The Black Cat

“The Black Cat” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) which was published in 1843.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. It is a study of the psychology of guilt, in the story 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.

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. The story opens in the cell of a prisoner the day before he is to be executed by hanging where he was writing down the details of this experience, which led to his imprisonment and scheduled execution. The narrator describes himself as a caring and loving man, who and whose wife was very fond of animals. Over the years, the narrator’s disposition changed. He became prey to certain wicked human emotions as “Intemperance” and “Perverseness,” and these feelings of excess and cruelty began to consume him. The narrator then began to drink alcohol heavily and stay out during the nighttime, staggering home very late. He became “more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others”, started shouting at his wife, and even struck her at times. He mistreated all of his pets except his most loving cat Pluto. In time, however, he even started to mistreat the cat. And one night, so enraged did the narrator become that he withdrew a pocket knife and cut out one of the cat’s eyes. The next morning, though he was horrified by what he had done the spirit of “perverseness” overcame him again with the course of time – 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 hanged the cat 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.

Though he was becoming mad day by day, he tried to explain everything with logic. 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. Peculiarly, on the single wall that did not fall in the fire is an image of a gigantic cat with a rope around its neck. The narrator explains the phenomenon away with scientific reasons. The battle in the narrator’s mind between delusion and reality rages at this point. He tries desperately to explain what he sees with rational thought, but his mind is already infected with superstition and his explanations begin to sound far-fetched and somewhat insane.

In the story we see his guilt make him belief in the reincarnation of the cat. After some months he found another cat which looking exactly the same to Pluto and this one also became a great favorite to him 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. After a time, the narrator develops an absolute dread of the cat. When he discovers the white splash on its breast, which at first was rather indefinite he was terrified. 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.

He was so much terrified that he just wanted to get rid of the cat at any cost. One day, in a fit of rage, the narrator raised an axe to strike at the creature, but he “buried the axe in” his wife’s head. The narrator realizes that he must get rid of the body and finally “wall it up in the cellar”. Afterward, he looked for the cat, “for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death.” But it had disappeared–apparently in fear of his wrath. That night, even with the weight of murder on his mind, he slept soundly. After all, there was no cat to irritate him. 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. The narrator says, “My happiness was supreme”. This lack of guilt is certainly a change from what his feelings were at the beginning of the story.

His over confidence caused his final downfall. On the fourth day, a party of police unexpectedly arrives to inspect the premises. The narrator delights in the fact that he has so cleverly and so completely concealed his horrible crime that he welcomes an inspection of the premises. When the police was about to leave, the narrator – pleased at his cleverness and his ability to handle the police – began to talk too much. In an act of insane bravado, he raps so heavily upon the bricks that entombed 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 . . . might have arisen only out of hell” 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. *************************************************************************************

**Short story in the horror genre that focuses on the psyche of the narrator. Poe was one of the developers of the short story as a literary genre. He defined a short story as a narrative prose work that (1) is short enough to be read in one sitting, (2) takes place in one locale on a single day, (or even in a few hours), (3) centers on a single line of action, and (4) maintains a single mood. Every word or phrase should contribute to the theme and the mood.

*** The supernatural elements of “The Black Cat” leave open the question of how much is real, how much can be rationally explained, and how much is a product of the narrator’s imagination. Pluto’s possible magical significance is first noted by the wife, who states that black cats are said to be witches in disguise, although her kind treatment of Pluto indicates that she does not put much faith in this particular superstition. The narrator explicitly dismisses this viewpoint, but the superstition flavors his entire story. When he observes the image of the cat on the wall, he describes it as gigantic; he previously described Pluto as fairly large, but whether the size of the image is an expression of the paranormal or simply a product of his frightened imagination is difficult to say. 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 but we have no evidence that the narrator is observing anything more than the twisting of his own mind.

***”The Black Cat” is in many ways a moral tale that deals with the tension between love and hate and that warns of the dangers of alcohol, a substance to which Poe himself was addicted for much of his life. The narrator appears at first to love both his wife and his pets, but by the end of the story his fondness has turned to neglect, spite, and even hatred, particularly for Pluto and his successor. Although Poe does not provide a solid explanation for the narrator’s encroaching loss of sanity, perhaps suggesting that madness might happen at any time to any person, the narrator admits the role of alcohol in his behavior. In addition, the arrival of the second cat is closely related to his alcoholism, since he first finds the cat in a seedy drinking establishment. The second cat ultimately serves as the facilitator of justice when it reveals the corpse’s hiding place at the end of the tale, and its initial appearance on top of a hogshead of gin or rum emphasizes its moral purpose.

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