"A Witch, A Cat Woman": Cat Woman's Patriarchal Roots
Kim Honda
Cat women—dangerous and sexy—prowl through pop cultural history, from pulp magazines to B movies, from comic books to costume shop staples. This association between women and cats even permeates our language—a vagina is a pussy, a fight between two women is a catfight. But where does this association come from? I decided to dig a little deeper, and what I found is that the trope of the “evil cat woman” derives from early Christian patriarchal attempts to “re-brand” ancient feminine divinities that threatened Christianity’s male-lead structure. But while the cat woman trope extends back to ancient civilizations, she takes center stage in our contemporary culture, moving out of mythic folklore and into the average person’s pop cultural consciousness, where the trope becomes even more complex—merging race and gender. And interestingly, her link to ancient forms of patriarchy has become hidden; every Halloween girls dress up in slutty cat costumes without any idea of the historical power struggle that lurks behind this choice. The concept of women who morph from humans into felines suggests anxieties about the limits of female subjectivity yet frames female sexuality as beyond regulatory structures of science and the boundaries of the human. Nowhere is this trope more prevalent than pop cultural films and literature. By reaching back to an archaic regulatory imaginary, these films and novels attempt to combat the changing roles of women and to maintain a gendered and racial status quo. So while early Christians reached for the cat-woman trope to maintain their power, the patriarchy of the modern era has done the same.
“Fantastical Powers”: Christian Patriarchy’s Link to the Powerful Cat Woman
In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy, as historian Teri Wadell explains, “cat fetishes were a common component of the insignia of female royalty” (82). Baset, the cat deity of motherhood, was one of the most popular “cat relics” (82). Baset came to also be associated with Isis and Diana, divinities who were widespread and influential across the Roman Empire. But, the patriarchal and monotheistic structure of Christianity was threatened by faiths led by multiple female figures, and so as Christianity gained strength, cults or divinities associated with females were eradicated or pushed underground. The church labeled female cat-divinities evil by “fabricat[ing]” stories of “sisterhoods” who worshiped these deities, claiming these sisterhoods “performed subversive practices [...] at the devils behest” (84). To maintain patriarchal Christianity, which “ensured that women were excluded from political/public life and confined to the domestic sphere,” women who did not follow these codes, or who remained linked to the cat deities, were marked as evil. These women were often labeled witches, associated with animal familiars or beasts, an association that generated the fear that their “fantastical powers” could “incapacitate man and his God-given domain over beasts” (85). Over time, the church established the witchery of women, and, as Wadell notes, “cats and women” became connected “with the extremes of sexual indulgence and perversion” (87). Today, the cat woman trope is a product of the powerful woman whom Christianity attempted/attempts to overthrow by demonizing her and her sexuality. It is also the product of the long history of labeling “deviant” women witches. In short, we can see how the roots of making the female into either an animal or monster, whether a cat or a witch, stems from early Christian misogyny, a misogyny that remains strong even as it becomes more secular in the current century.
Why Bad Girls Are Always Monsters; It’s in Their Blood
The nineteenth-century move toward “scientific” determination of feminine evil also plays a role in the demonization of women that connects to the cat woman trope. Victorian “scientists” posited a variety of theories to explain deviance; Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, with his 1894 text The Female Offender, attempted to define and determine the causes of women’s criminal or deviant behavior. Lombroso argues that female criminal tendencies are “biologically predisposed” and “postulates that female criminals possessed certain physical traits that were absent in other women” (92). By linking their monstrousness to their bodies, the texts explored in this article situate female deviance as a product of biology, of lineage. For Lombroso, women were naturally stupid, submissive, domestic, and moral, namely Angels in the House, the popular nineteenth-century term for the ideal Victorian wife—a woman that was expected to be, above all else, pious and passive. Because women were held to this unrealistically idealized femininity, when they did break the rules, they were that much worse. Why?—because they must not only be deviant in their behavior—but deviant in their natures, in their blood—the female criminal is, in this schema, fundamentally unnatural, “untrue to her very sex.” Thus, when a female commits a crime it is much scarier than when a male does so, because she is using power—power she is not supposed to have. Women are supposed to be docile and controlled. When they are not, they are labeled as exceedingly evil, as biologically deficient—or, as cat morphing monsters.
These harmful sociological/“scientific” expectations of femininity directly link to the early Christian demonization of cat women. Both propagate the myth of woman as passive and docile creatures and the counter myth of active female agency as inherently criminalized and monstrous. This uneasiness about women who act outside the regulatory structures of patriarchy continued into the Twentieth Century as more women gained economic, social, and political autonomy. With this rise in female power came anxieties about how to control it. It is in this time, the early Twentieth Century, that the most outlandish stories of cat women were created.
Pulp Fiction and the Twentieth Century’s “Re-Branding” of Ancient Christian Patriarchy
One of the earliest instances of the cat woman in popular culture is found in the pulp fiction story The Bagheeta, by Val Lewton. Its particular representation of the woman as cat has influenced some of the most well known examples of the trope. The story tells of a tribe who is haunted by a panther. This panther can turn into a beautiful, sultry, and deadly woman—what they call a Bagheeta. If this panther-woman entices a man’s kiss, that man will die. To save the tribe, it is up to one young male virgin to hunt down and kill the Bagheeta. In the Bagheeta is the symbol of the cat woman—a woman who is sexual and formidable. By representing this deviant woman as a murderous panther, female sexuality is made dangerous, and brutal, but also powerful. She is something patriarchy must eradicate.
What is most interesting about The Bagheeta is its ending. The reader discovers that the Bagheeta is actually a fictitious story created by certain men in the tribe. When the young male sent to kill the beast discovers this, he decides to comply and participate in the lie—he maintains that he did indeed kill a Bagheeta so that he will “appear brave and good in the eyes of the village” (Lewton). In other words, the men create a fiction of the sexual woman as a supernatural beast explicitly to elevate and maintain their own higher status, in the same way that early Christian leaders slandered women who lead religious groups. However, the young man explains, another reason for perpetuating this lie is that the woman he desires would never “give herself” to one who “betrayed her father’s the secret” (308). So, not only does the elevation of male status in the tribe motivate this myth, but male desire for female sexuality itself perpetuates it. While this story works to regulate and contain female sexuality, in the end it is the men who are controlled by it.
“So Little, So Soft”: Idealized Femininity and the Cat Woman in Cat People
Val Lewton, author of The Bagheeta, later directed the classic 1942 noir thriller Cat People, also a story concerning the fear of the “inherent evil” in the powerful, sexualized female. The film follows Irena, a Serbian immigrant, who also has the ability to turn into a murderous panther. She marries an American man, Oliver, and desperately tries to be the ideal woman. Her secret heritage serves as a good motivator: Irena’s Serbian village has “bowed down to Satan” and become “witches” who “in jealousy or anger or out of their own corrupt passions can change into great cats, like panthers. And if one of these women were to fall in love, [...] she would be driven by her own evil to kill him” (Tourneur). Just as Lombroso attempts to maintain male power by claiming the deviant woman is inherently evil, and as early Christians labeled woman as cat worshiping witches, Irena is made to conform to idealized femininity by the threat of turning into a monster.
While Irena is able to maintain this placidity for a while, her feline transformation exposes the contradiction of this ideal femininity that Oliver, and the patriarchy, seeks to enforce. Irena is expected to stay virginal and pure, to control her “own corrupt passions,” (i.e. she can’t think about sex), and if her “lover were to kiss her,” or “take her into his embrace,” (i.e. have sex) she becomes a murderer (Tourneur). Her repressed sexuality echoes the regulatory structures placed on women’s sexual lives in the early Twentieth Century. Those who did not comply, women who were (openly) sexual, were seen as deviant monsters, and according to Lombroso biologically defective.
Yet this model is inherently contradictory, for women were/are also expected to be mothers. Irena faces similar problems. While the threat of becoming a literal monster limits her sexuality, her marriage to her husband demands the opposite. Irena feels the paradoxical nature of her situation when Oliver first asks to “kiss her” (Tourneur). Oliver expects sexual fulfillment, yet also denies the powerful sexuality of her cat-beast alter ego. Irena feels the discrepant pressure of denying her sexuality while being expected to please her husband and mother his children. Ironically, although these limits are placed on Irena, she is blamed, essentially, for not being sexual enough and at the same time containing a powerful sexuality.
In the film, female sexuality is again depicted as something violent, beastly, uncontrollable. To maintain the patriarchal paradigm, control over the female, especially her sexuality, is necessary—it must be made small. Hence, after the psychologist learns of Irena’s cat curse, he concludes, “these things are very simple” (Tourneur). In an attempt to diminish the powerful (and dangerous in his male eyes) sexuality of the woman, the psychiatrist reduces this potential to something small and unimportant.
This tendency is echoed today when woman are constantly associated with words like kitten, kitty, or pussy, which suggest the small, weak, helpless, soft, and pleasurable. By associating women
with cats and kittens their powerful sexuality is diminished. But Irena does not turn into a cute, cuddly kitten. She becomes a dangerous panther. While the film attempts to demonize and diminish female sexuality, it contradicts itself by representing it in a vast and powerful way. Yes, Irena is evil. But she is also given a immense archaic energy, the ability to transcend the limits of the human, and holds power over the male characters in the film.
The influence of the early Christian association of women and cats is most potently seen when Irena explains, “[her] people bowed down to Satan, and said their masses to him. They had become witches and were evil” (Tourneur). And when Oliver drives Irena away with a cross-shaped ruler exclaiming, “In the name of God, leave us in peace,” Irena the panther obeys and disappears instantly. By linking Irena, the jealous sexualized woman, with the devil, the film participates in the long tradition established by early Christianity, which, to promote their patriarchal religious paradigm, labeled any women who threatened that order as witches who were sexually perverse. This link is quite fascinating, for as Waddell has told us, these early Christian officials “fabricated” accounts of devil worshiping sisterhoods. In other words, they made up stories. What was happening in early twentieth-century film and pulp fiction is in essence the same move. In order to maintain the patriarchal order, women who were gaining power must be demonized and made monstrous— stories must be told about her. And by linking them to the cat, these products of more modern culture participate in a practice of othering than connects back centuries.
