The Black Cat (short story)

"The Black Cat" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".^[2] In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt.

Plot

Illustration for "The Black Cat" by Aubrey Beardsley (1894–1895)

The story is presented as a first-person narrative using an unreliable narrator. He is a condemned man at the outset of the story.^[3] The narrator tells us that from an early age he has loved animals. He and his wife have many pets, including a large, beautiful black cat (as described by the narrator) named Pluto. This cat is especially fond of the narrator and vice versa. Their mutual friendship lasts for several years, until the narrator becomes an alcoholic. One night, after coming home completely intoxicated, he believes the cat to be avoiding him. When he tries to seize it, the panicked cat bites the narrator, and in a fit of rage, he seizes the animal, pulls a pen-knife from his pocket, and deliberately gouges out the cat's eye.

From that moment onward, the cat flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the narrator is remorseful and regrets his cruelty. "But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness." He takes the cat out in the garden one morning and ties a noose around its neck, hanging it from a tree where it dies. That very night, his house mysteriously catches fire, forcing the narrator, his wife and their servant to flee the premises.

The next day, the narrator returns to the ruins of his home to find, imprinted on the single wall that survived the fire, the apparition of a gigantic cat, with a rope around the animal's neck.

At first, this image deeply disturbs the narrator, but gradually he determines a logical explanation for it, that someone outside had cut the cat from the tree and thrown the dead creature into the bedroom to wake him during the fire. The narrator begins to miss Pluto, feeling guilty. Some time later, he finds a similar cat in a tavern. It is the same size and color as the original and is even missing an eye. The only difference is a large white patch on the animal's chest. The narrator takes it home, but soon begins to loathe, even fear the creature. After a time, the white patch of fur begins to take shape and, to the narrator, forms the shape of the gallows. This terrifies and angers him more, and he avoids the cat whenever possible. Then, one day when the narrator and his wife are visiting the cellar in their new home, the cat gets under its master's feet and nearly trips him down the stairs. Enraged, the man grabs an axe and tries to kill the cat but is stopped by his wife- whom, out of fury, he kills instead. To conceal her body he removes bricks from a protrusion in the wall, places her body there, and repairs the hole. A few days later, when the police show up at the house to investigate the wife's disappearance, they find nothing and the narrator goes free. The cat, which he intended to kill as well, has also gone missing. This grants him the freedom to sleep, even with the burden of murder.

On the last day of the investigation, the narrator accompanies the police into the cellar. They still find nothing significant. Then, completely confident in his own safety, the narrator comments on the sturdiness of the building and raps upon the wall he had built around his wife's body. A loud, inhuman wailing sound fills the room. The alarmed police tear down the wall and find the wife's corpse, and on its rotting head, to the utter horror of the narrator, is the screeching black cat. As he words it: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"

Publication history

"The Black Cat" was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. At the time, the publication was using the temporary title United States Saturday Post.^[4] Readers immediately responded favorably to the story, spawning parodies including Thomas Dunn English's "The Ghost of the Grey Tadpole".^[5]

Analysis

Like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator of "The Black Cat" has questionable sanity. Near the beginning of the tale, the narrator says he would be "mad indeed" if he should expect a reader to believe the story, implying that he has already been accused of madness.^[6]

The extent to which the narrator claims to have loved his animals suggests mental instability in the form of having “too much of a good thing”. His partiality for animals substitutes “the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man”. Since the narrator’s wife shares his love of animals, he likely thinks of her as another pet, seeing as he distrusts and dislikes humans. Additionally, his failure to understand his excessive love of animals foreshadows his inability to explain his motives for his actions.^[7]

One of Poe's darkest tales, "The Black Cat" includes his strongest denunciation of alcohol. The narrator's perverse actions are brought on by his alcoholism, a "disease" and "fiend" which also destroys his personality.^[8] The use of the black cat evokes various superstitions, including the idea voiced by the narrator's wife that they are all witches in disguise. Poe owned a black cat. In his "Instinct vs Reason -- A Black Cat" he stated: The writer of this article is the owner of one of the most remarkable black cats in the world - and this is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches.^[9] In Scottish and Irish mythology, the Cat Sìth is described as being a black cat with a white spot on its chest, not unlike the cat the narrator finds in the tavern. The titular cat is named Pluto after the Roman god of the Underworld.

