Psychology and Motive in Poe's "The Black Cat" and "The Masque of the Red Death"

Introduction: Poe and the Human Psyche

In most of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, it is easy to see his fascination with the workings of the mind. His protagonists are usually driven by an emotion — such as anger, jealousy, or guilt — and it is very rare when their behaviors are clear-cut and easy to decipher. Literary critic Tony Magistrale (122) suggests that perhaps "it is even possible to argue that many of Poe's individual characters contain and dramatize all at once the contradictory impulses of the human psyche." In fact, scholars still debate the psychological makeup of the characters in the two short stories "The Black Cat" and "The Masque of the Red Death." In the end, readers are left with questions to which they must supply their own answers.

Interpreting the Narrator's Motive in 'The Black Cat'

What made the narrator in "The Black Cat" suddenly strike out at his once beloved animals and actually attempt to kill the black cat? More importantly, what made him kill his wife instead of the cat? Was this act simply a mistake made in a moment of heated passion, or was it premeditated — the expression of something inside him that desired her death all along? These are questions that literary scholars have long debated in relation to Poe's story.

An article by Joseph Stark suggests that Poe purposely made the narrator's psychological makeup and eventual motive for murder vague, in order to leave it open to the interpretation of the reader: "In other words, by depicting a motiveless murderer whose actions cannot be sufficiently explained, Poe 'place[d] before the world... without comment' difficulties in both scientific and religious thought and ironically upheld the mysterious nature of the human will in a time dominated by intellectual rationalism" (255).

As a result, says Stark, "numerous critics have taken this puzzle as an invitation to discern the narrator's motive, with a wide range of suggestions." Frushell comments on "the narrator's degeneration by stages into the condition of grotesque perversity" (43). As in a split personality, two sides of the narrator are fighting it out: "the true 'animal' in him (his 'underworld' — the senses, appetites, affections, the non-rational) acts in at least two-thirds of the tale as his conscience, which longs to vex the aspiring, prideful half." At the end, says Frushell, the truth wins out, and in an act of self-betrayal the narrator admits to what he has done.

Psychobiographical and Psychological Readings

In order to determine motive, Piacentino analyzes the narrator's behavior from a psychobiographical viewpoint. He argues that it is important to discern what happened to the narrator as a child — what traumatized him so severely that he became an alcoholic and eventually turned to murder. Piacentino's suggestion is that the narrator was ridiculed as a child because of his "tenderness of heart" (possibly implying homosexual leanings) and thus internalized the personal hurt he felt from that ridicule. As Piacentino states: "While many of the critics of 'The Black Cat' prefer to see this murder as premeditated, I interpret the act as the culmination of deep-seated and suppressed anxieties that are contained in how the narrator retrospectively presents his childhood." As the narrator grew older, he denied this personal fault, until — in the culmination of those suppressed anxieties — he killed his wife.

Piacentino argues further: "When anxiety and frustration threaten a person's security and self-esteem, as in the case of Poe's narrator, such a combination of repression and displacement — though probably not to the extreme the narrator carries it — may be regarded as a predictable natural reaction."

Other suggestions for the narrator's actions include temporary insanity, schizophrenia, and the ultimate depravity of mankind. Is any one of these the true motive? No one can say for certain. Perhaps even Poe did not know when he wrote the story. Writing his tales may have been his way of examining the different types of human motivation leading to intended or unintended results.

Prospero's Psychology in 'The Masque of the Red Death'

A similar absence of clear motive appears in "The Masque of the Red Death." At first, the psychological motivation of Prospero seems quite understandable: he is a selfish man who cares only about his own well-being and nothing about the people dying from the red death around him. However, a number of literary scholars argue that this story is far more complex than it first appears, and that Poe may have intended something quite different by Prospero's actions.

As Canada observes, while literary scholars have examined many aspects of Poe's work, they have paid particular attention to his fascination with psychology. An outspoken admirer of phrenology — a pseudoscience based on the premise that various mental functions are controlled by specific regions of the brain — Poe tirelessly explored subjects such as self-destruction and madness.

Some critics argue instead that Poe's story had a religious motive, because Poe is often seen as a philosophical-religious writer who expounds on the conditions of salvation and psychological reconciliation to the will of God (Wagenknecht, 217; May 102). Prince Prospero attempts to escape death by retreating into his abbey, "an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste" (Poe 130). Once everyone is inside, the gates are welded shut to ensure there is no "ingress or egress," and the prince declares that "the external world could take care of itself" (Poe 131). However, by shutting himself away from the plague, Prince Prospero is also shutting himself away from his life as a whole — and from God. The result, in this case, is death.

May (102–103) also questions whether Prince Prospero is mad and unable to distinguish the real from the unreal. For the masquerade ball, he creates a patterned unreality: "There were delirious faces such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams" (Poe 132).

Conclusion: Poe's Deliberate Ambiguity

With both "The Black Cat" and "The Masque of the Red Death," many questions are left unresolved. By giving just enough information about the protagonists to make them interesting and believable, but not enough to truly understand their motives, Poe gives his readers the opportunity to search within themselves for the answers that best respond to their own psychological needs. In this way, Poe's deliberate ambiguity becomes a mirror — one that reflects not the characters on the page, but the minds of those who read them.

References

Canada, Mark. Poe in His Right Mind. Dissertation. 1997.

Frushell, Richard C. "'An Incarnate Night-Mare': Moral Grotesquerie in 'The Black Cat.'" Poe Studies, (1972) 5.2: 43–44.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Stark, J. "Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe's 'The Black Cat.'" The Mississippi Quarterly (2004) 57.2: 255–264.

Timmerman, John H. "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'" Papers on Language and Literature (2003) 39: 227–234.