But this othering takes on a more multifaceted role in this film, where race and nationality intersect with Irena’s gendered oppression. Not only does Irena the monstrous panther-morph represent anxieties surrounding female power, she represents hegemonic American prejudice toward the exotic, female foreigner. As E. Ann Kaplan has argued, film noir is where the “Western Imaginary superimpos[es] [...] connotations of savagery, cannibalism, immorality, and backwardness” onto the racial other (185). Released during World War II and close to the start of the Cold War, at a point of burgeoning tensions regarding race and nationality, the film depicts anxieties about the place of foreigners in America. But what is most fascinating about Irena’s character is the way, as Kpalan has argued, her black panther-body collapses the figures of “jews, blacks, and foreign women” (188). More specifically, for Kaplan, Irena represents “white culture’s fears of what might happen if gender and racial boundaries were not [...] kept in place” (186). So, not only must Oliver resolve Irena’s sexual deviance, he must reconcile her racial difference as well. Although an immigrant from Serbia, Oliver chooses to focus on the fact that Irena is now “here in America” and equates being American to being “normal” (Tourneur). For Oliver, to be normal means to be “in love” with a “good plain Americano.” The repetition of the phrase “you’re so normal” is Oliver’s attempt at justifying his lust for an exotic other. By insisting that she is a normal American, Oliver can feel validated at desiring someone that would not fit the mold of Angle in the House, who is traditionally white and does not possess a beast-like sexuality lurking within her (or at least, she does not let this sexuality show).
Oliver’s use of the cross to eradicate Irena not only connects back to ancient Christianity, but similarly links the film to the racial anxieties of the 1940s. By depicting Eastern Europe as a ‘backward’ place that “bowed down to Satan” the film reveals anxieties about a loss of “white,” Western hegemony, and attempts to re-assert power over these “lesser-than” cultures. This is especially evident in the contrast between Irena’s mystical powers and the rational, scientific hypnosis used by the western psychiatrist in the film. The sexualized exotic immigrant is associated with the archaic, while the American is associated with the Enlightenment.
Yet, I argue, Cat People undermines its own oppressive attempts. While the sexualized, demonized, racial other that is Irena is contained in the end, for both her and her panther double are killed, Irena kills the womanizing psychiatrist. The proxy for white, male authority and regulatory structures is destroyed by the panther identity of Irena, her sexually free (and dark) identity. And while the film revolves around the evilness of Irena, it still revolves around Irena, giving her narrative space, within which, the film exposes the vastly unrealistic expectations of ideal femininity, calling attention to patriarchy’s own oxymoronic nature. And finally, in attempting to represent unrestrained, dark femininity as a monstrous beast, female power is elevated to a status beyond the human.
Similar to Cat People, the 1980s remake lingers near the borders of conflict. Released near the end of the Cold War, this sequel, also titled Cat People, continues the gendered and racial othering of deviant, foreign women. Again, this panther-ego serves as a punishment for a deviance that is framed as genetically born, attached to a group imagined as inherently aberrant; she descends from the ancient Cat People, an “insestuous race” (Schrader, my emphasis). Here, deviance is not only linked to femininity, but to race relations—this deviance is emphasized as part of Irena’s race. And again, this race is figured as foreign. Played by a German actress, Nastassja Kinski, Irena learns of her heritage in a dream sequence where she travels from a modern train to a desert landscape that evokes Africa, or at least, somewhere far away from normative America. And as in its original, Irena is ultimately contained by the patriarchal authorities in the film, but this time her containment is quite literal—locked in a cage at the zoo and forced to remain a panther, Irena becomes a spectacle for the fascinated gaze of the normative men and women who may view her.
The Cat Woman as Costume: Sterilizing Female Sexuality
Batman’s Catwoman remains, in the tradition of the trope, highly sexualized and labeled deviant. The original Catwoman, Selina Kyle, is a criminal, who turns to burglarizing to get by, without a male figure to take care of her. She represents the increasing autonomy of the early twentieth-century woman and that autonomy is figured as criminal. Moreover, despite her independence, this cat woman of the 40s is simultaneously infantilized and sexualized. In her first appearance in Batman #1, Batman chastises her with the reproach, “Quiet or Papa spank.” Later, Catwoman uses her sexual wiles to convince Batman to run away with her and some stollen jewels. Catwoman’s independence is stigmatized and outside of social law.
