Cat and Mouse as Partners

This beast fable is not one I’d encountered before. A cat and mouse decide to keep house together and they purchase a pot of lard to keep for the winter. To secure it from thieves they stow it under the altar of the church. Soon the cat begins to hanker after the lard and, telling the mouse that she must attend a christening as a godmother, she creeps away three times and eats some of the lard until it is all finished up. Each time, on her return, she tells the mouse about her godchildren and gives their names: Skinoff, Halfgone and Allgone. The mouse’s suspicions are increasingly roused by these odd names but, as the cat says, ‘It’s no worse than “Crumb-thief”, as your godchildren are called’, and she makes no connexion with the pot of lard. Come winter, cat and mouse run short of food they can forage and the mouse suggests they fetch the pot of lard.

‘Oh,’ said the mouse, ‘now I see what’s happened; now it’s coming to light; you’re a real true friend. You ate it all up while you were godmother; first the skin off, then half gone, then ...’ ‘You’d better be quiet,’ cried the cat. ‘One word more and I’ll eat you up.’ ‘All gone’ was already on the tip of the poor mouse’s tongue. It was scarcely out of her mouth when the cat leapt at her, seized her, and gobbled her up. There, you see, that’s the way of the world.

My friend and trusty guide Joyce Crick tells me that this was one of the very first tales which Wilhelm noted down, in 1808, and that he received it from his neighbour, Gretchen Wild. She adds:

He overhauled it completely for the third edition of 1837, transforming a laconic anecdote into a short story conveyed by means of dialogue with full characterization of the figures and their relationship. The presence of an oral story-teller is cunningly suggested by the worldly moral uttered in the very last line – but that was not added until the fourth edition of 1840.

In 1856 Wilhelm published a revised edition of notes which included one to this tale pointing to similar stories in other countries – Lower Pomerania, Norway and ‘Africa’. Thus the literary history of ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’ shows in microcosm how unafraid the Grimms were to improve their original material in a way that would horrify oral historians now (and I don’t use quote marks around ‘improve’ because I think these changes do make the story more interesting and effective, sorry oral historians of the world); it also ends, as shown in that note, with interest in folklore expanding to become international.

Wandering right off the point here, I found in Joyce’s introduction the answer to something which had been puzzling me about the Grimms’ compilation of tales. I couldn’t understand how they could have been so certain that the stories they collected were echt German and did not originate elsewhere; equally I found the enthusiasm for shaping the stories into more literary artefacts at odds with their presentation as tales told to the brothers by old German peasant women. Joyce, however, tells us that the brothers were well aware that the folk-tales existed in other traditions, and that their original aim was to recover motifs – not only from folk-tales, but also from old printed romances, folk-songs, even jurisprudence – which recurred through the centuries: these enduring motifs would show something about the German people, I suppose what they held important, an element of their spirit. As it was the motifs which primarily interested the brothers, tweaking or shaping the tales which were their vehicles (which after all is probably no more than any oral storyteller would do) presumably did not in their eyes distort their value.

(James Lloyd, Cat and Mouse, 1967, watercolour on board; Tate Gallery but not on display; I particularly like the expression in the cat’s eyes, which does not bode well for the mouse)

But back to ‘Cat and Mouse as Partners’. The brazen lies of the cat are actually very funny. When the mouse doubts that anyone has ever really been christened ‘Halfgone’, the cat retaliates with my favourite remark in the whole story (added by Wilhelm, I assume): ‘You sit there at home in your dark-grey dressing-gown and long pigtail [...] and you get odd ideas. That’s what happens when you don’t go out in the daytime.’ Such a brilliant characterisation in one sentence! The final moral, ‘that’s the way of the world’, though – what exactly does that mean? That we should beware people like the cat, or that we should accept our lot in life as cat or mouse if that’s what we are? The mouse’s mistake is not that she dutifully does the housework and abides by her word, it is to fail to accept that she is a mouse. She believes that she can be the cat’s equal. Is the way of the world that we can never be equals? Or that we lack the self-knowledge to understand that we are mice?

