I became a Cat Woman the moment I was hit with a thud of love that I’d never realised a creature could produce. I’ve always loved animals – as a child I attempted to befriend snails and tried to tame mice so they would sit in my pockets. I took my tortoise to school and I even spent hours up to my knees in my local river trying to tickle trout in the hope that one day they would swim behind me like a train of fishy ribbons, in my very own rural Somerset version of swimming with dolphins.

But one day, when I was in my early thirties, following a sudden move that had left me somewhat adrift, I met a cat who changed my life forever. Or rather, I re-met . . .

Dylan was the Cornish village cat I had seen on holidays for years and always admired from afar – I snuck a stroke whenever I could. But now I was living in his little seaside village where I knew no one except relatives. One day, when out walking, I paused by the large flowerpot in which he was sleeping and gave him a stroke, at which point he stretched and climbed down. After a few minutes I turned to walk back up the street to my house and he followed me home. He came in and curled up on my lap.

It got to night time and I wasn’t sure what to do. I had to send him home – I couldn’t steal a cat – but there was something about him being there that just made everything feel better. I eventually and very reluctantly turned him out.

But the next morning, when I opened the front door, there he was. He trotted in as if he owned the place and wouldn’t budge all day. Night fell and again I turned him out. But each day he came back. I had been thinking of getting a kitten, but now that was impossible. I did not want another cat. I wanted him.

Although in theory he belonged to someone else, each day he would show up and, before long, it was quite obvious that he had decided to move in. I had been a bit of a wreck, but for some reason this beautiful, old, giant tabby cat had chosen me. Soon I belonged to him as much as him to me.

Days turned to weeks, then months, then years. (I hasten to add at this point that his old owners now knew where he was – do not ever actually steal a cat!) The bond sometimes overwhelmed me. He would sit curled up on my lap, sometimes wrap his arms around me as if cuddling, and usually spent the night stretched out down my back. If I went out for a walk he would follow me. He would come to the beach and sniff the seaweed curiously. If I ever bumped into him out and about he would jump up excitedly as if overwhelmed with the adventure of me suddenly appearing.

Those of you who have read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy will understand when I say that he felt like my daemon – a part of me somehow that it hurt to be away from for too long. We could communicate. If I was feeling ill he would sense the sore spot and curl up on it. If I was sad, he wouldn’t leave my side.

Dylan was also a well-known character in the village. I would occasionally hear about his trips to the pub, or how he had been ‘helping’ at the post office by sitting on the counter. Come summer when the tourists arrived, he couldn’t resist sitting outside to be admired (he was very beautiful). But woe betide any dogs who got too close – fluffing up his fur and growling before chasing them away was one of his favourite hobbies.

I guess you could see his kindness and his sensing of when things weren’t right as a little uncanny, but how this bond between human and animal, between woman and cat, could be seen as anything but positive is a mystery to me. I felt honoured.

In 2011, partly inspired by my experience with Dylan over the previous year, I began to collect photos of women or girls and their cats. Every time I came across one in a charity shop, junk shop, market or online auction site, I would buy it. It was a strange impulse. Perhaps something akin to the urge to take in a lost cat.

I have always been interested in ‘found photos’; I feel a keen poignancy in these images of people that have been left to be looked over and bought by strangers. In a time when photography was far more difficult and expensive than it is now, someone had once thought the subject important enough to want to preserve their image. These were people who were loved, yet had since been forgotten, and no one was keeping their memories safe. I later discovered from an archivist friend that these found photos are actually known as orphan images. I thought perhaps I would use them as inspiration for projects or stories, that even if I didn’t know who they were I could rehome their photos, adopt them, and they could live again, just a little.

I slowly began to amass a gallery of cats and their owners, from Edwardian England to recent times. Sometimes there was a name scrawled in spidery ink on the back of the photos of the pets I found, but of course these animals would not exist in official records like their human family would. I know how much pets are part of a family, how important they are to their owner’s life, but more often than not, their companionship, their contribution to family life, is lost to history.

Who were these cats? What were their personalities like? We, as humans, have graves and epitaphs and obituaries, but with the exception of neglected garden markers and posh Victorian pet cemeteries, pets are not memorialised. All these lost characters – all that forgotten love, the head nudges and kneading, the calming strokes and playfulness . . . I wanted to do something that would celebrate them in a way they never could be through a grave, so long after death.