Of the many actresses to play Catwoman, looking critically at the most iconic, Ertha Kitt and Michelle Pfifer, and the most recent, Halle Berry and Anne Hathaway, reveals similar anxieties about race and gender as the trope’s previous incarnations. One of the earliest performances of Catwoman, Ertha Kitt’s (1967), emerged during the civil rights movement. Despite the character’s original depiction as a socioeconomically disenfranchised woman who turns to crime to support herself, this 1967 depiction portrays Catwoman as purely evil, committing crime for the sake of being bad (she also has a cringe-worthy penchant for bad cat puns). The black actress’ deviance, it seems, is located in her genes, her body, her blood. Similarly, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman oozes evil—her crime stemming from her anger towards the patriarchy. She is the ultimate ‘angry, feminist bitch.’ My favorite line from the movie sums it up well: “life’s a bitch, now so am I” (Burton). Released in the 90s when intersectional feminist theory was challenging the male status-quo, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is a reaction to this flourishing feminist thought. Despite their iconic status, or because of it, these Catwomen invoke the anxieties of the dominant—perhaps they are lauded as the most iconic by mainstream culture because they represent the desire to repress the ‘angry, feminist bitch.’
The more recent on-screen Catwomen have taken a step forward, though not a giant one. While Ann Hathaway’s portrayal of Catwoman was hailed as “the best Catwoman yet” by Slate.com, I consider her to be one of the least feminist cinematic representations of Cat Woman. She is merely a sexual spectacle throughout the film. And while Alyssa Rosenberg of Slate may find the fact that Hataway’s Catwoman brings “joy to Bruce Wayne” as praiseworthy, to me, her power is taken off with her slutty costume, only to leave her to fulfill the stereotypical role of Batman’s romantic partner.
But while the tales of Cat People and The Bagheeta unconsciously bestow authority to the woman, Catwoman of the Batman comics does not offer her the supernatural powers that transcend the category of human. Instead, she merely wears a costume, almost mocking the archaic power the other texts unconsciously bestow. This lack of a supernatural ability to shift into other beings situates her sexual power in clothing. Catwoman’s sexual power and independence is merely a costume, which, when taken off, leave her to be assimilated back into the patriarchy.
There is one exception though. Admittedly, the 2004 film Catwoman, starring Halle Berry, is not the most cinematically impressive Batman inspired film. But I find Halle Berry’s Catwoman to be the most interesting of the litter. Indeed, Berry’s feline associations stem from a hypersexualization that makes an exhibition of her body. But despite this hyper erotic display, her sexuality becomes a source of power. The film ends with her, unlike Hathaway’s Catwoman, denying the male love interest and choosing an autonomous life of, in her words, “freedom” and “power.” And while Ertha Kitt’s blackness seems to connect to her criminal deviance, Berry celebrates hers. Like the other Catwomen, her ‘darkness’ is connected to her feline-self. But unlike Hathaway, Berry not does shed her cat-skin, she is proud of her ‘difference,’ even forming a positive female relationship from it, with the old cat-witch who teaches her about her powers.
These stories that label women’s bodies as supernatural name female power as monstrous in an attempt to regulate or tame it. However, the very positioning of women’s bodies as capable of transcending the bounds of the human, of course nods to women’s power even as it attempts to circumscribe it. Ironically, by depicting the deviant female as a cat woman, these regulatory texts collapse in on themselves, giving narrative space to the woman, a woman imagined as extraordinarily powerful and in need of extraordinary control. Such arguments subvert the prevalent images of natural female docility, chastity, or racial dominance they attempt to shore up—imagining the vast power of non-reproductive, selfish, and unrestrained female sexuality and independence as an always already possible trajectory of feminine possibility.
Bibliography
Batman Returns. Warner Bros. 1992. Dir. Tim Burton. Screenplay by Daniel Walters. Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVitto.
Cat People. RKO. Dir. Paul Schrader. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen, Alan Ormsby. Starring Natassaja Kinski, Malcom McDowell, John Heard, and Annette O’Toole.
Cat People. RKO. 1942. Dir. Jaques Tourneur. Screenplay by De Witt Bodeen. Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph and Tom Conway.
Catwoman. Warner Bros. 2004. Dir. Pitof. Screenplay by Bob Kane, Theresa Rebek. Starring Halle Berry.
Cat-women of the Moon. 1953. Z-M Productions. Dir. Arthur Hilton. Screenplay by Roy Hamilton. Starring Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, Marie Windsor.
Cixous, Helena. “The Laugh of Medusa.” The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007. 1643-1646. Print.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
The Dark Night Rises. Warner Bros. 2012. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway.
Flowers, Ronald B. Theoretical Explanation of Female Crime. Greenwood Press, 1987.
Kaplan, E. A. "'The Dark Continent of Film Noir': Race, Displacement and Metaphor in Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Welles' the Lady from Shanghai (1948)." Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. British Film Institute, 1998. 183-201. ProQuest. Web. 28 Sep. 2015.
Linda Rohrer. "The Transformation of Woman: The 'Curse' of the Cat Woman in Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, its Sequel, and Remake." Literature/Film Quarterly 25.4 (1997): 291-9.
Lewton, Val. “The Bagheeta.” Weird Tales. 16.1 (1930)
Waddell, Terrie. "The Female/Feline Morph: Myth, Media, Sex and the Bestial." Ed. Terrie Waddell. Rodopi, 2003. 75-96.
