“Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats”: Cat Houses In The News

Plath wrote “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats” on June 2, 1956, per her pocket calendar. Plath spoke a bit of French, and the very near-homophone la maison translates to “the house.” This is less a poem about an animal hoarder, and more explicitly about a cat house, or a brothel. This subject was all over the news as 1956 English society wrestled with ideas of church and state, and homosexuality was still viewed as a crime. In December 1955, The British Medical Association published the well-selling Homosexuality and prostitution: a memorandum of evidence, and in May 1956, the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council published their own study on sexual offenders and social punishment. Meanwhile, journalists like Colin MacInnes were building careers writing about the seamier side of London.[1]
Plath’s poetic “Ella Mason” lives in “a ramshackle house” in a red light district of London called Somerset Terrace. Section 33 of the Sexual Offences Act in Britain reads: It is an offence for a person to keep a brothel, or to manage, or act or assist in the management of, a brothel. In Plath’s poem, there are “queries” made about Plath’s Ella Mason, who lives with eleven felines at last count, playing “hostess to” the Tabbies and Toms of the neighborhood. In later poems such as “Watercolor at Grantchester Meadows,” Plath also uses the cat as a metaphor for a jaded, unscrupulous woman. In “Ella Mason,” she gives it away in her last two lines: “That vain jades sulk single down bridal nights, / Accurst as wild-cats.”
On the second of August, the Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, which did not criminalize the act of prostitution itself, but did the activities of soliciting and running a house of ill repute.
[1] English novelist and journalist Colin MacInnes (1914-1976) was openly bisexual and wrote on subjects such as urban squalor, racism, sexuality, drugs, anarchy, and decadence in 1950s London.
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