Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

3 Animals and the Mark of the Human

3 Animals and the Mark of the Human Let me open this next part of my case by risking a generalization: over the years and in different locations cats have had to endure various signi¤cations foisted on them by humans. More to the point, cats in the eighteenth century often had a speci¤c totemic function: they were the animal analogue of the moral monster. If it has recently been claimed that dogs may help make us human, then there was once a fear (not entirely vanquished) that cats might make us inhuman.1 Although cat-fancy was to grow during the period, cats on the whole stood for wanton cruelty and unmitigated carnivorousness.2 Their totemic function even interfered with supposedly objective descriptions of the felines. In his History of the Earth, Oliver Goldsmith, closely following the French naturalist Buffon, describes cats as “a bloody and unrelenting tribe, that disdain to [man’s] own power, and carry on unceasing hostilities against him.”3 Unlike all other animals, cats represent the asocial—even the antisocial—unless sex impels them together: They lead a solitary ravenous life, neither uniting for their mutual defense , like vegetable feeders, nor for their mutual support, like those of the dog kind. The whole of this cruel and ferocious tribe seek their food alone; and, except at certain seasons, are even enemies to each other. The dog, the wolf, and the bear, are sometimes known to live upon vegetable or farinaceous food; but all of the cat kind, such as the lion, the tiger, the leopard, and the ounce, devour nothing but ®esh, and starve upon other provision. (3.198) Not simply inimical to human interests, cats are the specter of society’s dissolution. As opposed to Rousseau’s gentle and solitary savages, cats are vicious monads: “They are, in general, ¤erce, rapacious, subtle, and cruel, un¤t for society among each other, and incapable of adding to human happiness ” (3.198–199). Reluctantly and with many quali¤cations, Goldsmith mentions the role of the so-called domesticated cat as mouser. Yet worst of all, cats, like little humans, appear to enjoy cruelty. Unlike that of humans, their enjoyment is real: “young kittens are very playful and amusing; but their sport soon turns into malice, and they, from the beginning shew a disposition to cruelty” (3.204). Goldsmith adds, “Of all the marks by which the cat discovers its natural malignity, that of playing and sporting with its captive, before killing it outright, is the most ®agrant” (3.205). Because the semiotic existence of cats straddles scienti¤c observation and symbolic representation, perhaps “myth” (in the sense put forward by Roland Barthes) is a more apt term than “totem”: nature serves as a ground and a cover for the historically contingent and ideological.4 In the eighteenth century, this double status actually tends to excuse cats at the same moment they are demonized. The fact that cats are malice incarnate is no reason that we should take on their traits by torturing them. After all, their malice is not unnatural—ours would be. Cats feature prominently in the ¤rst engraving of Hogarth’s series “The Four Stages of Cruelty” from 1751 (¤gures 3.1–3.4). Sadly, in these depictions of monstrous behavior, felines do not bene¤t from the inference that compassionate humanity ought to commiserate even the naturally malicious. I will be calling on a wide array of other sources to show how inhumanity—the appearance of something that should be impossible— was rendered productive in the ¤ght against cruelty to animals in England . Hogarth’s images nonetheless will be a constant point of reference in the following pages. The story told in the series appears almost banal in its clarity: a poor boy, Tom Nero, begins by torturing animals, eventually moves on to killing a human, and ends up an unwilling participant in an anatomy lesson at the Royal College of Physicians.5 As if this narrative were not already easy enough to read, a visual prolepsis inscribes Tom’s destiny in the ¤rst engraving: a boy has drawn a stick ¤gure of the protagonist as a hanged man and turns his index ¤nger toward the future corpse. From the beginning, the reader of the engravings knows where the Curiosity Killed the Cat 38 narrative is going and what message it proffers: cruelty to animals, which is to be shunned...