I began to think a lot about how these bonds are not widely understood, and how my love for Dylan potentially labelled me – ah, the Crazy Cat Lady . . . The women and cats in these photos might have had a bond as deep as mine and Dylan’s, and yet for some, these beautiful images of friendship are simply a chance to label these women as lonely and odd. They must be mad and secretly want 15 cats, no one can have married them, they must be lacking – they could even be a witch! It’s a peculiar way of interpreting female portraiture – would they have made the same assumptions if the women in these photos were alone or with children?

There was something unsettling in this idea for me. Why is the ‘Cat Lady’ seen in such negative terms? Is there a reason? Could I find any clues in history? Through research and a creative project, could I do something to redress this negativity, while creating something hopeful for the future? I wanted to explore and reimagine the idea of the Cat Lady through a creative act of remembering, and to build an alternative memorial for these animals and their women.

Nearly five years after Dylan and I found each other, I moved back to Somerset and his old owners let me take him. He was nearly 17 now and they kindly saw that, considering his age and the bond between us, it would be better for him to come with me.

We had another year and a half together before one day, rushing back from work with a feeling something was wrong, I went up to my room to find him lying at the top of the stairs. He had been coming down to greet me, making one last attempt to see me, when his body had given up and he had died. He was still warm. The urine his dying body had released still bubbled on the surface of the carpet. He had been fine when I’d left that morning. On our last night together he had danced to Kate Bush with me – his old man party trick whenever ‘Wuthering Heights’ was played. He was certainly old for a cat, but only a little stiff. If only I had known . . .

I know they say cats like to go off quietly and die alone, but I couldn’t forgive myself for not being there, for not cuddling up to him on his last day. For not being with him until the end. I think I missed his last breaths by seconds. In that moment my world fell apart.

II

I never thought I’d become a Cat Lady. But, as I think of it now, the strangest thing is that it is something you can become. You don’t become a dog or a rabbit lady, it is not seen as odd to keep horses or hamsters. In fact, few creatures have the power to define you as cats do. If I had chosen a different pet – for example, my childhood tortoise, which I still have – perceptions of me would not change. I would be the same. But Cat Lady is a thing. It is an identity.

When we call someone a Cat Lady we imply that they have left acceptable society, become unhinged, mentally unwell and desexualised; Cat Ladies have crossed over to an existence in which normal human relationships become inconceivable. It is something to be feared, as once it has happened it is unlikely to be reversed. It is a transformation. It is an end.

I’ve purposely chosen the term ‘Cat Women’ to refer to people in this book. (Though interestingly, Catwoman is both the most sexualised and untrustworthy of female comic book characters.) The word ‘lady’ implies someone genteel, yet when it follows the word ‘cat’, it often means the opposite.

For the women who have cats, their relationship with their animal is a positive and beneficial thing. So where does this suspicion that cats can signify or bring about some sort of strange transformation in a woman’s being come from? Why, as I reached my fortieth year, did my ownership of cats label me more than what I did for a living, what I had achieved or, on an even more superficial note, what I looked like? Outward appearance of success or sense of sanity can be undermined by being single with cats. Why is it OK, seen as benign, to laugh at Cat Ladies when it’s clearly endorsing a sexist stereotype? We don’t say, ‘He’s a man with a dog – beware!’ We say, ‘Ah, man’s best friend! Who wouldn’t want to meet a nice man who owns dogs?’ Dogs are friends, acceptable companions. Cats, however, are something else entirely . . .

Prejudices like this don’t come from nowhere – to become so deep-seated they develop over time. Something in the idea was old – I could feel it. I spread out my pictures of unknown women with their cats and decided I needed to know more.

In ancient cultures, cats and women had a special relationship – not one to be feared and suspicious of, but one to celebrate and be in awe of. Famous women associated with cats were not lonely old women or witches, but rather goddesses.

In ancient Egypt, cats were revered and there were numerous female cat deities, most notably Bast, whose cult survived for 2,000 years until it was banned in AD 390. Bast was the goddess of maternity and fertility, a part of womanhood to be celebrated, not feared. Cats were also cherished pets, as we can see both in the surviving art of the period and by the thousands of cat mummies that have been found in archaeological expeditions.

In Norse mythology, the goddess of fertility, motherhood and love was Freyja, a powerful goddess again associated with cats, her favoured form of transport being a chariot pulled by two, possibly Norwegian Forest, cats.

There are other examples in various pagan cultures of an association of cats with a mother goddess and the moon with its cycles, and therefore an endless sense of new life. Their nine lives do not necessarily just mean they are good at getting out of tricky situations. The game cat’s cradle even has its origins in this idea – you weave a net with your fingers to catch the sun in the form of a little cat, so that it returns with greater strength in the spring. It is a spell in the form of a children’s game – a home for miniature magic cats.