“Fantastical Powers”: Christian Patriarchy’s Link to the Powerful Cat Woman
In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy, as historian Teri Wadell explains, “cat fetishes were a common component of the insignia of female royalty” (82). Baset, the cat deity of motherhood, was one of the most popular “cat relics” (82). Baset came to also be associated with Isis and Diana, divinities who were widespread and influential across the Roman Empire. But, the patriarchal and monotheistic structure of Christianity was threatened by faiths led by multiple female figures, and so as Christianity gained strength, cults or divinities associated with females were eradicated or pushed underground. The church labeled female cat-divinities evil by “fabricat[ing]” stories of “sisterhoods” who worshiped these deities, claiming these sisterhoods “performed subversive practices [...] at the devils behest” (84). To maintain patriarchal Christianity, which “ensured that women were excluded from political/public life and confined to the domestic sphere,” women who did not follow these codes, or who remained linked to the cat deities, were marked as evil. These women were often labeled witches, associated with animal familiars or beasts, an association that generated the fear that their “fantastical powers” could “incapacitate man and his God-given domain over beasts” (85). Over time, the church established the witchery of women, and, as Wadell notes, “cats and women” became connected “with the extremes of sexual indulgence and perversion” (87). Today, the cat woman trope is a product of the powerful woman whom Christianity attempted/attempts to overthrow by demonizing her and her sexuality. It is also the product of the long history of labeling “deviant” women witches. In short, we can see how the roots of making the female into either an animal or monster, whether a cat or a witch, stems from early Christian misogyny, a misogyny that remains strong even as it becomes more secular in the current century.
Why Bad Girls Are Always Monsters; It’s in Their Blood
The nineteenth-century move toward “scientific” determination of feminine evil also plays a role in the demonization of women that connects to the cat woman trope. Victorian “scientists” posited a variety of theories to explain deviance; Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, with his 1894 text The Female Offender, attempted to define and determine the causes of women’s criminal or deviant behavior. Lombroso argues that female criminal tendencies are “biologically predisposed” and “postulates that female criminals possessed certain physical traits that were absent in other women” (92). By linking their monstrousness to their bodies, the texts explored in this article situate female deviance as a product of biology, of lineage. For Lombroso, women were naturally stupid, submissive, domestic, and moral, namely Angels in the House, the popular nineteenth-century term for the ideal Victorian wife—a woman that was expected to be, above all else, pious and passive. Because women were held to this unrealistically idealized femininity, when they did break the rules, they were that much worse. Why?—because they must not only be deviant in their behavior—but deviant in their natures, in their blood—the female criminal is, in this schema, fundamentally unnatural, “untrue to her very sex.” Thus, when a female commits a crime it is much scarier than when a male does so, because she is using power—power she is not supposed to have. Women are supposed to be docile and controlled. When they are not, they are labeled as exceedingly evil, as biologically deficient—or, as cat morphing monsters.
These harmful sociological/“scientific” expectations of femininity directly link to the early Christian demonization of cat women. Both propagate the myth of woman as passive and docile creatures and the counter myth of active female agency as inherently criminalized and monstrous. This uneasiness about women who act outside the regulatory structures of patriarchy continued into the Twentieth Century as more women gained economic, social, and political autonomy. With this rise in female power came anxieties about how to control it. It is in this time, the early Twentieth Century, that the most outlandish stories of cat women were created.
Pulp Fiction and the Twentieth Century’s “Re-Branding” of Ancient Christian Patriarchy
One of the earliest instances of the cat woman in popular culture is found in the pulp fiction story The Bagheeta, by Val Lewton. Its particular representation of the woman as cat has influenced some of the most well known examples of the trope. The story tells of a tribe who is haunted by a panther. This panther can turn into a beautiful, sultry, and deadly woman—what they call a Bagheeta. If this panther-woman entices a man’s kiss, that man will die. To save the tribe, it is up to one young male virgin to hunt down and kill the Bagheeta. In the Bagheeta is the symbol of the cat woman—a woman who is sexual and formidable. By representing this deviant woman as a murderous panther, female sexuality is made dangerous, and brutal, but also powerful. She is something patriarchy must eradicate.
What is most interesting about The Bagheeta is its ending. The reader discovers that the Bagheeta is actually a fictitious story created by certain men in the tribe. When the young male sent to kill the beast discovers this, he decides to comply and participate in the lie—he maintains that he did indeed kill a Bagheeta so that he will “appear brave and good in the eyes of the village” (Lewton). In other words, the men create a fiction of the sexual woman as a supernatural beast explicitly to elevate and maintain their own higher status, in the same way that early Christian leaders slandered women who lead religious groups. However, the young man explains, another reason for perpetuating this lie is that the woman he desires would never “give herself” to one who “betrayed her father’s the secret” (308). So, not only does the elevation of male status in the tribe motivate this myth, but male desire for female sexuality itself perpetuates it. While this story works to regulate and contain female sexuality, in the end it is the men who are controlled by it.
