The Black Cat

¶ … Black Cat by Poe

The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his "scary" stories, and also his bizarre tales that take one's imagination into places that it previously perhaps has not gone. His strength in the short stories he wrote is his ability to use descriptive narrative to get the reader's intense interest in what is going on, what the characters are doing (and thinking), and what the climax will be in the story.

Also, Poe always tries to create a mood or a point that is not necessarily what the actual characters are doing in the plot of the story, but this is what the creative writers and poets usually try to do; that is, make a bigger point, a literary point, by using characters, theme, conflict, irony, and good dialogue. Poe is also sly, conning the reader into going along with him even though it may be obvious these things he described couldn't possibly have happened.

Not everyone who ever read a story by Poe thinks that he is a terrific writer. For example, in this story, "The Black Cat," Poe is apparently trying to put across the point that in some men's minds there is an "absolute spirit of 'perversity'," according to critic William Henry Smith, which leads those men in his story to try to do the "very opposite of what reason and mankind pronounce to be right."

So, critic Smith is saying something akin to the story of the little boy who always seems to want to do exactly what his mother has told him is not the right thing to do, and when he does the things he was explicitly told not to do, he gets punished. In "The Black Cat" short story, the punishment, according to Smith's article, originally in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (reprinted in the American Library Journal), is brings about "a train of circumstances as hideous, incongruous, and absurd..."

Smith's review was written long ago, in 1847, and it is interesting that he says Poe puts "no passion in these tales" and makes "no attempt" at "dramatic dialogue." Smith even goes so far as to say that even though the metaphors and illustrations in Poe's story are "awkward, strained, infelicitous" (infelicitous means "not appropriate" and "not well-timed" according to the Merriman-Webster online dictionary), Smith does give Poe credit for writing a story with "marvelous skill." The facts and details "never depend on any bold display of the imagination," but the many incidents Poe packs into his story are like a painting or a "horrid whirlpool."

Well, that is a critic from 159 years ago, and what are we to think of the story today, in 2006? Poe is simply a genius, and as was stated in the opening paragraph of this paper, he gets the reader's interest through his brilliant descriptive narrative and his sly tone.

For example, Poe says at the beginning that he doesn't expect "nor solicit belief" in this story. He says he would be "mad indeed" if he expected readers to believe what he was about to tell. Then, he dives into the story and explains that his wife brought a cat into the house, named Pluto; and though he mistreated his other animals (his rabbits, the monkey and the dog) and became "more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others," he didn't mistreat Pluto, he says.

And then that night when he came home drunk, he grabbed Pluto and after grabbing the cat, and being bitten by the cat, he seemed to be possessed by some kind of a demon. In the meantime, he took out a knife and cut one of Pluto's eyes out of its socket, sick, as that may seem.

This is very typical of Edgar Allan Poe, to be explaining how his principle character (the narrator usually) went slowly insane, or at least temporarily mad. In "The Black Cat," Poe later watched his cat heal up, but now the cat was, understandably, afraid of his owner / master. And here Poe goes to great lengths to explain that what he was about to do was, yes, "PERVERSE," but heck, everyone gets that way once in awhile. "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?" Following that weak justification, he admits that he hung poor Pluto from a tree, and tears were "streaming" from the protagonists eyes over the remorse he felt; later in bed, his house went up in flames. He went back to the burned out shell of a building and there was "the figure of a gigantic cat... [with] a rope about the animal's neck."

Next, the story moves to the protagonist's rationalization and justification for why he saw the cat's "apparition"; then, in another of his drunken moments, he saw a black cat, as big as Pluto was, but instead of being all black, the cat had a white splotch coving "the whole region of the breast." They became friends, and his wife loved it too, but wait - he began to have that perverse hatred feeling again. Going back to the attitude he had when he first was mean to the cat. He noted that the new cat had one eye - like Pluto - and it followed him everywhere. It covered him with "loathsome caresses," got under his feet, and was fond of "...fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast."

And so the dread and terror grew and grew, which is typical of Poe's stories of madness and weirdness; he tried to chop its head off with an axe, only to have his wife grab the axe before he could thrust it at the cat; angry and "goaded into a rage more demonical, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain." She died right there. Now this is really a nut case, by any standards, but again, Poe is making a point about human nature, we are always led to believe; he's not really writing about his own mental stability or instability. He is getting under the skin of the reader by being so outrageous and unbelievably cruel.

So, what to do with the body? He places the corpse inside a wall by removing the bricks, putting his dead wife in there, and replacing the bricks. "Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster that could not possibly be distinguished from the old." This took some careful planning, but a madman can do these things, readers are to understand after working through "A Black Cat." After burying his wife, he now seeks out the cat that has been so much of a problem to him. "My happiness was supreme!" Poe writes, after several days go by and the cat has not reappeared to haunt the protagonist. When the police arrived to search his house, he happily showed them around; "I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence," he said. When the police were satisfied (didn't they smell the rotting body of his wife?), "the glee" in his heart "was too strong to be restrained."

He said to the police, "I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy." He feels so confident that he has gotten away with murder, literally, that he starts bragging about how solid his house is. "These walls are solidly put together," he said, and rapped his cane against the "very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom."