All these and security were within. Without was the 'Red Death.'" The Black Cat is a slightly more plebian story, about a man who had a particular affinity for pets and who adopted many and shared this love with his patient and loving wife. The man developed severe alcoholism and his entire demeanor changed, as he went about cruelly attacking verbally and physically all who were close to him, including cutting out the eye of his previously cherished pet a very large and loving black cat and eventually hanging the cat to death by a tree limb. The mans alcoholism did not wane as it might have in a similar case but only got worse, and after the incident with the cat, the whole of his fortune was lost to a fire. His home having burned to the ground he continued to live through his anger self-loathing and alcoholism until he happened upon another cat who greatly resembled the first and hoping at first to make amends brought it home only to find it even more loathsome than the first animal. The cat developed a great affinity to him, and even developed a mark of the noose upon its breast. In a fit of rage the man attempted to kill the cat with an ax and was thwarted by his patient and loving wife, whom he killed instead and walled up in a false chimney in the cellar. When the police came to search his home the man rapped on the wall of the cellar and the cat, which had been mistakenly walled up with his dead wife cried out and...

Poe writes this work as if a man, given the ultimate power over house and home is given a dangerous gift especially if he is predisposed to drink, as drink can hopelessly and helplessly change a man into a monster, as can unrestrained decadence, seen in the previous story.
Poe's message in both these works is one of the need to fear those things that are most mundane, and challenge those structures of tradition that drive men mad with gluttony and excess. The prince is disconnected from his people, without remorse or aide for their plight and the murderer who walls his loving wife up in a chimney, as if he is an innocent man, is driven crazy by alcohol and a harmless housecat, with sinister allusions. These stories represent the mundane made real, as they could have actually happened in the real world at many junctures in history, and Poe makes them all the more real and frightening with bold imagery and a carefully crafted word.

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. Thirty-Two Stories. Ed. Stuart Levine and Susan F. Levine. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000.