The Black Cat (short story)
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| Author | Edgar Allan Poe |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror short story |
| Publisher | The Saturday Evening Post |
| Media Type | Print (periodical) |
| Released | August 1843 |
"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". 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. "The Black Cat" is the less well known of the two, probably because it is longer and less tight as a narrative. However, its spaciousness allows a more extensive exploration of the themes of violence, hatred, and guilt, as well as a more mystical, mysterious setting and a chilling end. The narrarator claims he is sane.
[edit] Plot summary
The story opens in a style typical of Poe’s works. An unnamed narrator claims to be perfectly sane and logical, yet the manner of his writing and the story he goes on to relate both seem to prove otherwise. Poe uses an unreliable narrator.
The narrator loves animals. He and his wife have many pets, including a large black cat 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 intoxicated, he wishes the cat out of his presence, and tries to remove him physically. The cat then bites the narrator, and in a fit of rage, he seizes the animal, pulls a pen-knife from his pocket, and gouges out the cat’s eye.
From that moment onward, the cat (understandably) 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 remorselessly hangs it from a tree, where it dies. That very night, his house mysteriously catches on fire forcing the narrator and his wife to flee.
The next day, the narrator returns to the ruins of his home to find, imprinted on the single wall that survived the fire, the figure of a gigantic cat, hanging by its neck from a rope.
At first, this image terrifies the narrator, but gradually he determines a logical explanation for it, and begins to miss Pluto. 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.
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. In a fury, the man grabs an axe and tries to kill the cat but is stopped by his wife. Enraged, he buries the axe in her skull instead. To conceal her body he places her in a corner of the room and walls up the space. When the police came to investigate, they find nothing and the narrator goes free. The cat, which he intended to kill as well, has gone missing.
On the last day of the investigation, the narrator accompanies the police into the cellar. There, 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 wailing sound fills the room. The alarmed police tear down the wall and find the wife’s corpse, and on her head the screeching black cat who has apparently been eating her.
His secret discovered, the narrator is sentenced to the gallows.
[edit] Major themes
A recurring theme in the works of Poe is the spirit of perverseness, defined in "The Black Cat" as the longing "to do wrong for the wrong's sake only". The hanging of the cat out of pure spite is a deed done out of the spirit of perverseness. Perhaps the narrator’s adoption of another animal just like Pluto is also for the sole purpose of further tormenting its spirit. With the assistance of alcohol, the narrator in essence drives himself insane by indulging in transgressions. This leads to the killing of his wife, and knocking on the very wall behind which her body was hidden.
This story also deals in the fantastic. The boundary between "reality" and "fantasy" is somewhat hazy throughout the story. It is mentioned, in the beginning, that the narrator’s wife sometimes joked that Pluto was a witch in disguise, as is the superstition of black cats. Not only is "Pluto" the Roman name for Hades, the god of the Underworld, the apparently coincidental burning of the narrator’s house on the very night of Pluto’s death is also suspicious. Is that a consequence, perhaps a curse, created by the cat, or simply an accident? The impression of the cat on the wall seems especially surreal, but the narrator makes a logical excuse for this as well.
Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd — by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.
The appearance of the second cat, the gallows on its chest, and all the subsequent events are also highly coincidental, yet not altogether impossible. The reader can believe that this story is entirely logical, but the extreme improbability of the circumstances suggests otherwise.
