18B. "The Black Cat" (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

"Edgar Allan Poe" by Pablo Lopez

Aesthetics: How Would the Cat Survive?
1) The cat also survives within the wall for four days, which a normal cat probably would not be able to do?

Ideology: Domestic Abuse

2) With his violent outbursts the narrator tries to defend himself by trying to reason that “Who has not… found himself committing a vile or a silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not,” and that his violence was “because I knew it had loved me” (Poe). Domestic abusers often use these phrases to try and make others see sense in their actions or prevent consequences from arising.

Ideology: Do We Become What We Read?
3) His stories and poems have always been too dark to me, and I think this can be damaging to the human soul if we’re not careful. While it is not wrong to wrestle with hard truths in life, I do not recommend glorifying darkness or wickedness, and I think Poe is a villain of the arts because of this. I believe that art was and is meant to glorify God, and although mankind is fallen, we should not dwell too heavily on that fact, but look to the One Who made us and gave His Son to save sinners.

Ideology: Rage-aholic
4) The fact that the character later kills Pluto in a fit of rage demonstrates how men have difficulty controlling their anger even when it comes to a “friendship” that has lasted for several years. This idea is further supported by the main character killing his wife after the “blow was arrested by [her] hand” and she endures her husband’s wrath that was originally meant for the new cat. Before her death, the wife attempts to keep the main character from ruining another good relationship even though he has already damaged his with her, implying the difference in “cruel” men and “uncomplaining” women.

Ideology: Alcohol and the Author
5) Despite being a once good and caring man, due to his excessive consumption of alcohol he “grew, day by day, […] more regardless of the feelings of others,” and he began to “offer [his wife] personal violence,” and of his many pets he “not only neglected, but ill-used them” (767). Despite how Poe makes a character so easy to dislike, its concerning that Poe himself had his own experiences with alcohol, and that his explanation on the “spirit of Perverseness” could come from a place of personal experience. He explains that the horrible actions he carried out upon poor Pluto were due to “the unfathomable longing for the soul to vex itself- […]- to do wrong for wrong’s sake only” (767). Though he does not put much effort into displaying how to avoid or cope with this state of mental extremity, he describes the demented place’s atmosphere in such a way to invite the consideration of the “spirit of perverseness” and where and how it manifests in our lives.

Ideology: Self-Hatred
6) The narrator is slowly losing his humanity throughout the story, and when he sees the kindness of his cat and his wife, he becomes enraged and bitter at what he himself has become. This is why he lashes out and kills them.

Ideology: The Witch Made Me Do It
7) Poe does not depict a man who merely exclaims his own innocence, rather, he creates a character who shifts accountability and blame onto a black cat—not necessarily directly, but surely indirectly. The narrator first creates his red herring in his saying, “[My wife] made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. […] I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered,” and although it may be that black cats, and in particular, this black cat, is a supernatural force of nature to be reckoned with, the cat is used, effectively, in this story to justify a drunkard’s explosive anger and arrogance.

Aesthetics: For the Horror of It

8) There [are] several schools of thought regarding why humans enjoy the horror genre; excitation transfer theory proposes that enjoyment of horror (films, in this context) comes from the suspense of a threat, which Poe creates in the narrated telling of this story of the black cat and the escalating nature of the narrator’s transgressions against said cat. The theory further proposes that when the threat is resolved, a “euphoria” is born and the suspense is overcome. The empathetic reader’s resolution is offered directly in this story, as Poe writes, “No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!—by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman—a howl—a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.” At last! Our conflicted, habitually violent protagonist is damned by his own folly; the black cat he so brutishly struck down avenges his murdered wife, and we, as readers, get to enjoy the afterglow of deserved poetic justice. Alternatively, some theories about enjoyment of the horror genre are built upon precepts from the Five Factor Model, suggesting that those who are high in sensation-seeking may be more apt to turn to horror as form of entertainment. Thus, I propose that Poe effectively captures the off-putting nature of a horror tale, and he demonstrates that humans are drawn to what affirms their own safety and what disturbs them absolutely—ironically, in this context, the two coalesce into one.

Ideology: The Black Cat as Slave?

Lesley Ginsburg "Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe's 'The Black Cat'" (1998)

• "Not only does 'The Black Cat' reproduce the struggle between a helpless dependent and an abusive tyrant which figures so prominently in both gothic fictions and abolitionist discourses, but the crumbling edifice of denial exposed by the narrator's confession deconstructs the sentimental strategies of repression so common to antebellum rhetoric" (376).
• ". . . critics have shown that the story reflects contemporary sensationalist fictions, parodies the temperance confessional, and critiques the growing acceptance of the insanity defense in antebellum courtrooms (Reynolds, Matheson, Cleman). But the tale also invokes other discourses central to the 1830s and 1840s, including its rehearsal of the scene of pet abuse so often featured in antebellum child-rearing manuals and its repetition of the obsessive pitting of black against white, dependency against freedom and animal against human, which fueled contemporary debates over chattel slavery and social reform" (376).
• "At the core of the proslavery ideology was the equation of slaves with animals" (380)
• ". . . proslavery rhetoric was quick to sentimentalize the relationship of master and slave by repeated allusions to the cloying imagery of the bonds between humans and domesticated animals, esspecially pets" (381)