What Killed the Cat
February 25, 2026
I was railing again about Eve. For Eve. Why should she take the rap for humanity’s fall, just because she had a healthy curiosity? Then I remembered Pandora, whom we blame just as angrily for the unleashing of our woes. But think of living with that box, gazing at it day after day, wondering, feeling the hot thrum of energy emanating from it, knowing how easy it would be to just pry up one corner…. Who, male or female, would be able to leave that box closed forever?
Curiosity opens us to the world. It seeks answers, solves problems, fathoms mysteries. The uncurious sink into ruts and do not even bother to spin their wheels. Curious men are explorers, discoverers, captains of ship or industry, pioneers and entrepreneurs. Curious women…have been damned.
Imagine that your new husband lies with you each night, making passionate love to you, yet you are forbidden to look upon him. Would you not lift a candle to see its contours of his face? Love yearns to memorize the features of the beloved, hold them inside forever. But when Psyche sneaks a peek at Cupid, she is condemned to wander the earth alone, a list of impossible tasks in one hand. Love overcoming all obstacles, we like to say. But really, she is being punished for craving information.
Lot’s wife is also punished for turning to look back as she flees Sodom. There is definitely a theme here: looking, learning, discovering, are all dangerous territory for a woman. Granted, Osiris is also punished for looking back at Isis. But mainly, it is the female gaze that terrifies. Childhood baggage, perhaps, because mothers have eyes in the back of their head?
Women who see into crystal balls, dark forests, or the mysteries of the heart are especially feared, even burned. But possessing arcane knowledge, it seems to me, should be a gift. Men honored the Oracle at Delphi, did they not?
I expect it depends on whether the arcane knowledge can bend a man to a witch’s purpose or is simply whispered to help him.
And what of the women who are not wielding magic but simply fighting to stay alive? Bluebeard’s wife explores because she has a hunch of danger, as do the Brontë heroines. Yet even when the story validates their curiosity, it is punished as illicit. The same pattern held in the Gothic romances I inhaled as a teenager. Even in today’s novels, there can be dark secrets (vampirism? S&M?) a young woman must discover about the man she loves.
At least these women are not dismissed as silly. In European, South Asian and Middle Eastern folk tales, wives were warned not to open some door, book, box, or letter—and they paid a price when they did. By the Victorian era, the nosy woman—peeking through curtains or eavesdropping—had become a trope. Women of a certain class had enough leisure to be bored, and just enough education to be curious. This annoyed men, who tried to caricature, ridicule, and shame them out of it.
That trope lingered. On Bewitched, the nosy neighbor who was constantly peering through the blinds was pathetic, a funny annoyance because what she saw bemused her. Miss Marple, on the other hand, was adored: she was old, thus seemed harmless, yet was effective, and her curiosity threatened no one but the murderer.
Today’s books and shows are crammed with smart, inquisitive female cops and detectives, investigative journalists, politicians, scholars. I wonder what my grandmother would say. A woman of considerable curiosity who never had the chance for a real education, she warned me not to raise my hand in class because the boys would not like me. Yet she read voraciously; soaked in the news; observed every secret drama, vice, and virtue in our Catholic parish. She used to look up interesting words and use them three times that same day, saying we should all do this to “make the word our own.” Some eccentric sentences resulted, but she kept us alert.
Did she drive my grandfather crazy? Undoubtedly. When I ask my husband why women’s curiosity has been seen as dangerous, he answers a little too fast: “Because all the questions can be annoying, and because some questions we think are better left unasked. Some things that don’t interest us or kind of frighten us, we just want to leave alone. Women don’t seem to have those boundaries.”
So is it that our questions require a painstaking response that would interrupt the TV show? Or that they might expose a need for improvement, maybe a little weekend DIY? Or that they are unanswerable, when the old cliché is that guys like to solve and know everything? Or that they probe uncomfortably? I do feel the need to know.
Crazy, how little time has passed since women’s curiosity was considered pathological. Habits of reading or study were linked to hysteria, nervous illness, or infertility. Manuals of proper conduct warned women not to ask “impertinent questions,” meaning questions about politics, theology, or men’s business affairs.
Hobbes called curiosity “the lust of the mind.” Maybe women asking questions is as nervous-making as women owning their own sexual desire.
Maybe we no longer care.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is a dangerous sorceress who turns Odysseus’s crew into swine, then seduces Odysseus himself. In a retelling by feminist author Madeline Miller, Circe is a goddess whose girlhood hints at mysterious powers, so Zeus banishes her to an island. Bored and burning with curiosity, she refines her knowledge of herbs and potions. When a ship lands on the island and its captain and crew members rape her, she turns them into swine.
Is it fair to recast these stories? I think so. Homer was playing with the myths he was taught, and they, too, were dreamed up by somebody. As old fears and delusions drop away, our stories ought to change. The originals will still exist, and anyone can compare.
If they are curious.
