. By way of balance there is, of course, a jokey online culture about the unspeakable evilness of cats. These are the ones who deliberately sabotage your printer, or post video diaries commenting on the futility of your dating life. But beyond this binary, there is a more nuanced narrative of the cat as a figure that makes a virtue out of complexity and ambivalence. So perhaps we would do better to think of the cat as dissident, oblique, even radical.
In terms of genetic engineering, Darwin regarded the cat as a lost cause: “Although so much valued by women and children, we rarely see a distinct breed long kept up.” He hinted, too, at the reason. The fact was that the cat’s riotous sex life marked it out as an incorrigible disruptor of bourgeois norms. A female cat will scream from the rooftops to let the neighbourhood know that she is in season and keen to hook up with as many toms as possible.
It was the American historian Kathleen Kete who declared the cat to be “the anti-pet of nineteenth-century bourgeois life”. She was referring to the way that avant-garde artists and writers adopted the cat as a symbol of their own resistance to inherited cultural narratives. The most spectacular example is Edouard Manet’s 1863 reworking of Titian’s hallowed Venus of Urbino .
And then there were the cliches about single women and cats. Building on the medieval association of witches and their feline familiars, by Victorian times spinsterhood was assumed to automatically involve a cat or two. At a time when statistics showed that females outnumbered males by over a million, the issue of the “surplus woman” was urgently debated in the newspapers and parliament. It wasn’t just a matter of finding jobs for these unfortunate husbandless women.