And then there seem to be other questions... The pot of lard is hidden at the altar and consumed there by the cat who then devours the mouse in the same spot, where holy communion is received. The names the cat gives her godchildren – Skinoff, Halfgone, Allgone – these are the states through which the pot of lard passes but also the poor mouse at the end. Pot of lard and mouse are doubly conflated; the host implicitly linked. Is this a joke or something more significant? Will the mouse be rewarded in heaven? (I like to think so!) And then it seems that the cat has sinister intentions from the start: she instigates the joint ménage and fibs ‘and spun [the mouse] a tale of the love and friendship she bore her’ as if she is planning to eat her at some point anyway. Yet she gives the mouse a chance to save herself and it is the mouse who pronounces her own doom. Would the cat have spared her if she hadn’t uttered ‘Allgone’? Or did she know that the mouse would be impelled to speak; did she know the mouse better than the mouse knew herself?

Next week: ‘Our Lady’s Child’.

(‘Cat and Mouse’, alas, uncredited. I found this photograph on the internet quite by chance; I used to have a print of it stuck on my wall when I was a teenager. It still makes me laugh like a drain)

Comments

[Desperate Reader]

Makes me wonder, is this where the idea/image of fat cats came from?

[Helen]

Heh, could be? Or have you ever come across the Danish folk-tale of the Fat Cat? We had a picture book, by Jack Kent, of the story which I enjoyed very much as a child. The Fat Cat starts by scoffing his mistress's gruel, then devours her and everyone who crosses his path. I think a woodcutter chops him open, everyone jumps out and they sew him back up again. Good wholesome fun.

[bibliolathas]

Such an interesting post. I love that mouse in the air picture too - had a postcard of it on my desk for ages!

[Helen]

Thank you bibliolathas (sorry, not sure what to call you!), that is kind.

It's a great picture, isn't it? Impossible to have a bad day with that on your desk...

[litlove]

Another brilliant post - you are so good at these, Helen! And oh how I love that picture. I think I need to look at that every day. But also so many interesting questions that the tale raises about what the moral of the story could be. I was also fascinated to hear of the recurring 'motifs' as they go on to structure the novella at the end of the 19th century, which for a while was a hugely popular genre. But in the novella, the motif is used like a symptom in psychoanalysis, an overdetermined element that crops up again and again as the hitch in the tale where the trouble/meaning is buried.

[Catie]

Hi! I have just found your blog, but just wanted to say that this sounds like a fantastic project and great inspiration to read some more Grimm along with your posts.

[Bellezza]

You've brought so much into what I considered simply a tale. I think it's so true that the stories portray a motif, perhaps as some would say the Old Testament stories of the Bible do. The truth is in their meaning, not each literal word. Also, how interesting that the lard is laid at an altar of sorts; by drawing in the place where holy communion is served there must be an implication in there somewhere. Now, where it lies, in reward or cleansing, I'm not certain...

[Helen]

Hello to you all, I am so sorry for not replying earlier. I've just started following my teacher-training course - it's all in Dutch and after four days I think my head is going to explode! It's the strangest experience because I can only grasp what's happening in very broad terms, it's like being in a glass bottle or something. Enormously stressful but probably amazingly good for my character...

litlove, I came back and looked at that picture on Wednesday evening after delivering possibly the worst English lesson ever given in the history of humanity, and it made me laugh. I REALLY wish I knew who had taken it! I am fascinated by what you write about the development of the novella. I'd love it if you wrote more about it, perhaps a post hint hint... And then of course the fairy tales themselves go on to be used as motifs and even plot structures in later novels; it's all very rich.

Catie, thank you for your lovely comment and welcome! It would be great if you joined in! I've visited your blog very briefly but enjoyed it very much and will comment soon.

Thank you Bellezza, and you know I think that a comparison with the Old Testament stories is an excellent one. The stories have that same feel of being utterly stripped down to the narrative and thus able to offer so much in terms of interpretation. And the being stripped down can add mystery too. I'm still stuck about the altar, which is described as a church altar. But perhaps there's some sort of echo there of an altar to the lares (or penares? My Latin was always pants), the household gods. The cat's eating of the lard underlines her abuse of the household she's set up with the mouse? But it's very tenuous.

[claire]

Hi Helen! Thanks for dropping by my blog. This is my first time visiting here and am ecstatic over how wonderful your blog is! I'm already a fan. I'll be back and take the time to read everything! :D

[Helen]

Dear Claire, oh thank you, what a lovely thing to write! I am so glad we've found each other!

[Stefanie]

What an interesting tale I had never heard before! And you ask such good questions about how we are supposed to interpret the "moral." It's very ambiguous. I love the last photo! Oh that made me laugh :)

[Helen]

Thanks Stefanie! It is an interesting tale - but all of them have been so far. I'm getting a lot more out of them than I expected to.