Reading comprehension fail
In a listserv discussion of the trope of spinster as crazy cat lady:
Someone cites Kipling's 'The Cat Who Walked By Himself' from The Just-So Stories as an exemplar.
(They also consider this carefully crafted piece of narration 'accidentally hilarious'.)
Characterising the Woman as a spinster.
Er: did they not notice that one of the ways Cat beguiles Woman is by soothing the fractious baby? Woman may not be married as such, but she is certainly cohabiting in the cave with Man.
This goes rather further than the just 'not reading the question asked' thing that I have surely previously moaned about, a recent example of which was, in response to a request for recent historiography on early modern witchcraft, a recommendation of Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon. I yield to no-one in my admiration for that work, but it is very specifically about the rise of modern paganism since the late C19th and goes the distance in arguing against the idea that there were long-standing folk traditions and practices at the root of this.
I'm not sure I would attribute this entirely to the pernicious influence of Teh Internetz, having been irked, many years ago, by some distinguished literary scholar who made an absolutely balls-up of explaining what Hardy meant, in the preface to Jude the Obscure, when he wrote of
the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who do not recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises.
'Licensed to be loved on the premises' (an expression Sue uses in the text to refer to marriage and her revulsion from it) means having one's marriage lines; and the argument is that these 'intellectualized, emancipated' creatures do not see the value of boasting oneself a superior person because one has them. This he got entirely wrong-end on.
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