• The Doppelgänger – see also "William Wilson"
• Guilt – see also "The Tell-Tale Heart"

Although Pluto is a neutral character at the beginning of the story, he becomes antagonistic in the narrator’s eyes once the narrator becomes an alcoholic. The alcohol pushes the narrator into fits of intemperance and violence, to the point at which everything angers him – Pluto in particular, who is always by his side, becomes the malevolent witch who haunts him even while avoiding his presence. When the narrator cuts Pluto’s eye from its socket, this can be seen as symbolic of self-inflicted partial blindness to his own vision of moral goodness.^[7]

The fire that destroys the narrator’s house symbolizes the narrator’s "almost complete moral disintegration".^[7] The only remainder is the impression of Pluto upon the wall, which represents his unforgivable and incorrigible sin.^[7]

From a rhetorician's standpoint, an effective scheme of omission that Poe employs is diazeugma, or using many verbs for one subject; it omits pronouns. Diazeugma emphasizes actions and makes the narrative swift and brief.^[10]

Adaptations

• In 1910–11 Futurist artist Gino Severini painted "The Black Cat" in direct reference to Poe's short story.
  

  The Black Cat, 1910–1911. A painting by Gino Severini
• Universal Pictures made two films titled The Black Cat, one in 1934, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and another in 1941, starring Lugosi and Basil Rathbone. Both films claimed to have been "suggested by" Poe's story, but neither bears any resemblance to the tale aside from the presence of a black cat.^[5] Elements of Poe's story were, however, used in the 1934 film Maniac.^[11]
• "The Black Cat" was adapted into a 7-page comic strip in Yellowjack Comics #1 (1944).
• Sept. 18, 1947, Mystery in the Air Radio Program with Peter Lorre as the Protagonist in The Black Cat. Note: eye is not gouged out. Instead the cat's ear is torn.
• The middle segment of director Roger Corman's 1962 anthology film Tales of Terror combines the story of "The Black Cat" with that of another Poe tale, "The Cask of Amontillado."^[5] This version stars Peter Lorre as the main character (given the name Montresor Herringbone) and Vincent Price as Fortunato Luchresi.
• In 1970, Czech writer Ludvík Vaculík made many references to "A Descent into the Maelström" as well as "The Black Cat" in his novel The Guinea Pigs.
• Writer/director Lucio Fulci's 1981 film The Black Cat is loosely based on Poe's tale.
• The 1990 film Two Evil Eyes presents two Poe tales, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" and "The Black Cat." The former was written and directed by George A. Romero while the latter was written and directed by Dario Argento. This version stars Harvey Keitel in the lead role.
• In 1997, a compilation of Poe's work was released on a double CD entitled Closed on Account of Rabies, with various celebrities lending their voices to the tales. The Black Cat was read by avant-garde performer Diamanda Galás.
• "The Black Cat" was adapted and performed with "The Cask of Amontillado" as Poe, Times Two: Twin tales of mystery, murder...and mortar—a double-bill of short, one-man plays written and performed by Greg Oliver Bodine. First produced in NYC at Manhattan Theatre Source in 2007, and again at WorkShop Theater Company in 2011. Part of the 2012 season at Cape May Stage in Cape May, NJ.
• "The Black Cat" is the eleventh episode of the second season (2007) of the television series Masters of Horror. The plot essentially retells the short story in a semi-autobiographical manner, with Poe himself undergoing a series of events involving a black cat which he used to inspire the story of the same name.
• In 2011, Hyper Aware Theater Company produced "The Black Cat", one of several Poe stage adaptations written by Lance Tait, as part of its “Gutterdrunk: The Poe Revisions” in New York City.^[12]

References

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: The Black Cat

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Black Cat (Poe).

• Project Gutenberg: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2
• Complete Text at E A Poe Society of Baltimore
• Full text on PoeStories.com with hyperlinked vocabulary words.
• The Poe Decoder: The Black Cat
• The Black Cat public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• Illustration and description of Severini's painting.
• The Black Cat reading by Gerry Hay