Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”
The following fragment is proposed for commentary: the outcome of the tale entitled “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1843 in a Philadelphia newspaper.
Edgar Allan Poe and the American Literary Landscape
This American author is considered one of the first writers in the country, inaugurating what has been called the Golden Age of American literature, covering the period between 1830 and 1890.
The Boston author, in his role as a thinker and creator, makes a significant contribution to the literary history of the short story by setting it apart from other genres and preparing the revolution of modern lyricism.
The Short Story and Romanticism
The genre of the short story owes much to the literary movement of Romanticism, a period in which Poe wrote. Its main feature, the consideration of the self as an autonomous entity, broadens the concept of nationalism. This motivates an unusual interest in the reconstruction of the past via the popular story that would reflect the traditional legends of respective communities. England idealized its feudal past, France had a revolutionary intellectual vocation, Germany focused on the recovery of their folklore, but America only had the history of the Native Americans against whom they were fighting and the wars of independence. So, the writers would rather watch the future and, based on European fashion, give rise to original literature.
Poe’s Originality and Influence
Poe’s originality, as described in the essay “The Philosophy of Composition”, is to give importance to the outcome of the story, subordinating all other elements (theme, characters, plot, etc.) to produce an emotional response in the reader. This is demonstrated in his Extraordinary Tales, an indispensable work in the history of literature. With it, the detective story is born (which strongly influences Conan Doyle), and the tale of psychological terror, which also propels science fiction (directly influencing Jules Verne) and renews the Gothic tale.
Gothicism and Dark Romanticism
The prevailing Gothicism in Poe’s production is the result of the reaction of some authors to the first American Romanticism, Transcendentalism, whose optimistic view of man is answered by what is known as Dark Romanticism, featuring imperfect and failed personalities who move in decrepit and disturbing atmospheres.
Analysis of “The Black Cat”
The fragment that we discuss corresponds to a psychological horror story with a philosophical background, strictly Gothic.
“The Black Cat” is the confession of a defendant on the eve of his death, detailing the circumstances that pushed him to commit the murder of his beloved wife and then brick her up in the basement of his home. The narrator claims to have been a quiet person and animal lover until his alcohol addiction makes him irascible and sadistic with his cat, Pluto. After killing him, another cat similar to the above appears at the home of the young couple, and the protagonist gradually becomes obsessed with a white spot in the form of gallows that appears on the animal’s chest. One day, upset, he tries to kill it with an axe, but his wife intervenes, and it is she who receives the blow. He then bricks her up in the basement, and the cat disappears from his life.
The fragment contains the surprising denouement, in which the protagonist, whom the police cannot incriminate, causes his own incrimination.
Thematic Lines
This story develops four thematic lines that seem to recur in the “Extraordinary Tales” of Poe. First, the study of the psychology of a madman, which would come to fruition in “The Tell-Tale Heart”. In addition, both characters are drawn by an inexplicable force that leads them to confess their crimes against their will. Poe says in “The Black Cat” that this evil force impels man to seek evil for himself and called it “the Imp of the Perverse”. Finally, the bricking-up theme is found also in other stories such as “The Cask of Amontillado.”
Narrative Perspective and Character
Poe chooses the first-person narrative to show the psychology of a patient. With this perspective, he gives credence to the strange events that occur in the work and provides an opportunity for the reader to follow the thread of the deranged mind of the madman and share their particular phobia.
The main character, throughout the story, expresses an altered state after he starts drinking alcohol. His schizophrenic behavior is manifested in an initial gelophobia, or fear of cats, which gradually worsens. His fears and obsessions give rise, first, to sadism and, finally, to murder. Although this was unintentional, the character acts with an unusual coldness, distances himself emotionally from the events, and shows no remorse.
Structure and Atmosphere
The fragment may be structured in two parts that respond to the disorder of the split personality that the murderer ultimately suffers:
In the first (from the beginning of the paragraph to “…behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my heart”), the scene is set during the time when the police search the house “again.” The main character had not minded too much the first search, because in the story he does not refer to it, but he is not too concerned about this one either. Self-sufficient and confident, he says, “I did not feel the slightest concern,” “I followed without shaking a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who sleeps in innocence.” In short, he is what is called an organized murderer, with enough cynicism to refer to his victim as “the wife of my heart.”
Note that Poe focuses the perspective only on the mind of the protagonist, who is concerned and focused on the absolute control of his body, so that no inadvertent gesture may betray him and arouse suspicion. Therefore, he controls how he walks, the attitude of his arms, and even the beating of his heart. In contrast, the outside world is a blur: the police do not speak, are not described, are only seen up and down the basement, and although “no hole or corner [is] left unrevised,” neither the house nor his belongings are described at any time.
It is from the time the search is over when the uncontrolled mind of the protagonist is unleashed (in my frantic desire to say something naturally, I almost did not realize my words) and he reveals to the police the exact location of the bricked-up body. The protagonist has betrayed himself, against his wishes, driven by a primitive force that the narrator calls the Imp of the Perverse. The narrator has blamed the successive moral violations he has committed throughout the story, and now this force will lead him to self-destruction.