To see a black cat or a rainbow brings luck, but if a cat crosses in front of a wedding procession, beware.

A cat is often thrown into a new house to appease the vengeful spirits that haunt any new building.

If illness strikes a house, soak the household cat with water that has been used to wash a patient and then drive it out of doors – the cat will take the illness with him.

Cats can smell the coming wind and raise one if they like, so, like witches, they often do so, especially if offended.

Dogs, cats and horses can all see ghosts, but while most animals are afraid of them, cats are not.

There are many mentions of cats in UK folklore – black cats are sometimes good luck; all cats can notoriously call up a storm, hence why sailors should never throw them overboard. In fact, that is what cats are doing when they scratch at carpets and furniture – not marking territory and destroying your house but controlling the weather. If a cat sits with their back to a fire it is sure to rain. An exploration of the partly fifteenth-century Hay Hall in Birmingham found a cat and mouse to have been built into the walls – possibly to ward off mice in the new building. Cats were different, uncanny; they were intrinsically objects of suspicion in a way that other animals were not.

Yet in early medieval times cats, as far as we can tell, led relatively straightforward lives. There are recorded instances of them being kept as pets by religious orders, including by nuns – our first known Cat Women – and they were valued throughout society for their ability to catch vermin. But this changed in the later medieval period, and what followed are hundreds of years of suspicion and persecution, which often caused trouble for any woman who cared for them.

The role of cats in folklore and ancient religion may have been to their detriment in the early Christian world. Primitive beliefs had to be refuted, so a creature so anciently associated with pre-Christian customs was likely to be persecuted. It was also, specifically, a creature linked to women and female deities within these ancient beliefs, which perhaps strengthened the suspicion of women in relation to cats.

Attitudes really begin to change for the worse in the thirteenth century, when certain links between cats and heresy became stronger. There was a resurgence in the worship of the Norse goddess Freyja by a pagan fertility cult in the Rhineland that caused much consternation. Heretical demonic sects were said to worship cats as a form of the devil. Whatever the reasons, from this time onwards there appears to have been widespread persecution of cats.

There are some incredibly distressing incidences of cats being persecuted. One of the most grizzly is a report that, during the coronation of Elizabeth I in 1559, extreme Protestants filled a wicker effigy of the pope with live cats and burnt it on a pyre – the cats’ screams were said to be the language of the devil as it resided in he body of the pope, escaping into the air. Some, in the era of Charles II, were also rather fond of this practice, purportedly using the howls of burning cats to intensify the dramatic effect of anti-heresy protests and other such events.

So the suspicion of cats was embedded into the Western psyche, starting with early Christianity’s desire to wipe out pagan beliefs and developing into cats as a symbol for heresy. This all seems a long way from our progressive, science-based, modern beliefs though. Or does it? Is the derisory image of the Cat Lady where the last of this fear and mistrust still left in our unconscious has come to reside?

Where the suspicion of women who have cats becomes dangerous is in the case of witches. Just as the thirteenth century saw the rise in cat persecution, so it also saw a rise in the persecution of cat-owning women that lasted well into the eighteenth century. There are two parts to the belief in this darker relationship – metamorphosis and familiars.

Witches can turn into cats. Sometimes hares and other creatures, but cats, it was believed, are a common choice of creature to metamorphose into. Stories supporting this myth abound. In 1718, it was recorded that a William Montgomery killed two cats and wounded many others who were howling all night. He attacked them fiercely with a sword and a hatchet and two women died the next day. A further woman was found to have a mysterious deep hatchet wound, the damaged limb later withering and dropping off. Many cruelties carried out on cats were the next day justified by suspicious women found supposedly injured in corresponding ways; this confirmed that she was a witch who had transformed into a cat and therefore she (and the cat) had got what she deserved.

Gervase of Tilbury noted in his Otia Imperialia of c. 1211 that ‘women have been seen and wounded in the shape of cats by persons who were secretly on the watch and . . . the next day the women have shown wounds and loss of limbs.’ This was not a short-lived fad, a weird, temporary superstition or quickly refuted ignorance, but a centuries-long belief. When something is believed for this long it embeds itself in society – women would have been wary of being associated with cats for fear of being accused.

During their trials, women accused of metamorphosis were often said to have achieved it through vile ointments that included ingredients such as boiled babies. These horrible and graphic claims added layers of poison onto the innocent lives of women and cats.

But, still, this is not so much a woman with cat who is being targeted, as woman as cat. It is with the idea of familiars that the danger of women with cats really becomes apparent.

