Baldwin’s communicating cats

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article looks at William Baldwin’s idea of the cat as companion, the animal functioning as a potentially wild and alien companion to human sociality and family spaces. Baldwin probes the flesh-eating fears Tudor citizens harboured about the cats in their midst; and explores the witness role they play occupying liminal positions between the sexes, sectarian extremes, public and private spaces, in ways that interrogate the boundaries between animal and human zones. The essay argues that cats are dreamt as hybrid animals, wild and tame, killers and companions. Their meat-eating powers, their sexual prowess and ambiguous witnessing of human privacies are seen as triggering deep-seated anxieties fostered by the sectarian ideological conflicts of Tudor politics and religion. Baldwin’s novel also looks at the ways cats’ secret witnessing reveals the sexual secrets of the Tudor domestic sphere, as from a female point of view; and how, with Mouse-slayer’s revenge, that witnessing turns against the human as species to create a narrative of radical animal resistance to domestication and subservience.