Beware the Cat within a short history of human and nonhuman animal voice

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I contend that Beware the Cat belongs to an earlier world in which almost all mortal creatures were thought of as having voices. Musicians, naturalists, hunters, and literary authors agreed that birds and other creatures had voices and expressed emotions. In the course of history, as knowledge became specialised and Descartes’s mistaken ideas about nonhuman animals gained acceptance, people began to be thought of as the only creatures who had voices. In addition, a large body of voice-related words, including chattering, howling, and bawling, which used to apply to human and non-human creatures have become confined to one domain or another. I trace the histories of some of these words and show how the Oxford English Dictionary often displays the logic system of a post-Cartesian world. In the essay, I place Baldwin’s text within a literary tradition of thinking about nonhuman animal voice that includes Shakespeare and Margaret Cavendish.