In folklore, a familiar is a demonic creature – not the devil himself, but a gift given by the devil on initiation into witchcraft. They come in the form of small beasts, often a domestic animal, which of course often means a cat. They are not the embodiment of a witch (unlike metamorphosis), but rather a powerful being in their own right, there to help a witch carry out her nefarious magic. Like a much more sinister version of Gobbolino, the witch’s cat, in the children’s book of the same name, with her sparking whiskers – familiars are the origin of the witch’s cat on a broomstick (though why in modern witch stereotypes these are often black I do not know, as black cats in folklore were the only ones with some positive aspect – i.e. being lucky). But to the medieval mind, and for many people well into the eighteenth century, these were not fictional characters but a real and sinister demonic power. A threat. For a woman, being seen with a cat could be a dangerous business.

Keeping animals as household pets was not common practice in the Middle Ages, except in monastic orders or as mousers. In medieval bestiaries (compendiums of real and what we would now see as mythical creatures), cats are nearly always depicted with a mouse or rat. In Europe, cats were not generally kept as pets until the seventeenth century and not till the nineteenth century were cats sentimentalised as cherished pets, mainly among the upper classes. (This is shown by art, the first pet shows and pet cemeteries. Interestingly this growing sentimentality and permission to care openly for pets was likely to have been caused by the increase in rational thinking in the late eighteenth century – the superstitions that led to persecution of cats were now culturally frowned upon.) Therefore stroking or talking to a cat was seen as odd behaviour, and could arouse suspicion. Pre-nineteenth century, aside from the aristocracy, women’s lives were largely confined to the home unless helping in the fields, and among these women it was the elderly, the single, the lonely and the widowed who were the most likely to befriend a cat, and therefore most likely to be persecuted. Today it is still women who fall into these categories who are most likely to be stigmatised as a Cat Lady.

At the height of the witch persecutions in the seventeenth century, Cat Women found themselves in grave danger. An account from the Bideford witch trials in 1682 where a witness reports that he saw a cat jump through a woman’s window at twilight was enough to get her accused of witchcraft: it was believed that the cat was her familiar.

There are even cases of celebrity familiars, for example a white spotted cat called Sathan, who was widely reported on and talked about in the sixteenth century. Belonging to Elizabeth Francis, who was put on trial for witchcraft in Chelmsford in 1556, Sathan was also a suspiciously old cat, inherited from the accused witch’s grandmother – it was thought that familiars were passed from mother to daughter, the one thing it would seem that could be inherited down the female side of the family. Fed on bread, milk and the occasional drop of Elizabeth’s blood, Sathan reportedly spoke in a strange hollow voice and did her evil bidding – killing a man who refused to marry her, before procuring her another. After sixteen years she passed him on to Agnes Waterhouse, who used him to kill other people’s cattle and a man who had offended her. Agnes herself was then tried for witchcraft in Chelmsford, the same cat therefore being used to condemn at least two innocent women.

This prejudice was not just a European thing. In America the puritanical heritage of the fear of cats was imported with Western settlers. While some Native American cultures saw the native cats as powerful beings (indeed in what is now Illinois an ancient bobcat was found in a burial mound normally reserved for humans, wearing a special collar), small domestic cats are not native to the USA and were imported with settlers when the controlling of vermin became an issue. As in the UK they were kept as mousers, but there are also records of religious extremists persecuting cats for being connected to the devil.

During the Salem witch trials of 1692–3, cats were again suspected of being familiars. This was a moment of intense hysteria, and other animals, including two dogs actually accused of witchcraft themselves, were persecuted. However, other dogs were used to track witches down, suggesting that in general dogs were trusted where cats were not.

Black cats were more feared, and this can be seen continuing through the American creative psyche, with Edgar Allan Poe, fond of cats himself, using the black cat in his dark stories in the first half of the nineteenth century, understanding the negative connotations it would stir up.

Reading accounts of familiars, there is a real sense of perceived threat in the combination of woman and cat. These days we might not believe in witchcraft, but there is still a sense that this threat simmers in a society that does not like women who don’t fit into its idea of what women should be. And women who prefer the company of cats do not fit. Today these Cat Ladies are often given the prefix ‘Crazy’, adding the stigma of mental health issues too.

When I think about these poor women accused of witchcraft just for having a pet, I cannot help but wonder as to what these cats were like. Were they lap cats or aloof? Good hunters? Did they like to play or curl up by the fire? How many feline friendships were destroyed over this sinister ignorance? Thinking back further than my photos can stretch, I like to imagine them: tabby, tortoiseshell, ginger, black or white; jumping, stretching, scratching. I bet they were well loved. And yet, in searching for a saucer of milk or a warm place to sleep, some got their kind female friends killed.