The Black Cat

Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Born: January 19, 1809; Boston, Massachusetts
Died: October 7, 1849; Baltimore, Maryland

Type of Plot: Psychological
Time of Work: The mid-nineteenth century
Locale: An unnamed American city

Principal Characters: 

The narrator, an educated man and animal lover turned alcoholic, ailurophobe, and murderer 

His wife, sensitive and silent-suffering 

Pluto, the couple's first pet black cat 

A second black cat, one-eyed, which is adopted by the couple 

Told in the first person by an unreliable narrator (a term designating one who either consciously or unconsciously distorts the truth), the story can be seen to be divided into two parts, each of which builds toward a climactic physical catastrophe: in the first part, the narrator's mutilation and later murder of a favorite pet, as well as a fire that destroys all he and his wife own; in the second part, the narrator's ax murder of his wife, followed by his arrest and death sentence.

Opening with both suspense and mystery in his revelation that he wants to “unburden” his soul because he will die the next day, the narrator gives details (with unwitting ironic ramifications) of his early love for animals and marriage to a woman of the same sentiments, who presents him with many pets. Among these is his favorite, a black cat, whose name, Pluto (Greek god of the underworld), foreshadows the narrator's descent into the murky regions of alcoholism, self-deception, and violence.

When he does later succumb to alcoholism, the narrator shortly thereafter begins maltreating his wife and pets, which gives a double meaning to his term for drinking, “Fiend Intemperance,” referring not only to alcohol abuse but also to intemperate transgression of rational thought and behavior. Eventually the narrator maltreats “even Pluto” (which implies that the cat was valued more than his wife, whom he has maltreated earlier). One night, presumably out of frustration, he seizes the cat, which has been avoiding him. When it bites him, the narrator says he became “possessed” by a “demon” and with his pocket knife cut out one of the cat's eyes. At first grieved and then irritated by the consequences of his action, the narrator says that he was then “overthrown” by “the spirit of PERVERSENESS” (author's capitalization), Edgar Allan Poe's definition of which anticipates by a half century psychologist Sigmund Freud's concepts of the id (unconscious desires to do all things, even wrongs, for pleasure's sake) and the death wish (the impulse within all for self-destruction). The “spirit of PERVERSENESS” causes the narrator, even while weeping, to hang Pluto in a neighboring garden. That night a fire destroys his house and all his worldly wealth, and the next day the narrator discovers on the only wall that remains standing the raised gigantic image on its surface of a hanged cat.

His alcoholism continuing, the narrator one night at a disreputable tavern discovers another black cat, which he befriends and adopts (by implication making a substitution out of guilt and remorse), as does his wife. For this double (a frequent motif in Poe's works), however, the narrator rapidly develops a loathing. First, it has only one eye, which reminds him of his crimes against Pluto. Second, it is too friendly—an ironic inversion of the common complaint that cats are too aloof, as the narrator complained about Pluto. Third, it has a white patch on its breast that to the guilty narrator's imagination looks more and more like a gallows, which points both backward to his hanging of Pluto and, unknown to him, forward to his hanging for the murder of his wife.

One day, with his wife on an errand into the cellar of their decrepit old house, the narrator, infuriated when he is almost tripped on the stairs by the cat, starts to kill it with an ax, is stopped by his wife, and then instead kills her with the ax. With insane calmness and ratiocination, the narrator concocts and implements a plan of concealing the corpse in a cellar wall. Meanwhile, the cat, which has tormented his dreams, has vanished, allowing him to sleep—despite his wife's murder. Inquiries are made about his missing wife, however, and on the fourth day after the murder, the police come for a thorough search. As they are about to leave the cellar, the narrator, apparently with taunting bravado but really with unconscious guilt that seeks to delay them so he may be arrested and punished, remarks to them on the solidity of the house's walls, rapping with a cane the very spot of the concealed tomb. When a horrible scream is emitted from the wall, the police break down the bricks, discover the corpse with the black cat howling on its head, and arrest the criminal. Rationalizing to the end, the narrator blames the cat for his misdeeds and capture: “the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman.”

The story has many themes, most of them relating to human psychology and several in the form of contraries: reason versus the irrational; human being versus animal; self-knowledge versus self-deception; sanity versus madness; love versus hate; good versus evil; the power of obsession and guilt; and the sources or motives of crime. As in many of his works, Poe is interested in the borderline between opposites and how it may be crossed.