“So Little, So Soft”: Idealized Femininity and the Cat Woman in Cat People
Val Lewton, author of The Bagheeta, later directed the classic 1942 noir thriller Cat People, also a story concerning the fear of the “inherent evil” in the powerful, sexualized female. The film follows Irena, a Serbian immigrant, who also has the ability to turn into a murderous panther. She marries an American man, Oliver, and desperately tries to be the ideal woman. Her secret heritage serves as a good motivator: Irena’s Serbian village has “bowed down to Satan” and become “witches” who “in jealousy or anger or out of their own corrupt passions can change into great cats, like panthers. And if one of these women were to fall in love, [...] she would be driven by her own evil to kill him” (Tourneur). Just as Lombroso attempts to maintain male power by claiming the deviant woman is inherently evil, and as early Christians labeled woman as cat worshiping witches, Irena is made to conform to idealized femininity by the threat of turning into a monster.
While Irena is able to maintain this placidity for a while, her feline transformation exposes the contradiction of this ideal femininity that Oliver, and the patriarchy, seeks to enforce. Irena is expected to stay virginal and pure, to control her “own corrupt passions,” (i.e. she can’t think about sex), and if her “lover were to kiss her,” or “take her into his embrace,” (i.e. have sex) she becomes a murderer (Tourneur). Her repressed sexuality echoes the regulatory structures placed on women’s sexual lives in the early Twentieth Century. Those who did not comply, women who were (openly) sexual, were seen as deviant monsters, and according to Lombroso biologically defective.
Yet this model is inherently contradictory, for women were/are also expected to be mothers. Irena faces similar problems. While the threat of becoming a literal monster limits her sexuality, her marriage to her husband demands the opposite. Irena feels the paradoxical nature of her situation when Oliver first asks to “kiss her” (Tourneur). Oliver expects sexual fulfillment, yet also denies the powerful sexuality of her cat-beast alter ego. Irena feels the discrepant pressure of denying her sexuality while being expected to please her husband and mother his children. Ironically, although these limits are placed on Irena, she is blamed, essentially, for not being sexual enough and at the same time containing a powerful sexuality.
In the film, female sexuality is again depicted as something violent, beastly, uncontrollable. To maintain the patriarchal paradigm, control over the female, especially her sexuality, is necessary—it must be made small. Hence, after the psychologist learns of Irena’s cat curse, he concludes, “these things are very simple” (Tourneur). In an attempt to diminish the powerful (and dangerous in his male eyes) sexuality of the woman, the psychiatrist reduces this potential to something small and unimportant.
This tendency is echoed today when woman are constantly associated with words like kitten, kitty, or pussy, which suggest the small, weak, helpless, soft, and pleasurable. By associating women
with cats and kittens their powerful sexuality is diminished. But Irena does not turn into a cute, cuddly kitten. She becomes a dangerous panther. While the film attempts to demonize and diminish female sexuality, it contradicts itself by representing it in a vast and powerful way. Yes, Irena is evil. But she is also given a immense archaic energy, the ability to transcend the limits of the human, and holds power over the male characters in the film.
The influence of the early Christian association of women and cats is most potently seen when Irena explains, “[her] people bowed down to Satan, and said their masses to him. They had become witches and were evil” (Tourneur). And when Oliver drives Irena away with a cross-shaped ruler exclaiming, “In the name of God, leave us in peace,” Irena the panther obeys and disappears instantly. By linking Irena, the jealous sexualized woman, with the devil, the film participates in the long tradition established by early Christianity, which, to promote their patriarchal religious paradigm, labeled any women who threatened that order as witches who were sexually perverse. This link is quite fascinating, for as Waddell has told us, these early Christian officials “fabricated” accounts of devil worshiping sisterhoods. In other words, they made up stories. What was happening in early twentieth-century film and pulp fiction is in essence the same move. In order to maintain the patriarchal order, women who were gaining power must be demonized and made monstrous— stories must be told about her. And by linking them to the cat, these products of more modern culture participate in a practice of othering than connects back centuries.
But this othering takes on a more multifaceted role in this film, where race and nationality intersect with Irena’s gendered oppression. Not only does Irena the monstrous panther-morph represent anxieties surrounding female power, she represents hegemonic American prejudice toward the exotic, female foreigner. As E. Ann Kaplan has argued, film noir is where the “Western Imaginary superimpos[es] [...] connotations of savagery, cannibalism, immorality, and backwardness” onto the racial other (185). Released during World War II and close to the start of the Cold War, at a point of burgeoning tensions regarding race and nationality, the film depicts anxieties about the place of foreigners in America. But what is most fascinating about Irena’s character is the way, as Kpalan has argued, her black panther-body collapses the figures of “jews, blacks, and foreign women” (188). More specifically, for Kaplan, Irena represents “white culture’s fears of what might happen if gender and racial boundaries were not [...] kept in place” (186). So, not only must Oliver resolve Irena’s sexual deviance, he must reconcile her racial difference as well. Although an immigrant from Serbia, Oliver chooses to focus on the fact that Irena is now “here in America” and equates being American to being “normal” (Tourneur). For Oliver, to be normal means to be “in love” with a “good plain Americano.” The repetition of the phrase “you’re so normal” is Oliver’s attempt at justifying his lust for an exotic other. By insisting that she is a normal American, Oliver can feel validated at desiring someone that would not fit the mold of Angle in the House, who is traditionally white and does not possess a beast-like sexuality lurking within her (or at least, she does not let this sexuality show).
