Reshaping the Beastly Spirit in Women: Feline Imagery in de Souza and Rich
Throughout history, women have repeatedly been likened to felines, whether to humiliate them, to mark them as outsiders, or, more recently, to arm them with a language of resistance. Eunice de Souza’s “Advice to Women” reclaims this association by urging women to build an independent identity, opening with the terse instruction to “Keep cats” (de Souza 1). Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” approaches the same imagery from the opposite direction, using the fierce, free tigers Aunt Jennifer embroiders to expose how marriage has stripped her of her own identity and autonomy. Read together, the two poems challenge the norms that have long linked women to feline creatures, showing how a single image can be turned from a tool of stereotype and alienation into one of feminist resistance.
The association between women and cats as objects of scorn dates back to the medieval period, when “the idea of cats as demonic, minions of Satan, fuel[ed] centuries of association between cats, witches, and single women” (Tzudir 305). This inheritance suppressed women’s self-expression and cast their independence as suspect. Over time, however, the same stereotype was reclaimed by feminists, who read the cat not as a mark of deviance but as a symbol of the unconventional woman who refuses to bend to traditional expectations. De Souza draws on this reclaimed symbolism, suggesting that women have something to learn from cats: namely, that subordination to others is itself a threat to selfhood.
The anxiety de Souza voices about married women losing themselves finds its clearest expression in Rich’s poem. Rich writes that “the massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand” (7–8), a line that captures how a woman as vital and untamed as a tigress can still be worn down by the institution of marriage until her identity and interests dissolve into it. The figure of the “cat lady,” meanwhile, carries a similar double edge: it functions simultaneously as an insult and as a badge of resistance, casting spinsters and independent women alike as outcasts from an otherwise orderly society.
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Linking women to cats and tigers to signal authority and self-possession might seem, on its surface, like a compliment. Yet the moment that same feline imagery is set against the institution of marriage, as it is in Rich’s poem, it exposes something less flattering: a society uncomfortable with independent women and inclined to treat their independence as a problem to be resolved. Both poems set out to illuminate the constraints society places on women, but in doing so they also risk reinforcing the very trope they critique, letting the “cat lady” stand in for unconventionality rather than dismantling the label altogether. In the end, both the humiliation and the resistance built around this imagery share a common flaw: they measure a woman’s existence against her resemblance to a feline rather than against her humanity, asking audiences to understand her life through an old and persistent metaphor instead of on its own terms.
Works Cited
de Souza, Eunice. “Advice to Women.” Fix: Poems, Newground, 1979.
Rich, Adrienne. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” A Change of World, Yale University Press, 1951.
Tzudir, Sentila. “Deconstructing the Crazy Cat Lady: A Reimagining in Eunice de Souza’s Advice to Women.” International Journal of Novel Research and Development, vol. 9, no. 12, Dec. 2024, p
