The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

                                        Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Both of his parents were actors. His mother, the much admired Elizabeth Arnold Poe was a talented actress. His father, David Poe was considered less talented. The Poes performed at theaters throughout the Eastern seaboard, from Boston to Virginia. In 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, leaving orphaned Edgar, his infant sister Rosalie, and his older brother Henry. David Poe, apparently had abandoned his wife and children earlier and was not present when she died.

The three children were separated and raised by different families. Edgar was taken in by the successful Richmond merchant John Allan, and his frail wife Frances. The Allans had no children of their own. They raised Edgar as part of the family and gave him their middle name, but never legally adopted him.

In 1815, Edgar traveled with the Allans to England and Scotland, where John Allan planned to expand his tobacco business. Edgar attended boarding schools throughout the five years the family lived overseas. After John Allan’s business venture failed, he moved the family back to Richmond, Virginia in 1820.

"The Black Cat" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. In the story, an unnamed narrator has a strong affection for pets until he perversely turns to abusing them. His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree. The home burns down but one remaining wall shows a burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose. He soon finds another black cat, similar to the first except for a white mark on its chest, but he develops a hatred for it as well. He attempts to kill the cat with an axe but his wife stops him; instead, the narrator murders his wife. He conceals the body behind a brick wall in his basement. The police soon come and, after the narrator's tapping on the wall is met with a shrieking sound, they find not only the wife's corpse but also the black cat that had been accidentally walled in with the body and alerted them with its cry.

The story is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt. "The Black Cat", which also features questions of sanity versus insanity, is Poe's strongest warning against the dangers of alcoholism.

Summary

More than any of Poe's stories, "The Black Cat" illustrates best the capacity of the human mind to observe its own deterioration and the ability of the mind to comment upon its own destruction without being able to objectively halt that deterioration. The narrator of "The Black Cat" is fully aware of his mental deterioration, and at certain points in the story, he recognizes the change that is occurring within him, and he tries to do something about it, but he finds himself unable to reverse his falling into madness.

In Poe's critical essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," he wrote about the importance of creating a unity or totality of effect in his stories. By this, he meant that the artist should decide what effect he wants to create in a story and in the reader's emotional response and then proceed to use all of his creative powers to achieve that particular effect: "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart or the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?"

In "The Black Cat," it is obvious that the chief effect that Poe wanted to achieve was a sense of absolute and total perverseness — "irrevocable . . . PERVERSENESS." Clearly, many of the narrator's acts are without logic or motivation; they are merely acts of perversity.

In virtually all of Poe's tales, we know nothing about the narrator's background; this particular story is no exception. In addition, it is akin to "The Tell-Tale Heart" in that the narrator begins his story by asserting that he is not mad ("Yet, mad am I not — ") and, at the same time, he wants to place before the world a logical outline of the events that "have terrified — have tortured — have destroyed me." And during the process of proving that he is not mad, we see increasingly the actions of a madman who knows that he is going mad but who, at times, is able to objectively comment on the process of his increasing madness.

In this story, the narrator begins his confession in retrospect, at a time when he was considered to be a perfectly normal person, known for his docility and his humane considerations of animals and people. His parents indulged his fondness for animals, and he was allowed to have many different kinds of pets. Furthermore, he was very fortunate to marry a woman who was also fond of animals. Among the many animals that they possessed was a black cat which they named Pluto. Since his wife often made allusions to the popular notion that all black cats are witches in disguise, the name Pluto (which is the name of one of the gods of the underworld in charge of witches) becomes significant in terms of the entire story. The other popular notion relevant to this story is the belief that a cat has nine lives; this superstition becomes a part of the story when the second black cat is believed to be a reincarnation of the dead Pluto with only one slight but horrible modification — the imprint of the gallows on its breast.

Interestingly, Pluto was the narrator's favorite animal and for several years, there was a very special relationship between the animal and the narrator. Then suddenly (due partly to alcohol), the narrator underwent a significant change. "I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others." To reiterate the comments in the introduction to this section, Poe believed that a man was capable at any time of undergoing a complete and total reversal of personality and of falling into a state of madness at any moment. Here, the narrator undergoes such a change. The effect of this change is indicated when he came home intoxicated, imagined that the beloved cat avoided him, then grasped the cat by its throat and with a pen knife, cut out one of its eyes. This act of perversity is the beginning of several such acts which will characterize the "totality of effect" that Poe wanted to achieve in this story.