Oliver’s use of the cross to eradicate Irena not only connects back to ancient Christianity, but similarly links the film to the racial anxieties of the 1940s. By depicting Eastern Europe as a ‘backward’ place that “bowed down to Satan” the film reveals anxieties about a loss of “white,” Western hegemony, and attempts to re-assert power over these “lesser-than” cultures. This is especially evident in the contrast between Irena’s mystical powers and the rational, scientific hypnosis used by the western psychiatrist in the film. The sexualized exotic immigrant is associated with the archaic, while the American is associated with the Enlightenment.
Yet, I argue, Cat People undermines its own oppressive attempts. While the sexualized, demonized, racial other that is Irena is contained in the end, for both her and her panther double are killed, Irena kills the womanizing psychiatrist. The proxy for white, male authority and regulatory structures is destroyed by the panther identity of Irena, her sexually free (and dark) identity. And while the film revolves around the evilness of Irena, it still revolves around Irena, giving her narrative space, within which, the film exposes the vastly unrealistic expectations of ideal femininity, calling attention to patriarchy’s own oxymoronic nature. And finally, in attempting to represent unrestrained, dark femininity as a monstrous beast, female power is elevated to a status beyond the human.
Similar to Cat People, the 1980s remake lingers near the borders of conflict. Released near the end of the Cold War, this sequel, also titled Cat People, continues the gendered and racial othering of deviant, foreign women. Again, this panther-ego serves as a punishment for a deviance that is framed as genetically born, attached to a group imagined as inherently aberrant; she descends from the ancient Cat People, an “insestuous race” (Schrader, my emphasis). Here, deviance is not only linked to femininity, but to race relations—this deviance is emphasized as part of Irena’s race. And again, this race is figured as foreign. Played by a German actress, Nastassja Kinski, Irena learns of her heritage in a dream sequence where she travels from a modern train to a desert landscape that evokes Africa, or at least, somewhere far away from normative America. And as in its original, Irena is ultimately contained by the patriarchal authorities in the film, but this time her containment is quite literal—locked in a cage at the zoo and forced to remain a panther, Irena becomes a spectacle for the fascinated gaze of the normative men and women who may view her.
The Cat Woman as Costume: Sterilizing Female Sexuality
Batman’s Catwoman remains, in the tradition of the trope, highly sexualized and labeled deviant. The original Catwoman, Selina Kyle, is a criminal, who turns to burglarizing to get by, without a male figure to take care of her. She represents the increasing autonomy of the early twentieth-century woman and that autonomy is figured as criminal. Moreover, despite her independence, this cat woman of the 40s is simultaneously infantilized and sexualized. In her first appearance in Batman #1, Batman chastises her with the reproach, “Quiet or Papa spank.” Later, Catwoman uses her sexual wiles to convince Batman to run away with her and some stollen jewels. Catwoman’s independence is stigmatized and outside of social law.
Of the many actresses to play Catwoman, looking critically at the most iconic, Ertha Kitt and Michelle Pfifer, and the most recent, Halle Berry and Anne Hathaway, reveals similar anxieties about race and gender as the trope’s previous incarnations. One of the earliest performances of Catwoman, Ertha Kitt’s (1967), emerged during the civil rights movement. Despite the character’s original depiction as a socioeconomically disenfranchised woman who turns to crime to support herself, this 1967 depiction portrays Catwoman as purely evil, committing crime for the sake of being bad (she also has a cringe-worthy penchant for bad cat puns). The black actress’ deviance, it seems, is located in her genes, her body, her blood. Similarly, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman oozes evil—her crime stemming from her anger towards the patriarchy. She is the ultimate ‘angry, feminist bitch.’ My favorite line from the movie sums it up well: “life’s a bitch, now so am I” (Burton). Released in the 90s when intersectional feminist theory was challenging the male status-quo, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is a reaction to this flourishing feminist thought. Despite their iconic status, or because of it, these Catwomen invoke the anxieties of the dominant—perhaps they are lauded as the most iconic by mainstream culture because they represent the desire to repress the ‘angry, feminist bitch.’
The more recent on-screen Catwomen have taken a step forward, though not a giant one. While Ann Hathaway’s portrayal of Catwoman was hailed as “the best Catwoman yet” by Slate.com, I consider her to be one of the least feminist cinematic representations of Cat Woman. She is merely a sexual spectacle throughout the film. And while Alyssa Rosenberg of Slate may find the fact that Hataway’s Catwoman brings “joy to Bruce Wayne” as praiseworthy, to me, her power is taken off with her slutty costume, only to leave her to fulfill the stereotypical role of Batman’s romantic partner.
But while the tales of Cat People and The Bagheeta unconsciously bestow authority to the woman, Catwoman of the Batman comics does not offer her the supernatural powers that transcend the category of human. Instead, she merely wears a costume, almost mocking the archaic power the other texts unconsciously bestow. This lack of a supernatural ability to shift into other beings situates her sexual power in clothing. Catwoman’s sexual power and independence is merely a costume, which, when taken off, leave her to be assimilated back into the patriarchy.
