Dec 17 2008
Fisking Puss in Boots
Did you realise that the old oral tradition of ‘Puss in Boots’ normally featured a female cat? When I discovered that it did rather make me look at the story in a new (a.k.a. more cynical) light. Suddenly a pantomime fable started to feel more like furry femdom with a tragic ending–and that suggests that despite my best efforts I have one hell of a gendered outlook on characters. So here is some feline fisking, to illustrate that point….
The version below is the synopsis as per Wikipedia but I have cast (caste?) Puss as female.
The division of property after a miller’s death leaves his youngest son with nothing but the granary cat. Disappointed, the son contemplates eating the animal, but the cat bargains with him, promising him riches in return for a bag and a pair of boots. Though dubious, the miller’s son goes along with her and provides the items.
So if you want to be saved by a pussy, um, cat you need to let her wear the boots in the family.
Puss-in-Boots takes the bag and catches a succession of items of game - rabbits, partridges, etc. - which she takes to the palace and presents to the king as presents from his master, the “Marquis de Carabas”. Eventually the cat learns that the king and his beautiful daughter will be travelling by the river road. Puss-in-Boots tells the miller’s son (who is ignorant of all this) to go and bathe in the river at the time that the royal party is due to pass. The boy does so, and as he bathes the cat steals his clothes, and runs to the road calling for help for his master, the Marquis de Carabas, who is drowning. The boy is “rescued” from the river, and his lack of clothes is explained as the work of robbers. He is therefore wrapped in rich robes and driven off in the king’s coach.
You also need to be willing to get naked upon command and without even requiring an explanation.
The cat speeds ahead of the king’s party to the lands of a powerful ogre. She threatens the people working in its fields that they will be chopped to bits if they don’t say that the fields belong to the Marquis of Carabas. As the king’s coach reaches the ogre’s lands, the king asks after the ownership of the fields, and is told that they belong to the Marquis de Carabas. Puss-in-Boots goes ahead of the party, and confronts the ogre. She flatters the ogre on his magical shape-changing abilities and challenges him to turn into a mouse. The moment the ogre does so, Puss-in-Boots eats him, thus claiming the palace and lands in her master’s name.
And if a girl has to threaten the proles, steal, lie, murder and eat sentient beings to get ahead–well, the ends justify the means.
Upon reaching the ogre’s palace, the royal party is welcomed by Puss-in-Boots in his master’s name. The king marries the princess to the miller’s son.
Although after making your boy rich, famous and influential, the odds are he is going to marry some pretty girl even with more money and influence–even though she is completely without wit or willpower and just does everything her ‘Daddy’ tells her.
The moral of the story? Um, I don’t even know any more. Never eat pussy of you want to wed ahead? A cat can look at a king, and create prince? Master a kitty and marry the pretty? Oh, I give up.
* Picture excerpted from an illustration by an uncredited illustrator in a version printed by McCall Publishing in 1969.
