Puss-in-Boots

The story

In the northern Italian town of Bergamo, a swaggering ginger tomcat named Figaro, who wears boots and grooms himself with fastidious pride, serves a penniless young ex-soldier, running a street busking-and-begging racket by day and helping his master thieve and seduce his way through life. The young man falls in lust at first sight with a beautiful young wife who is kept locked away at the top of the house, jealously guarded by her rich, miserly and impotent old husband, Signor Panteleone, and watched over by a hag of a duenna who lets her out only, under escort, to hear Mass. Figaro strikes up a romance with the household Tabby who lives on the miser’s side of the wall, and between them the two cats plot the young man’s way in: first he is smuggled in disguised as a rat-catcher, the cats having conveniently supplied the infestation, and later, when the old man is away, as a physician summoned to the supposedly ailing wife.

The lovers meet, and what began as frank lust ripens, to the cat’s faint disgust, into real tenderness. The old husband is removed by pure slapstick: he breaks his neck tumbling down his own stairs after tripping over the cat underfoot, and the young couple, so eager they cannot wait to move the corpse, tumble to it on the carpet beside the still-warm body. United at last and inheriting the miser’s fortune, they are free now to love without hiding, while Figaro and the Tabby settle into their own feline romance and a litter of kittens. The tone throughout is broad, knowing and comic, all rhetorical questions and bawdy asides, closer to pantomime than to the Gothic dread of the stories on either side of it.

A closer look

Reworking Perrault: comedy as method

Carter takes Perrault’s ‘Puss-in-Boots’ as her starting point but, as Marina Warner notes, splices and spices it with opera, pantomime and the stock types of the Italian commedia dell’arte to make something far more exuberant than its source. Helen Simpson traces its debts further, to the fin-de-siecle worldliness of Colette. The result is what Chris Power calls, verifiably, ‘a screwball sex comedy’, and Carter herself described it as the first story she wrote that was meant to be ‘out-and-out funny’. This matters for the collection as a whole. The comic register is not a holiday from Carter’s argument but a different way of making it: Mary Kaiser reads the tale as one that demythologises sex through humour, taking the menace out of desire by refusing to treat it as sacred or fatal. Where the Marquis turned sex into martyrdom, Puss turns it into a good time.

The cat-narrator and the pull of his voice

Everything reaches us through the cat, and the choice of narrator is doing careful work. He is a ribald raconteur, a master of innuendo who proceeds by rhetorical questions and comic exclamation, forever pausing to preen and to boast of his own dandyish looks and acrobatic prowess, so that his relish for his own cleverness is half the comedy. His very name, Figaro (Puss-in-Boots), lifts him from opera and Beaumarchais, the scheming servant who runs the plot from below stairs. He is unreliable and cheerfully cynical, and he is emphatically male, animal and self-interested. Yet this is the narrator who engineers a woman’s escape from a loveless marriage, aided by his practical counterpart the Tabby, and Carter lets us enjoy his roguery while quietly noticing that the whole intrigue is conducted, and narrated, for male pleasure. Part of the story’s interest is that its liberating plot arrives inside a thoroughly laddish voice.

A comic bloody chamber

For all its lightness, the story shares the collection’s recurring situation: like the brides of the earlier tales, the young wife is an innocent shut up in a rich man’s house, her sexuality the property of a jealous older man. Her bedroom becomes, in effect, another bloody chamber, a room where a woman is kept for a man’s use. The difference is that here the trap is comic and, crucially, escapable: the old miser Signor Panteleone (Puss-in-Boots), whose name marks him at once as the doddering Pantalone of the commedia, is dispatched by slapstick rather than vengeance, and the wife emerges into pleasure and money rather than into widowed grief. The lovers end up ‘at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet’ (Puss-in-Boots), sex rendered as healthy farce. Whether the tale fully critiques the misogyny of its own genre, or simply enjoys it from the inside, is a real question: Carter frees the woman, but she does so through a narrator who sees women mainly as sport.

Key quotations

As a comic outlier narrated in Carter’s densest slang, and with the text in copyright, this guide quotes ‘Puss-in-Boots’ sparingly and works chiefly by paraphrase.

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘hammer and tongs, down on the carpet’ (Puss-in-Boots)	Colloquial idiom, bawdy register	Sex is staged as vigorous, comic and physical rather than sacrificial; the crude idiom is the whole point, deflating the dread that surrounds desire elsewhere in the book.
‘Figaro’ (Puss-in-Boots)	Intertextual naming	The cat is named for the scheming servant of opera and Beaumarchais, signalling the story’s debt to comedy and pantomime and casting the narrator as a below-stairs plotter.
‘Signor Panteleone’ (Puss-in-Boots)	Commedia dell’arte stock type	The miserly old husband is named after Pantalone, the commedia’s greedy dotard, marking him as a comic obstacle to be outwitted rather than a Gothic threat to be feared.