The next morning, he writes, he was horrified by what he had done, and in time the cat recovered but now it deliberately avoided the narrator. As the cat continued to avoid the narrator, the spirit of perverseness overcame him again — this time, with an unfathomable longing of the soul to "offer violence . . . to do wrong for the wrong's sake only." Suddenly one morning, he slipped a noose around the neck of the cat and hanged it from the limb of a tree, but even while doing it, tears streamed down his face. He is ashamed of his perversity because he knows that the cat had loved him and had given him no reason to hang it. What he did was an act of pure perversity.

That night, after the cruel deed was executed, his house burned to the ground. Being a rational and analytical person, the narrator refuses to see a connection between his perverse atrocity of killing the cat and the disaster that consumed his house.

Again, we have an example of the mad mind offering up a rational rejection of anything so superstitious that the burning of the house might be retribution for his killing the cat. However, on the following day, he visited the ruins of the house and saw a crowd of people gathered about. One wall, which had just been replastered and was still wet, was still standing. It was the wall just above where his bed had previously stood and engraved into the plaster was a perfect image of the figure of a gigantic cat, and there was a rope about the animal's neck.

Once again, the narrator's mad mind attempts to offer a rational explanation for this phenomena. He believes that someone found the cat's dead body, flung it into the burning house to awaken the narrator, and the burning of the house, the falling of the walls, and the ammonia from the carcass (cats are filled with ammonia; Poe wrote essays on cats, their instincts, their logic, and their habits) — all these factors contributed to the creation of the graven image. But the narrator does not account for the fact that the image is that of a gigantic cat; thus we must assume that the image took on gigantic proportions only within the mind of the narrator.

For months, the narrator could not forget about the black cat, and one night when he was drinking heavily, he saw another black cat that looked exactly like Pluto — except for a splash of white on its breast. Upon inquiry, he found out that no one knew anything about the cat, which he then proceeded to take home with him. The cat became a great favorite of his and his wife. The narrator's perversity, however, caused him to soon change, and the cat's fondness for them began to disgust him. It was at this time that he began to loathe the cat. What increased his loathing of the new cat was that it had, like Pluto, one of its eyes missing. In the mind of the narrator, this cat was obviously a reincarnation of Pluto. He even notes to himself that the one trait that had once distinguished him — a humanity of feeling — had now almost totally disappeared. This is an example, as noted in the introduction, of how the mad man can stand at a distance and watch the process of his own change and madness.

After a time, the narrator develops an absolute dread of the cat. When he discovers that the white splash on its breast, which at first was rather indefinite, had "assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline" and was clearly and obviously a hideous, ghastly, and loathsome image of the gallows, he cries out, "Oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime — of Agony and of Death!" As we were able to do in "The Tell-Tale Heart," here we can assume that the change occurs within the mind of the mad man in the same way that he considers this beast to be a reincarnation of the original Pluto.

One day, as he and his wife were going into the cellar, the cat nearly tripped him; he grabbed an axe to kill it, but his wife arrested the blow. He withdrew his arm and then buried the axe in her brain. This sudden gruesome act is not prepared for in any way. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the narrator loved his wife very deeply. Consequently, this act of perversity far exceeds the hanging of Pluto and can only be accounted for by Poe's theme of the perversity of the narrator's acts.

Like the narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator here realizes that he must get rid of the body. He thought of "cutting the corpse into minute fragments," he says, as did the previous narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart," but rather than dismemberment, he decided to "wall it up in the cellar" in a similar way that Montresor walled up his victim in "The Cask of Amontillado."

The walls next to the projecting chimney lent themselves to this type of interment, and after having accomplished the deed and cleaning up in such a way that nothing was detectable, the narrator decided to put the cat to death. Unaccountably, it had disappeared. After three days, the narrator decided that the "monster of a cat" had disappeared forever; he was now able to sleep soundly in spite of the foul deed that he had done. This lack of guilt is certainly a change from what his feelings were at the beginning of the story.

On the fourth day, a party of police unexpectedly arrives to inspect the premises. As in "The Tell-Tale Heart," when the police arrive unexpectedly, we never know what motivated the police to come on a search. And in the same way, the narrator here is overconfident; he delights in the fact that he has so cleverly and so completely concealed his horrible crime that he welcomes an inspection of the premises.

