The Cat’s Meow
Why was “Cat Person” so popular? Because it was good.
Why did “Cat Person,” Kristen Roupenian’s now-infamous short story in The New Yorker, go viral? It’s a question vexing not only literature nerds but also the broader public that the story reached.
Several have suggested that the story went viral because it speaks to our current political moment.
Emily Temple writes for Lithub.com, “I wonder if this story would be getting the same kind of attention if it had been published even six months ago. More importantly, I have a sinking feeling that part of the reason it has gone so viral is that some people don’t exactly realize that it’s a short story.”
I share Temple’s apprehension at the possibility that the story has been so widely read solely because of our current political moment—in the aforementioned categories of literature nerd and broader public, I fall squarely into the former — particularly given the amount of articles lauding it as an extension of or corollary to the #MeToo movement.
To say that “Cat Person” is a story about sexual assault and harassment misses the point: although the specter of gendered violence haunts the story (the protagonist, Margot, worries about being murdered multiple times throughout), the kind of misogyny it explores does not result in violence. Rather, the story illustrates the fear of violence that underpins, for women, even consensual encounters.
But that’s not all “Cat Person” does. It is also a story about power, and the different vectors of power among individuals. Robert may wield the power granted to him by society as a white man, but Margot wields, at times, a certain power over him as an attractive, young woman — even as the story reveals how illusory that power can be.
Margaret Atwood famously said that “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But our fears do not always become reality. In this story, Robert is pathetic, even impotent, and not so much murderous as piteous. He spews a flurry of increasingly venomous texts to Margot at the story’s conclusion because all he has left are his words, and even those have proved inadequate.
In that vein, “Cat Person” is also a story about two people and their failure to communicate. It’s about the latent expectations we bring to our relations with other people, and about the ways in which others may fail to meet, surpass or complicate them — and the ways in which we might conform to the expectations that we believe others have for us without even realizing it.
It’s important to remember that Margot is young, that she is still learning how to exist in a world in which a woman may be murdered on a first date as easily as she might fall in love — a world in which women are expected to be compliant and submissive while also being placed on a pedestal. Men like Robert need women like Margot to be virgins who fuck like porn stars.
And she is learning to calibrate her own behavior to conform to the often-paradoxical expectations that men have for her, from flirting with her customers to get extra tips to dreaming up witty banter to keep Robert interested even as her feelings for him are lukewarm at best.
Margot, however, is not always as agreeable as she’s expected to be. She allows her roommate to cut things off in a brusque way with Robert and offers no apology. She thinks unkind things about him and his body and age.
In this story, men can be powerless, and women can act cruelly and callously, even as those roles prove unstable, reversible at any moment.
In other words, this is a story that is true to life, and perhaps that is why it resonated with so many people.
Perhaps this is also why those who critiqued the story remarked that both characters are unlikable — because in life people often are.
But fiction does not require that its characters be likable for it to be good, nor does it require a timely political message or, really, any clear message at all.
“Cat Person” is a story in which people are human and vulnerable and downright shitty to one another — and that’s why it’s a success.
Molly Roberts writes in The Washington Post, “Whether ‘Cat Person’ is ‘good’ has been a puzzlingly popular topic of debate. What matters is that it meant a lot to a lot of people.”
But isn’t that precisely what makes fiction good — that it can take the specific and speak to the universal? And what’s so puzzling about debating the merits of a work of fiction? Whole careers have been built on this very exercise.
Further, why must women’s writing, particularly their fiction, always have to mean something, when men’s writing is seldom forced to do the same?
It is this impulse to ascribe a fixed, and often personal, message to women’s art that led the story to be misread as autobiography despite the third-person narration.
That this work of fiction has been read as something else illustrates the cavalier and reductive quality of the readings we concoct for women’s art. It also ties into the cultural obsession with understanding what women mean, this categorization of the feminine as mysterious and even deceptive.
Certainly fiction does not exist in a vacuum. The cultural context is important here, and it imbues the story with meaning — people understand why Margot fears being murdered, why Robert’s treatment of her in bed can be read as degrading or at least misinformed, why his final text to her is so devastating yet so devastatingly predictable.
But to suggest that this story’s power lies in its cultural relevance is to undermine the skill of the author and the merits of the story itself. And simply because so many have suggested as much — and perhaps this is the secret to the story’s virality, at least in part — does not mean that it cannot also be good.
Ultimately, whether “Cat Person” is good is not a conversation about #MeToo, or about the morality and likability of its characters, rather it is an erudite and, perhaps, boring conversation about what makes fiction good at all.
A good work of fiction can absolutely comment on cultural dynamics, but it — along with its characters and conflicts — should also be able to stand on its own. “Cat Person,” in its accessible and unflinching view of two flawed people trying (and failing) to connect, does just this.
