Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat: Madness, Guilt, and Evil
The Black Cat: A Masterpiece of Psychological Horror
Edgar Allan Poe’s Literary Legacy
This text is a fragment of the famous story The Black Cat, a work by American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). It was published in The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia in its issue of August 19, 1843. Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, critic, and journalist of the American Romantic movement. He is generally recognized as one of the universal masters of the short story, being one of the first practitioners of the genre in the country. He renovated the Gothic novel and is remembered for his tales of terror. Considered the inventor of the detective story, Poe also contributed several works to the emerging genre of science fiction. His literary theories and poems, the most famous being The Raven, laid the foundation for modern poetry based on notions of Romanticism and greatly influenced European poetry of the century. His stories combine a tendency toward the fantastic with realistic accuracy and an intriguing plot.
Themes in The Black Cat
The Black Cat is one of the author’s most popular stories, and in this case, it is one of his great psychological stories. Edgar Allan Poe’s story combines two elements: horror and psychology, creating what we call psychological terror.
In the story, three main themes are related:
- Madness: This theme is also present in his other book, The Tell-Tale Heart. The protagonist is affected by his addiction, and alcoholism gives rise to uncontrollable fits of sadistic insanity.
- Guilt: The main character is constantly haunted by guilt after each of his outbursts of dementia and rage.
- Evil: The main character becomes evil toward animals after initially being kind to them. Evil is presented as a product of the misfortunes of his addiction.
A Summary of the Narrative
This story tells the tale of a man who likes pets. However, one night he returns home drunk, and when his cat scratches him, he gouges out one of its eyes in a fit of anger. The protagonist, increasingly stained by anger and alcohol, hangs his cat. That night, his house catches fire, and among the ruins is a stain on a wall resembling a hanged cat. Shortly after, he adopts another black cat, also one-eyed like the first, but with a white patch that gradually transforms to represent the image of a gallows. One night, crazed with rage, he kills his wife and walls up the body. After that, he also aims to kill the cat but cannot find it. Shortly after, the police come to his house.
The Climax and Denouement
At this point comes the climax and denouement of the story. After four days after the murder of his wife, and while the police are inspecting the basement, the protagonist is relaxed and fully confident that his innocence is clear, as he believed that the tomb was undetectable. He was so certain that he could not contain the urge to hit the wall behind which lay the corpse of his wife. It is at this point where the climax of the work occurs because the animal that had disappeared after the murder of the poor woman, at that very moment, gave signs of life, imprisoning and sentencing his evil master to death.