However, here, in an act of insane bravado, he raps so heavily upon the bricks that entomb his wife, that to his abject terror, a "voice from within the tomb" answered. At first, it was a muffled and broken cry, but then it swelled into an "utterly anomalous and inhuman . . . howl . . . a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation."

The police immediately began to tear down the brick wall, and they discover the rotting corpse of the narrator's wife and, standing upon her decayed head was the "hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder . . . I had walled the monster up within the tomb."

The final irony, of course, is that the cat which he had come to so despise — the cat that might have been the reincarnation of Pluto — serves as a figure of retribution against the murderer. By the end of the story, therefore, we can see how the narrator, in commenting on his own actions, convicts himself of the madness which he vehemently declaimed at the beginning of the story.

Themes

Rivals and Doppelgangers

In his stories, Poe creates a narrator faced with some kind of antagonistic person or force—a rival—that propels the plot of the story. In M.S. Found in a Bottle, the antagonist is both the supernatural weather and the strange breed of men on the ship. In The Black Cat, the rival takes the form of a cat, which seems to have a sixth sense for the narrator’s anxiety. Often the source of the rivalry is a mystery, as in The Cask of Amontillado, where the narrator explains that a man called Fortunato has wronged him and expresses his desire for revenge without ever explaining the nature of the original wronging. And then the punishment he exacts on Fortunato is so extreme, that it suggests that perhaps the act tells more about how unhinged the narrator is—or how unhinged his sense of rivalry has made him—than it tells about the criminality of Fortunato. In fact, sometimes the rivalry is free of offense entirely. In the case of The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator simply can't stand the old man’s vulture eye. Otherwise, the old man seems to be entirely innocent. The narrator's hatred is built up based on almost nothing. And yet it exists, and overwhelms him.

The Dead and the Living

In each story, it is the threat of death that pulls the plot along and that creates the suspense that Poe's stories are famous for. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the expectation of death, first by hanging, then with the pendulum, then into the pit, forces the narrator to confront his own mortality time and time again. In The Masque of the Red Death, death is personified and hangs over the story as a charismatic figure. This obsession with death can lend a menacing, almost masochistic tone to the stories’ voices, and a feeling of unavoidable motion in the plot, as if the characters are in a downward spiral towards their ends.

The Gothic Style

Originating in 18th Century England, Gothic Literature was an important and distinctive movement in literary history, with a body of definite themes and symbols that has grown and changed as the genre has spread across the world and across time. But some core aspects remain definitive of the Gothic style, including: Gloomy settings like castles, dungeons, prisons and vaults; haunting figures, ghostly and somewhat unreal; symbols and colors that suggest the gory and supernatural. The Gothic style of Poe’s stories ties them all together, with their morbid, gory, suspense-filled plots and solitary, romantic settings, like the location of Prince Prospero’s strange masquerade. Colors black and red, and visual symbols like evil eyes and black cats, vaults and cellars, create a very recognizable gothic world, so that all Poe’s stories seem to belong in one collection. Poe is famous for bringing Gothic literature into the Victorian era and incorporating psychology into their themes, making the supernatural more believable and close to home.

Self, Solitude, and Consciousness

While many of Poe's characters are married, and others are often visiting with friends or acquaintances, the overriding sense of Poe’s stories is one of loneliness and solitude. Each story leaves the character alone to face his destiny, fear, pain, or crime by himself. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator is alone in a cell and describing each encounter with mortal terror—he exists in the cell solely with death. In M.S. Found in a Bottle, the narrator writes a diary of his struggle aboard a paranormal vessel. The installments of his adventure seem like the narrator is confiding in us, the reader, and we alone are privy to his impending doom when he knows the ship is entering a whirlpool.

The Power of Memory

Many of Poe’s narrators tell stories that have already happened. Often, the difference between the situation of the narrator now, and the narrator then, is profound. For example, the narrator of The Black Cat begins what seems to be a domestic story about his pets, but it soon becomes clear that, as a result of the events of the story, the narrator is now in jail. This forewarning of the consequences of the tale provides the story much of its suspense. But a symptom of this voice of hindsight is a kind of unreliability. When we, as readers, know that the character talking is now in jail, for example, it raises the question of whether the narrator might be either hiding some aspect of the story or whether the traumatic events that led to the narrator's incarceration might have warped the narrator's memory of his own experience.