[edit] External links
- 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
- Free audio recording of "The Black Cat" from Librivox
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|---|
| Poems |
|
Poetry (1824) • O, Tempora! O, Mores! (1825) • Song (1827) • Imitation (1827) • Spirits of the Dead (1827) • A Dream (1827) • Stanzas (1827) • Tamerlane (1827) • The Lake (1827) • Evening Star (1827) • A Dream (1827) • To Margaret (1827) • The Happiest Day (1827) • To The River —— (1828) (1828) • Romance (1829) • Fairy-Land (1829) • To Science (1829) • To Isaac Lea (1829) • Al Aaraaf (1829) • An Acrostic (1829) • Elizabeth (1829) • To Helen (1831) • A Paean (1831) • The Sleeper (1831) • The City in the Sea (1831) • The Valley of Unrest (1831) • Israfel (1831) • The Coliseum (1833) • Enigma (1833) • Fanny (1833) • Serenade (1833) • Song of Triumph from Epimanes (1833) • Latin Hymn (1833) • To One in Paradise (1833) • Hymn (1835) • Politician (1835) • May Queen Ode (1836) • Spiritual Song (1836) • Bridal Ballad (1837) • To Zante (1837) • The Haunted Palace (1839) • Silence, a Sonnet (1839) • Lines on Joe Locke (1843) • The Conqueror Worm (1843) • Lenore (1843) • Eulalie (1843) • A Campaign Song (1844) • Dream-Land (1844) • Impromptu. To Kate Carol (1845) • To Frances (1845) • The Divine Right of Kings (1845) • Epigram for Wall Street (1845) • The Raven (1845) • A Valentine (1846) • Beloved Physician (1847) • An Enigma (1847) • Deep in Earth (1847) • Ulalume (1847) • Lines on Ale (1848) • To Marie Louise (1848) • Evangeline (1848) • Eldorado (1849) • For Annie (1849) • The Bells (1849) • Annabel Lee (1849) • A Dream Within A Dream (1850) • Alone (1875) |
| Tales |
| Metzengerstein (1832) • The Duc De L'Omelette (1832) • A Tale of Jerusalem (1832) • Loss of Breath (1832) • Bon-Bon (1832) • MS. Found in a Bottle (1833) • The Assignation (1834) • Berenice (1835) • Morella (1835) • Lionizing (1835) • The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall (1835) • King Pest (1835) • Shadow - A Parable (1835) • Four Beasts in One - The Homo-Cameleopard (1836) • Mystification (1837) • Silence - A Fable (1837) • Ligeia (1838) • How to Write a Blackwood Article (1838) • A Predicament (1838) • The Devil in the Belfry (1839) • The Man That Was Used Up (1839) • The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) • William Wilson (1839) • The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839) • Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling (1840) • The Business Man (1840) • The Man of the Crowd (1840) • The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) • A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841) • The Island of the Fay (1841) • The Colloquy of Monos and Una (1841) • Never Bet the Devil Your Head (1841) • Eleonora (1841) • Three Sundays in a Week (1841) • The Oval Portrait (1842) • The Masque of the Red Death (1842) • The Landscape Garden (1842) • The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) • The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) • The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) • The Gold-Bug (1843) • The Black Cat (1843) • Diddling (1843) • The Spectacles (1844) • A Tale of the Ragged Mountains (1844) • The Premature Burial (1844) • Mesmeric Revelation (1844) • The Oblong Box (1844) • The Angel of the Odd (1844) • Thou Art the Man (1844) • The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. (1844) • The Purloined Letter (1844) • The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1845) • Some Words with a Mummy (1845) • The Power of Words (1845) • The Imp of the Perverse (1845) • The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845) • The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) • The Sphinx (1846) • The Cask of Amontillado (1846) • The Domain of Arnheim (1847) • Mellonta Tauta (1849) • Hop-Frog (1849) • Von Kempelen and His Discovery (1849) • X-ing a Paragrab (1849) • Landor's Cottage (1849) |
| Other Works |
| Essays: Maelzel's Chess Player (1836) • The Daguerreotype (1840) • The Philosophy of Furniture (1840) • A Few Words on Secret Writing (1841) • The Rationale of Verse (1843) • Morning on the Wissahiccon (1844) • Old English Poetry (1845) • The Philosophy of Composition (1846) • The Poetic Principle (1846) • Eureka (1848) Hoaxes: • The Balloon-Hoax (1844) Novels: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) • The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) Plays: Scenes From 'Politian' (1835) Other: The Conchologist's First Book (1839) • The Light-House (1849) |