There is one exception though. Admittedly, the 2004 film Catwoman, starring Halle Berry, is not the most cinematically impressive Batman inspired film. But I find Halle Berry’s Catwoman to be the most interesting of the litter. Indeed, Berry’s feline associations stem from a hypersexualization that makes an exhibition of her body. But despite this hyper erotic display, her sexuality becomes a source of power. The film ends with her, unlike Hathaway’s Catwoman, denying the male love interest and choosing an autonomous life of, in her words, “freedom” and “power.” And while Ertha Kitt’s blackness seems to connect to her criminal deviance, Berry celebrates hers. Like the other Catwomen, her ‘darkness’ is connected to her feline-self. But unlike Hathaway, Berry not does shed her cat-skin, she is proud of her ‘difference,’ even forming a positive female relationship from it, with the old cat-witch who teaches her about her powers.
These stories that label women’s bodies as supernatural name female power as monstrous in an attempt to regulate or tame it. However, the very positioning of women’s bodies as capable of transcending the bounds of the human, of course nods to women’s power even as it attempts to circumscribe it. Ironically, by depicting the deviant female as a cat woman, these regulatory texts collapse in on themselves, giving narrative space to the woman, a woman imagined as extraordinarily powerful and in need of extraordinary control. Such arguments subvert the prevalent images of natural female docility, chastity, or racial dominance they attempt to shore up—imagining the vast power of non-reproductive, selfish, and unrestrained female sexuality and independence as an always already possible trajectory of feminine possibility.
Bibliography
Batman Returns. Warner Bros. 1992. Dir. Tim Burton. Screenplay by Daniel Walters. Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVitto.
Cat People. RKO. Dir. Paul Schrader. Screenplay by DeWitt Bodeen, Alan Ormsby. Starring Natassaja Kinski, Malcom McDowell, John Heard, and Annette O’Toole.
Cat People. RKO. 1942. Dir. Jaques Tourneur. Screenplay by De Witt Bodeen. Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith, Jane Randolph and Tom Conway.
Catwoman. Warner Bros. 2004. Dir. Pitof. Screenplay by Bob Kane, Theresa Rebek. Starring Halle Berry.
Cat-women of the Moon. 1953. Z-M Productions. Dir. Arthur Hilton. Screenplay by Roy Hamilton. Starring Sonny Tufts, Victor Jory, Marie Windsor.
Cixous, Helena. “The Laugh of Medusa.” The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007. 1643-1646. Print.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
The Dark Night Rises. Warner Bros. 2012. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway.
Flowers, Ronald B. Theoretical Explanation of Female Crime. Greenwood Press, 1987.
Kaplan, E. A. "'The Dark Continent of Film Noir': Race, Displacement and Metaphor in Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Welles' the Lady from Shanghai (1948)." Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. British Film Institute, 1998. 183-201. ProQuest. Web. 28 Sep. 2015.
Linda Rohrer. "The Transformation of Woman: The 'Curse' of the Cat Woman in Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur's Cat People, its Sequel, and Remake." Literature/Film Quarterly 25.4 (1997): 291-9.
Lewton, Val. “The Bagheeta.” Weird Tales. 16.1 (1930)
Waddell, Terrie. "The Female/Feline Morph: Myth, Media, Sex and the Bestial." Ed. Terrie Waddell. Rodopi, 2003. 75-96.
Working notes
I have always been fascinated by the way women and cats seem to be automatically associated in our culture. I often work with elementary students at my job, and one young student of mine actually thought that cats were exclusively female, and dogs male. This really sparked my interest in the topic. I was in graduate school working towards my Master’s in English literature at the time, and the connection between women with cats seemed to be popping up in much of the literature I was reading. I decided to take on this project, and what I learned eventually turned into this essay. While I assumed that the link between women and cats certainly had some sort of symbolic relationship to patriarchy or misogyny, what is radical about what I discovered is how very tangible the oppression that sparked this trope is: this relation stems from the political strategies of ancient Christian patriarchs. I think this emphasizes how important it is to pay attention, not only to the way women are represented in film and literature, but to the subtle stereotypes that form our social consciousness—often they stem from from real life politics. This goes both ways too—it is important to realize that political and social structures are not necessarily ephemeral; they become embedded and perpetuated in our popular culture. The more I understand about the history of female oppression, the more I can actively choose to resist it. I won’t condemn any woman who dresses as a sexy cat for Halloween; after all, I argue that the cat can be used as a symbol for female empowerment. But I do think it is important that we understand the social and political underpinnings of the choices we make.
About the author
Kimberly Honda holds an M.A. in English Literature. A teacher and feminist writer, she is deeply interested in the study of American women writers, animal studies, and popular culture; she finds joy in exploring parallel worlds through science fictions and fantasy narratives, and discovering what these stories reveal about our own society and our selves. Based in San Francisco, Kimberly teaches literacy.