Wicked witch Angelique is trying to prevent young gentleman Barnabas Collins from marrying his fiancée Josette. To that end, she has cast a spell on Josette and on Barnabas’ uncle Jeremiah, causing them to conceive a mad passion for each other. Jeremiah resists the feeling, and is resolved to leave town until Barnabas and Josette are safely wed.
Angelique decides that she will keep Jeremiah around by causing his brother, haughty overlord Joshua, to disappear. When she makes this decision, she is with Ben, an indentured servant of Joshua and bewitched thrall to Angelique. Ben is miserable when Angelique compels him to act against Barnabas, since Barnabas has always been most kind to him. However, Joshua treats Ben with relentless cruelty, and when Angelique announces that she will transform him into an animal, Ben is gleeful at the idea of the tyrant getting his comeuppance. Ben pleads with Angelique to make Joshua into a jackass, so that he can whip him while they plow the fields.
Angelique ignores Ben’s idea, and makes Joshua into a small cat instead. This transformation takes place while Joshua and Jeremiah are in the front parlor, arguing about Jeremiah’s plan to go away. Jeremiah turns to look out the window for a second, and when he turns back Joshua is gone and the cat is in his place.
When I was a graduate student in Classics lo those many years ago, I made a study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, more commonly known as The Golden Ass, an ancient novel about a man who trifles with a witch and is transformed into a jackass in consequence. So I was more interested than most would likely have been by Ben’s suggestion.
We can see why it had to be a cat rather than a jackass. For one thing, they didn’t have the budget to get a jackass into the studio at 433 West 53rd Street in Manhattan. But there are other reasons. A jackass is a large animal, not graced with the gift of stealth, and if one had materialized out of thin air in the front room it would have been obvious that magic was at work. That would have been bad for the plot, because the characters would have had no choice but to admit that witchcraft was a likely explanation. Even Jeremiah and Josette might well have realized that their sudden attraction was the result of a spell, and have set about fighting it directly. By contrast, a cat is a small creature, known for silence, and on a rolling estate bordering on the wilderness any number of them would be likely to slip into the manor house on a cold night. Its presence would attract little notice from anyone not already convinced witchcraft was in progress.
In addition to the plot trouble that would have resulted had Angelique turned Joshua into a jackass rather than a cat, there would also have been a tonal misstep. At this point they are still developing stories that show us what life was like around the Collins estate before Angelique came. Those are comedies of manners, tales of romance, melodramas about family tensions, and other genres that generate light amusement. That light amusement can keep going if the uncanny phenomena people see are little oddities that elicit impatient demands for a Logical Explanation, but if Angelique conjures up something as big and distinctive as a jackass the natural reaction would be terror, a strong enough feeling that everything else would feel irrelevant until it was resolved.
Also, jackasses have large, expressive eyes. It is difficult to look at the face of one and not to think you know how it is feeling. Joshua is enough of a villain that we simply laugh at the idea of him being put out of the way in this bizarre fashion, and the enigmatic face of a cat does not undercut this laughter. But if we look in the animal’s eyes and see longing and sorrow, which are always easy to find in the eyes of a jackass, we would feel pity for him. That pity would sound a discordant note at this point in the story, distracting us from the suspense about how Angelique’s evil plans will work and our interest in the other story elements we will be seeing.
It is true that there is nothing very catlike about Joshua. For Danny Horn, that is a flaw, one so severe that the whole story of Joshua’s catification “doesn’t work.” He writes:
The cat thing just doesn’t work. But it doesn’t work for interesting reasons, so let’s break it down a little…
A truly satisfying witch-vixen scheme needs to get two things right — it needs to make sense tactically, and it needs to be metaphorically coherent.
For example, spiking Josette’s rose water perfume with love potion totally works, on a strategic level. Josette and Jeremiah find themselves drawn to each other, but they have no idea why. There’s no evidence that leads back to Angelique; everybody just thinks they’re unable to control their forbidden attraction to each other…
And then there’s the cat. Tactically, this is another clear mistake. Yes, Angelique’s goal was to keep Jeremiah from leaving town, and striking Joshua down is an effective way of doing that.
But the actual circumstances don’t allow for any kind of cover story — Joshua apparently disappeared in the middle of a conversation in the drawing room. He wasn’t even walking in the woods, or alone in the basement. Jeremiah knows exactly where Joshua was at that moment, and there’s no way that he could have silently left the house, even if he had a reason to, which he didn’t. Again, this just puts everybody on guard, and hunting around for a malign influence.
And as a metaphor, it’s even worse… What does “cat” mean, in this context?
There’s no sense in which Joshua was a “cat”; the concept doesn’t connect to anything. There’s no symbolic resonance that would make it narratively satisfying, and so it just feels random and silly.
Danny Horn, “Episode 379: Nine Lives to Live,” Dark Shadows Every Day, 24 April 2014
I disagree. Jeremiah is the only person who knows that there is no possible way Joshua could have left, and Angelique’s plan is that he himself will soon run away with Josette, a circumstance which will render his testimony about anything suspect. Further, Joshua and Jeremiah’s sister Abigail and Josette’s aunt the Countess DuPrés are already “hunting around for a malign influence,” prompting everyone else to think they are being ridiculous. If those two seize on Jeremiah’s account of Joshua vanishing and being replaced by a cat, that division within the household will only deepen, bringing greater confusion and setting Angelique’s victims against each other.
The characters look at Joshua and see a tyrant who dominates their lives. We know enough about the major events upcoming to know that he will be utterly powerless to influence them in any way. So when we see his attempt to impose his will on his brother come to an abrupt end when he is reduced to the form of a furry little animal, we see the whole logic of the story in a nutshell.
Moreover, Joshua is played by Louis Edmonds, who in the parts of Dark Shadows set in the 1960s plays high-born ne’er-do-well Roger Collins. The contrast between Roger and Joshua marks the decline of the Collinses from the zenith of their power in the eighteenth century to its nadir in the twentieth. Roger has many of Joshua’s mannerisms, most of his sense of superiority, and all of his taste for expensive things and grand surroundings. But where Joshua is a dynamic businessman, a dominating patriarch, and a self-righteous advocate of Jeffersonian republicanism, Roger has squandered his entire inheritance, lives as a parasite upon his sister, and is frankly and shamelessly nihilistic. Joshua would be shocked if he were told that his commanding self-assurance was an outgrowth of narcissism; Roger cheerfully admits that he is utterly selfish. Joshua may see himself as the lion of upper New England; Roger endears himself to us with a talent for sarcastic remarks that might well be called catty. So when Angelique turns Joshua into a house cat, she is doing what we already know history will do to his descendants.
Acilius on Dark Shadows 