The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield

"God made the cat to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger." So said Fernand Mery, and so it is. The cat has shared our home since the age of the pharaohs. In that span of time she has been the subject of artists and poets, cartoonists and fabulists. By turns she has been depicted as either self-absorbed or self-possessed, maliciously rebellious or innocently mischievous, incorrigibly wild or something like Mery's tiger. In The Cat and the Human Imagination Katharine Brown offers a fascinating overview of our changing perception of the cat. Brown analyzes the works of artists from Lorenzo Lotto, whose 16th The Annunciation includes a sinister, almost rat-like cat which seems intent on fleeing the holy scene to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose paintings of young women with cats were studies in languid sensuality. It's a pity there are so few paintings included in this book. The writers who have felt motivated to write about the cat are too numerous to mention. Baudelaire evoked the cat's "physical beauty and grace" in his mid-19th century poem "The Cat" and shocked bourgeois society with his decadent tastes. The Bronte sisters made cats the mainstay in the well-ordered household and so pleased Victorian society. Poe stressed their mystery.... My favorite is Rudyard Kipling's "The Cat That Walked by Himself," the best of his Just So Stories. As Brown writes: "We not only tolerate the cat's resistance to human authority and take vicarious pleasure in its freedom from the conventions that inhibit us-we idealize its independence. Rudyard Kipling wrote the classic tribute to the cat's quiet insistence on keeping true to himself in the brilliant fable "The Cat That Walked by Himself." After Woman has domesticated Man, Dog, and Horse, Cat smells warm milk and presents himself at the cave. He persuades her to admit him by amusing the baby, putting it to sleep by purring, and killing a mouse in the cave - all of which he would have done anyway to please himself. Thus he wins his point without making any concessions: "still I am the Cat who walks by himself." After reading The Cat and the Human Imagination it occurs to me that we need something akin to a quantum theory to account for our various perceptions of the cat. Is it a merciless predator or an epitome of solicitous motherhood? Is it the companion of haggard old crones or sensuous young women? Is it affectionate or aloof? Physicist asked whether light was a wave or a particle and decided that the answer depended on who asked the question. Maybe it's so with the cat as well.

The comprehensive scope and depth of Rogers' work reflects her long standing personal regard for and civilized society's varied view of the domestic cat over the centuries. Rogers' earlier studies of women in literature are woven into this work in insightful but possibly controversial ways which challenge and interest the reader. There are dozens of references to art and literature that provoke one's interest in learning more, and do not bore the reader. This is a work for adults, a gem that anyone at all interested in the societal history of the domestic cat will admire and return to.