Elisabeth Crocker

Department of English
University of Virginia
libby@virginia.edu

 

(IMAGE)

 

Like the landscape of Coconino County where he lives, the character Krazy Kat’s gender and race shift, sometimes at random, but more often as a result of his social situation. George Herriman couched his assertions about the socially constructed nature of categories like race and gender, in addition to categories like class, ethnicity, age, and occupation, so deeply in the sophisticated allegory of his comic strip, however, that few readers recognized them. Those who have written on Krazy Kat in the past have confined their comments to Herriman’s drawing style and literary allusions, and to the more poignant but less puzzling aspects of the love relationship between Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse.

 

The situation of the characters remains unchanged over the course of the strip’s run from 1913 to 1944: Ignatz Mouse hates Krazy Kat with a violent obsession that causes him to throw bricks at Krazy’s head; Krazy loves Ignatz with a singleminded passion that causes him to interpret the projectiles as signs of Ignatz’ love; Offissa Bull Pupp loves Krazy Kat and hates Ignatz Mouse, and uses his lawful authority–as well as his billy club–to protect Krazy from the bricks. Ignatz detests the “Kop,” and Krazy does not return Bull Pupp’s affection, but he does not resent the intervention in his relationship with Ignatz. Krazy seems to understand that others cannot see the brick as a token of affection, and he ignores even Ignatz’ own protestations to the contrary, always utterly confident in his perception of the brick as a signifier of love.

 

The love-triangle plot has allowed critics to dismiss the problem of Krazy’s largely indeterminate gender. In the introduction to a Krazy Kat collection assembled shortly after Herriman’s death, e. e. cummings enumerated a number of tropes for Krazy to figure, including free will, democracy, and romance heroine (vii). Because Krazy is so often caught between the hero Bull Pupp and the villain Ignatz Mouse, and is fairly passive as the object of the Pupp’s love and as the object of the Mouse’s hatred, cummings gendered the Kat female. Nearly all critics and comics historians have since referred to Krazy as “she”; even novelist Jay Cantor, who used the Krazy Kat cast and setting for a postmodern psychoanalytic novel of the same name, unequivocally identified the Kat as a Dora-like female. While cummings himself understood that it was Krazy’s role in the romance-plot that was feminine, and not anything inherent in the character, others have since followed cummings’ use of “she,” relying upon his authority to avoid examining a complex issue.

 

When questioned about Krazy’s sex, however, even Herriman would respond that he did not know, and the Kat did not seem sure either (Capra, 40). “I don’t know if I should take a husband or a wife,” Krazy complains in an October, 1915 daily. “Take care,” Ignatz responds, hurling a brick. The narrator nearly always refers to Krazy as “he,” resolving awkward, ambiguous, or gender-neutral moments to the pronoun “him,” rather than to the pronoun “it.” Most of Krazy’s activity is not gender-specific, but in scenarios involving some complication of his normal relationship with Ignatz, Krazy adopts whichever gender role will restore the usual balance. Cases of disguise or mistaken identity in either Ignatz or Krazy, and of rivalry with a party outside of the Kat/Mouse/Pupp triangle, invariably produce gender-bending confusion in the strip.

 

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  Sunday, April 15, 1923

   

  This episode combines the classic chase scene with the love-triangle plot, further complicated by the intervention of an outside party, Pauline Pullet. Krazy’s behavior here seems to be governed by his innocence and his absent-mindedness, but he actually performs complex maneuvers in order to maintain the most options within the social structures at hand — love and the law.

 

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  Sunday, July 14, 1918

   

  Roles in love play do not define the only parameters of gender construction in Krazy Kat. Krazy is a black cat only in general, just as he is generally male. When the Kat’s fur changes color, however, his gender categorically changes with it. Krazy, upon emerging bleached white in Madame Kamouflage beauty parlor, ceases not only to be male but ceases even to be a Kat in the dazzled eyes of the Mouse. Ignatz cannot recognize Krazy when Krazy is white, because whiteness in itself is for Ignatz an appropriate object of erotic desire, which then in turn must be feminine.

 

• About:

 

This Krazy Kat hypermedia project began as a ToolBook application compiled for a graduate course in computing and literary study, taught by Hoyt Duggan and Peter Baker. John Price-Wilkin encouraged me to seek platform-independence when expanding it into a dissertation, of which this article is a part. When the dissertation is finished, with the direction of Eric Lott and John Unsworth, and the technical support of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, it will be published on the World Wide Web.

 

Click an image to view a comic.

 

Works Cited

 

• Capra, Frank. The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. New York: MacMillan Co., 1971.
• cummings, e.e. Introduction. Krazy Kat by George Herriman. By George Herriman. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1946.
• Herriman, George. Sunday pages July 14, 1918, and April 15, 1923, from George Herriman’s Krazy & Ignatz, vols. 1-9, Bill Blackbeard, editor. Forestville, California: Eclipse Books/Turtle Island Foundation, 1989.