The second part (from “May God protect me and free me…” until the end) precipitates the denouement. The cat, which presumably was introduced into the hole in the wall beside the corpse and which had remained locked up the four days after the murder, was possibly frightened by the sound of blows and let out an eerie caterwauling. This auditory impact is followed by a terrible visual impact when the wall falls. Poe does not exclude gory details for their effect: the corrupt body, gore, the cat with its single eye, red lips…
But this level of interpretation of reality does not match that of the schizophrenic mind of the protagonist, who was “prey to vertigo.” The object of his phobias, the cat he believed missing, appears again to do even more damage, to send him now to death (…the hideous beast whose craft had led me to murder and whose voice gave me to the executioner).
Symbolism and Psychological Horror
Although the cat has been a mythical animal, adored by the Egyptians and in the Middle Ages regarded as a symbol of the devil and the metamorphic body of witches, it is not recreated by the author as a necessarily damned animal. The animal in this story is only the destabilizing component of the sick mind of the protagonist. Terror is not motivated by an external, fantastic, or supernatural factor, but by the phobia and the nightmare that is generated in the mind of the protagonist. This is what has been called the genre of psychological horror, founded by the American author.
Elements of Storytelling
All the elements of storytelling: character, action, time, and space, serve the mysterious atmosphere. A disturbing timelessness is achieved by not providing a physical description or name for both the protagonist and the space in which he moves. The latter is closed, which promotes concentration on the psychology of the sick mind, and urban, a characteristic of Poe’s work, widely criticized by other writers of the genre. But, undoubtedly, it is the domain of internal time in the story, which is accelerated enormously in the second part of the text, that gives the prose a rhythm in line with the deranged mental condition suffered by the murderer.
Stylistic Analysis
Stylistically, Allan Poe’s prose is characterized by its sobriety. In the first half, simple syntactic periods dominate, or at most, sentences with a subordinate clause. The language is uncluttered and sometimes verges on the colloquial, for example, “left no hole or corner without review,” and he selects adjectives and adverbs that ponder the idea of self-control and impunity: “I did not feel the slightest concern,” “the heart beating quietly,” “walked calmly,” “completely satisfied.”
We said above that dialogue does not appear; however, the direct intervention of the protagonist does appear. This action serves to highlight the crucial moment when his mind loses control, leaving his words to puzzle the reader.
The rhetorical exclamations that open and close the second part emphasize the unexpected outcome and the surprise effect and give way to a more elaborate style. Asyndeton predominates in the narrative, speeding up the pace, which momentarily calms with copulative coordination at the ends of the two paragraphs, only to immediately re-accelerate, even reserving a final exclamation with the intention of leaving the reader overwhelmed.
To produce the auditory impact in the penultimate paragraph, gradation of sound is used: the echo of the blow happens first, “a cry,” then a “continuous scream,” and ends in “a howl.” These sounds are qualified with a regular number of epithets that grows with the same intensity, graduating first, “deaf and broken,” then “long, sharp and continuous scream, abnormal.” The same order and structure are found in the similes associated with these sounds: first one: “like the sobbing of a child,” then two, and they are terrible and sinister: “and could only have sprung up in hell from the throat of the damned in their agony and the jubilant demons in condemnation.” The images grow uncontrollably and hyperbolically: from children to the devil, from the creepy sob to the metaphor of a “hell of the throat.”
The description is highly concentrated; nothing distracts the reader’s attention, not even the police when they drop the wall, of which only the arms are metonymically selected (“a dozen strong arms attacked the wall.”) The visual impact presents a grotesque picture of the dead woman crowned with the one-eyed cat; the scene is colored with different shades of red, dark in the background (clotted blood) and very vivid up above (with the red mouth open and one eye as fire). The latter simile about the figure of the cat definitively embodies a supernatural evil force, which the protagonist calls “beast” and “monster.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, the fragment shows a strong concentration of action, time, space, and style in the service of the psychological terror that the protagonist suffers, and the setting does not exclude the gory details of American Dark Romanticism.
The Black Cat’s Relevance Today
The timelessness of the story’s disturbing fantasy, which we imagined in the nineteenth century, continues to resonate today. The modern reader can connect with Poe’s subject and aesthetics for several reasons, among which are the following: First, the urban space, a risky bet at the time, allows us now to imagine our strange neighbor exhibiting the antisocial behaviors portrayed by Poe. Second, our society is concerned about the psychological consequences that derive from the consumption of toxic substances. Finally, we emphasize the influence of this literature on the birth, in the 1970s and 1980s, of an entire subculture known as Gothic. Post-punk music in the United Kingdom, death rock, and other subgenres revolve around the dark sounds and aesthetics of gothic rock, which have had many followers in recent years and which are known by the nicknames of gothic, dark, sinister, batcave, etc.