The Man Who Reinvented the Cat
The curious career of the illustrator Louis Wain tells the story of how our feline friends came in from the alley and took up their place at the hearth.
By Rebecca Mead
Wain is the figure at the center of “Catland” (published by Johns Hopkins), an entertaining and often surprising cultural history by the literary critic Kathryn Hughes. “Catland” chronicles a seventy-year period, stretching from the latter half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth, during which, Hughes writes, “cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” In alternating chapters, Hughes narrates the life of Wain—whose drawings at the height of his popularity were as familiar as those of Beatrix Potter, and who spent his later years in a mental asylum, afflicted with symptoms of what may have been schizophrenia—and provides a zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth...
Hughes is adept in exploring the many, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which cats represented sexual deviation from a cultural norm. “Pussy bachelor” was a term for a certain kind of queer man, who, like a cat, was simultaneously fastidious and given to uncharted nighttime roving—a man such as Edward Lear, the poet, whose domestic happiness depended upon the presence of both his longtime manservant, Giorgio Kokali, and his cat Foss. Hughes reads Lear’s best-known work, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” as a parable about queer love and improvised nuptials between creatures whose gender, she points out, is never specified. If men with cats were coded as feminine, women with cats were coded as promiscuous and voracious. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the term “pussy” had emerged as a synonym for the female genitals. Hughes writes of music-hall acts in which female performers would gradually raise their skirts to reveal a kitten secreted in a front pocket of their bloomers, the creatures’ little triangular heads standing in for the female pubis.
For the whole article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/10/catland-louis-wain-and-the-great-cat-mania-kathryn-hughes-book-review