Black Cat - research paper

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Patricia Regina Vieira

Professor Dr.ª Anelise Reich Corseuil

Literatura em Língua Inglesa I

10 July 2014

“The Black Cat”: The Madness of the Narrator

Edgar Allan Poe is a well-known writer of Horror stories. The dark part of Poe

was recognized as Dark Romantic due to his writing’s style. This analysis aims to show,

through the main character, some characteristics of this subgenre present in the short

story “The Black Cat”, written by Poe in 1943.

Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre from the nineteenth century which was

common in America. Works within the dark romantic perspective were based by

Transcendentalism, yet it did not hold the entirely ideas of Transcendentalism, which

basic “was a belief in the spiritual essence of the man and his souls ability to transcend

the physical” (Chandran, 3). Dark romantic’s works explore the dark side of human

experience, such as death, nightmares, ghosts, fears, and bring themes of horror, the

macabre, tragedy and the supernatural.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of major famous writers of the Dark Romanticism. In his

poems and short stories, Poe wrote about this dark side of the humans, worked with the

obscurity of the human mind and its affinity towards the unknown, the supernatural. This

passage in Ukessays demonstrated why Poe was recognized as a dark romanticism:

A Dark Romantic was identified for valuing instinct over logic and reason

as well as thought that human events had definite signs and symbols

behind them. Edgar Allen Poe used the literary skill of symbolism very



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well, of which Dark Romantics were identified to use quite regularly (Poe

3, 1981). Dark Romantics were recognized to explore the dark side of an

issue, but Poe was particularly known for this for the reason that he had a

very mad and unbalanced psyche. Poe made use of conflicts and bad

occurrences from his own life to assist add him in his dark and sinister

writings. (Ukessays.com)

The main character of “The Black Cat” is the narrator. At first, he describes

himself as calmly, lovely; “From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of

my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the

jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my

parents with a great variety of pets.” (Poe, 320) He continues like this in his manhood

and had a black cat named Pluto, his favorite pet and playmate. However, after several

years, he changed. Day by day, he grew more moody, more irritable and more

regardless of the feelings of others. He became an alcoholic and a violent man. He

neglected all of his pets, except Pluto, even his wife was offered danger by him. This,

however, does not take much longer.

One night he returns home drunk and is bitten by the cat and, in a lamp of rage,

he cuts one of the cat’s eyes of. “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew

myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and

a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. “ (Poe

321-322) This part, it is possible to perceive the character’s psychological state start to

change, his madness begins to take control of his body and mind, though the feeling of

guilty still remains the day after his act. When the cat starts to avoid him due to fear,



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“the spirit of perversness” takes control and in cold blood he hangs the cat in a tree and

kills it.

With this character, Poe shows how madness can take control and poisons of the

human mind, show the weakness of the human being:

the spirit of perversness. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I

am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of

the primitive impulses of the human heart —one of the indivisible primary

faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. 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 ? (Poe, 322)

The narrator, a few days after killing Pluto, finds another cat, a black cat, and

takes it home. The new cat resembles Pluto very much, except for a splotch of white

hair nearly the region of the breast. This new cat seems to be a personification of Pluto;

in the next morning, he realizes that the cat does not have an eye, the same eye he

cuts of in Pluto. And the mark of white hair in the cat’s breast corresponds exactly as

gallows. These two facts are enough to drive him completely mad and out of his mind.

He decides to kill the cat again, but this time with an axe, the moment he goes to kill it,

his wife interferes and dies with the buried axe in her brain.

The following moment, instead of feeling guilty, he surprises the reader with an

utterly coldness and serenity, planning how to dispose the wife’s body without no one

realizing. “It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief

which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its

appearance during the night —and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into



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the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder

upon my soul!” (Poe, 328) The cat disappears along with his wife, but the death of his

wife does not affect him; he feels free, because, finally, the beast, as he refers to the

cat, is gone. “Once again I breathed as a free-man. The monster, in terror, had fled the

premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of

my dark deed disturbed me but little.” (Poe, 328)

Within one character Poe is able to demonstrate the dark side of humans, the

weakness linked with the alcohol addiction, the madness, the violence and the lack of

guiltiness. By the other hand, the cat is a symbolism, the second cat, specifically, is the

supernatural existence. Its appearance seems to be the personification of the narrator’s

unconsciousness, which fallows him until the last moment when it shows itself on the

corpse behind the wall.

It’s possible to relate the end of the story to the supernatural, due to the fact that

the end is both rationally possible and tremendously unlikely; since the cat could live in

the basement walls, but it is difficult to believe that it would remain silently in the wall for

a long time or go unnoticed by the overly meticulous narrator. Nevertheless, it may not

be able to confirm that the cat sitting above the corpse is real; it may be only a

projection of the narrator’s insanity and his guilty over floating.



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Works Cited

Chandran, Mini. ”Topics in Literary Movements - Dark Romanticism” (2008) In:

<http://web.stanford.edu/~kvenkat/documents/eng435.pdf>. Web. 7.05.2014

"Dark Romanticism And The Black Cat English Literature Essay." UKessays.com. 11

2013. All Answers Ltd. In: <http://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/dark-

romanticism-and-the-black-cat-english-literature-essay.php?cref=1>. Web. 7.05.2014

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. David

Galloway. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1967. 320-329.

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