Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe\'s

¶ … Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" published in 1843 comes with a narrator so interesting, twisted and bizarre that a vast body of literature is available on the subject of narrator's psyche and motives. In this paper, we shall study the narrator's behavior in a psychological framework in order to understand what prompted the narrator to commit a hideous crime. The author attributes the narrator's behavior to the "spirit of Perverseness..., one of the primitive impulses of the human heart..., to do wrong for wrong's sake" (Poe 852) and also to the black cat which he refers to as "a hideous beast had seduced [him] into murder" (859). James W. Gargano believes that narrator's "spirit of perverseness" and the "Fiend Intemperance" (Poe 851) may "be reduced to ordinary psychological and moral laws" ("Perverseness" 172). Gargano feels that narrator's "sentimental excesses, his extreme happiness in feeding and caressing his pets," is an indication of "an unhealthy over-development of the voluptuary side of his nature" ("Perverseness" 173).

Genette says that in this story, the narrator invites the reader whose "intellect [is] more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own" to reduce my phantasm to the common-place" (850). The narrator also tries to manipulate the reader in an attempt to win his sympathy by alternating between narrative time and story time, the narrative sequences affording him the opportunity to voice and authorize his current judgments and rationalizations for his past actions. The narrator introduces his story to us in a subtly manipulative manner when he states:

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative, which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my senses reject their own evidence. Yet mad am I not and very surely do I not dream.... My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified have tortured have destroyed me. Yet I will attempt not to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. (849-50)

What is really interesting about the narrator is his subtle explanations of his behavior and the murder of his wife that we get from certain lines in the story without the narrator actually intending to reveal much. There is a small passage that gives away narrator's troubled psyche and his real reason for killing his wife. It occurs in the first part of the story when the narrator tells us: "From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions" (850).

The narrator refers to his "docility and humanity" and "tenderness of heart" as parts of the reasons why he had to kill his wife. He is trying to offer a possible rationale for committing such a horrifying act. While trying to extend this rationale he tells us that his love for animals was always more than his love for people. "There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man" (850). But the question still remains. If he liked animals and possessed a sensitive nature, why would he kill a person "disposition," he tells us, was "not uncongenial with my own" (850) and who tries to please him by sharing his interest in animals. The narrator was perhaps jealous- jealous of the fact that his wife was capable of showing her caring side while he had to hide it for fear of ridicule. His wife is thus an impersonation of the lost self. The narrator finds traces of this lost self in his wife and the second cat, which wasn't even real. He begins to "to hate.. And to wish them dead," (McElroy, 103).

Critics feel that the wife being one of the "mirrors of [the narrator's] lost self" (Heller 103) offers a clue to narrator's motive for killing his wife but Susan Amper chooses to disagree calling the story "a fabrication, by which [the narrator] seeks to conceal the true nature of his crime" (475). His tenderheartedness may have been a cause of shame for him since in those days, sensitive men were considered rather effeminate and thus wee ridiculed often. The narrator may have actually wanted to be able to express his caring side more openly but was not allowed to do so by the society. He had to suppress his love for human beings and in doing so, he transferred the same feelings to animals. Robert B. Ewen calls it ego defense mechanism, "whereby feelings or behaviors are transferred, usually unconsciously, from one object to another that is less threatening" (29)

The narrator is so used to being rejected by the society that when Pluto, the Black Cat, offers his unconditional love, the narrator becomes intensely jealous and possessive. In a fit of anger and on detecting a slight hint of withdrawal, the narrator goes on to injure Pluto, after "fanc[ying] that the cat avoided [his] presence" (851). And eventually kills it. Then a second cat appears. This cat becomes the object of narrator's affection initially as he declared that this "was the very creature of which I was in search" (854). But when the cat "became immediately a great favorite with my wife" (854), the narrator starts developing feelings of jealousy which leads him to contend that, "I soon found a dislike to it arising within me" (854) even though the cat exhibited "its evident fondness" for the narrator. For some odd reason, either because of jealousy or pure guilt, the narrator gets "disgusted and annoyed" with the cat to the extent that "these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred" (854). Why would he kill the second cat as well? The answer to this implicit question lies in the behavior of his wife. For one, she was showing greater affection to the cat and thus the narrator felt neglected, but even important than this was narrator's inability to express his sensitive side the way his wife could. While mentioning the missing eye of the cat, the narrator tells us that this physical trait "only endeared it to my wife, who... possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures" (855).