From Streetsmart to Stranded: Stray Encounters with the Modernist Cat

Abstract: Modernist literature shows an increasing fascination with the figure of the cat rather than the dog who dominated nineteenth-century Anglophone writing. Moreover, while the Victorian stray dog was a foil for the domestic, national, canine subject, the stray cat seems to be a self-contained and even appropriate identity in twentieth-century modernity. In this article, I study the stray cat in the urban and cosmopolitan settings of T. S. Eliot, Jean Rhys, and Richard Wright. I posit the stray animal as a unique figure of aptitude and vulnerability, belonging and unbelonging. I argue that strays represent the problem of urban life from two angles: as streetsmart beings, they are either contiguous with urban life in a way that humans can only admire or loathe; alternately, their inability to find home in the city reflects human beings’ own alienation and vulnerability in urban space. While modernist authors do find it convenient to project their ambivalence about the modern city onto the stray, the material fact of animal-human coexistence forges affective relationships between urban residents/travelers and the stray animal. The modernist stray’s ability to generate a haunting, yet ultimately ineffectual empathy is a unique force in the terrain of animal-oriented ethics. The figure of the stray cat in modernism is worth studying, not only because it exposes the limitations of empathy born out of isolation but because its unsentimental affect remains a powerful literary production.