Despite the narrator's explicit claim of sanity in the story's first paragraph, he immediately shows himself self-deceived by terming his story “a series of mere household events.” Further, by the end of the first paragraph the narrator has circled to a contradictory position by expressing his hope for a calmer, more logical, and “less excitable” mind than his own to make sense of the narrative. A favorite adjective of his for pets, “sagacious,” which he uses early in the story for both dogs and his cat Pluto, thus ironically indicates the wisdom he himself needs both to see life clearly and not to give in to the irrationality of drinking or violent behavior. What should distinguish man from beast—this is, the faculty of reason—the narrator too frequently abandons, a weakness expressed in the animal metaphor of his “rabid desire to say something easily” to the police searchers.

His early reference to admiring the “unselfish and self-sacrificing love” of animals reveals the narrator's blindness; ironically, his scornful words, “the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man” (author's italics), apply to himself. The narrator later reveals that his dipsomania is self-indulgent and self-loving because he “grew . . . regardless of the feelings of others” and dimly perceived that he had lost the “humanity of feeling” (compassion) that his wife retained.

Sheer emphasis or proportion in the story—the great number of words he spends on the cats contrasted with the brevity of his remarks about the maltreatment and murder of his wife—indicates the deficiency in both the narrator's insight and his feelings. He cannot see that guilt causes him to forestall mentioning his greatest misdeed until the story's end, while his feeling for his wife was too weak to prevent his murdering her. The narrator cannot see that his killing her is not a mere deflection from his murderous purpose, but its true aim, whose motives are laid down in the sixth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-second paragraphs of the story. Mutely representing goodness, she has been a constant irritant to him, one on whom he can vent all of his pent-up feelings in one blow.

Besides the narrator's ironic self-contradiction or unwitting irony, Poe's other most pervasive technique in the story is symbolism. Symbols of perception include the narrator's particular mutilation of Pluto, for like his pet, the narrator is half-blind, not only in the past, in the story he relates, but also in the present, when he still cannot understand what it all means. In the past he was half-blinded by drink, and in both the past and present by guilt, rationalizing, or unwillingness to see unpleasant things. For example, though he claims to have been “half stupefied” when he first became aware of the second black cat, only a consuming if unacknowledged sense of guilt can explain his asserted failure to notice that it was one-eyed until after it was home, despite his prior continued petting of it in the tavern and detailed notice of its markings. He wanted an exact substitute, with the same injury, in order to punish himself. The words “half”’ “equivocal,” and “blindly,” which the narrator applies to himself at various times, reveal his defective vision.

Symbols of rationality and its defeat can be found in the narrator's horrible act of burying the ax in his wife's “brain”—a word that emphasizes thinking more than the word “skull” would. In this act, the narrator has in effect extinguished his own rationality, as well as its chief human representative in his sphere. Further, when the brick wall is broken down, the black cat is found perched on the corpse's head, one more indication of the narrator's guilt (recalling the site of the wound) and its cause.

Among the symbols of “humanity of feeling” is the second cat's marking. It has, in the narrator's phrasing, “a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.” Moreover, the cat has, the narrator says, a habit of “fastening its long claws in my dress” to “clamber, in this manner, to my breast.” Finally, the cat will not let him sleep; he awakens with it on his chest: “its vast weight [was] . . . incumbent on my heart!” (Poe's italics). The repeated references to “bosom” “breast,” and especially “heart” point to the narrator's fatal deficiency of love and compassion.

Finally, several strands of symbols help express the conflict between good and evil. The very scene of the crime, a cellar, recalls the suggestive name of the narrator's first black cat and represents the narrator's descent into the darkness of irrationality, the forces of the unconscious mind, and evil. Comparable imagery of spirited darkness can be found in the narrator's recollection that, prior to the murder, “the darkest and most evil thoughts” had become habitual to him; in like manner, he refers to his wife's murder as “my dark deed.” The interrelation between consciousness and conscience is suggested by the narrator's keeping his wife's corpse in this dark underworld, after walling her off—analogues of psychological repression.

Finally, the cat's howl in response to the narrator's rapping of the wall is described in symbolic terms: It begins as a muffled cry, “like the sobbing of a child,” but quickly swells into a “continuous scream . . . 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.” In capsule form, this utterance describes the whole of the narrator's life—and death.

Essay by: Norman Prinsky

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