The Black Cat is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and was first published in 1843. The story is opened up by an unknown narrator who states that he is insane in spite of the unnatural story of horror he is about to tell. He confesses a great love for animals in the beginning of the story by stating that pets respects the fidelity of friendship better than humans. He was married with a wife and together they loved domestic pets with one of their pets being a black cat named Pluto. The narrator later on developed an alcohol problem which brought him mood swings and rage and ended up torturing and hanging Pluto their pet. When the narrator’s house was caught on fire, he could see Pluto’s picture on the wall. The picture of his cat on the wall was driving him insane because he could not forget the brutal acts he did to the cat. First of all he pierced the cat’s eye thus removing it from the socket and later on hanged it on a tree. His conscious was eaten up by what he did and he decided to procure another cat to replace Pluto. He again develops a hatred for the new cat which he desperately wanted to kill and his wife stopped him, he ended up killing his wife and burying her corpse together with the cat behind the wall. The police came for investigation after his wife’s disappearance and the cat is heard making a cry from the inside of the wall. The protagonist in The Black Cat is a perverse character that gives in to his dark side and annihilates himself through his actions. The narrator succumbs to alcohol and the spirit of perverseness in him causes the decline in his temperament making him become aggressive and violent.
One of the recurrent themes in The Black Cat’s tale is perverseness which is evident in several instances and levels of intensity in the story. The dark tale starts out normally with the narrator having a wife and several pets. Among them is a black cat which the narrator had named Pluto. From the love of his pet Pluto, the narrator now takes him as an adversary after coming home drunk with rage and anger. The narrator claimed in the beginning of the story that he is fond of animals but his alcoholism makes him a different person as he becomes aggressive towards his pet and his wife. The narrator started feeling the spirit of perverseness after his cat started fleeing away from him. The carving of the cat’s eye by the narrator portrays his perverseness as he becomes unsatisfied by his pet’s reaction to his alcohol induced assault. His pet was left with one eye and he could not stand seeing it that way, at times he felt remorseful and the guilt brought him a lot of anger and aggressiveness as he longed to kill it so that he could not see what he has done to it.
Another instance of perverseness in the story is when the narrator hangs his cat Pluto. He was regretful at first for cutting out Pluto’s eyes but later on, he takes Pluto and hangs the cat on a tree. The narrator evidently confesses that "One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree". This was his confession when he killed his pet cat, he says “hung it with tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart", he felt remorse after his unjustifiable acts which depict his perverseness (Poe 2429). The narrator goes beyond the madness which consumes him most of the times in his aggressiveness. The guilt he felt was his driving force to kill.
The narrator in The Black Cat suffers from a raging and uncontrollable perverseness and later on return into a conscious state in which he realizes the chilling horror of his actions. The narrator does inhumane things to the cat but afterwards feels guilty of his actions when it too late mostly after his intoxication with alcohol is over. After the fire, the narrator brings home with another cat to replace Pluto. In his mind he constantly believes that the white patch on the animal’s chest, the only characteristic that sets this cat apart from Pluto, has taken shape and formed an image resembling Pluto and so he starts thinking of killing the cat so that it does not remind him of Pluto. It is evident that he feels guilty and his guilt thoughts are playing tricks on him. Moreover, his conscience is torturing his thoughts as he tries to live with the guilt of killing an innocent cat and now he has another on which he might also end up killing. His guilt makes him loathe and fear the new cat he brought to his house. The narrators mind grow mean as his guilt over killing his first cat develops into hatred of this second cat. Again incensed by alcohol, he attempts to kill the cat again and ends up murdering his own wife and burying her behind the wall together with the cat. The narrator can be seen grabbing an axe and trying to kill the cat when he visited the cellar in their new home together with his wife. When his wife stopped him, he ended killing her with the axe instead (Poe 17). The guilt had overcome him and he never understood what he was doing. From an animal lover to an animal murderer, this perverseness because he does wrong for the wrong’s sake because he cannot stand the rejection he gets from his pet.
According to Einhorn (12), perverseness gives the justification for otherwise uncalled-for acts for example killing the first cat, the narrator killing his wife and plastering a wall behind his wife’s corpse. Hi perverseness made him burry his wife behind the wall without thinking and even reporting that he had committed a crime. Allan Poe’s The Black Cat is a haunting tale that explores the psychology of guilt. The narrator was guilty of everything that he had done but his guilty made him very aggressive thus repeating the same unjustifiable acts of killing. The narrator in the story suffers from a raging and uncontrollable perverseness, he kills his wife out of anger and he even buries him in the wall even without thinking twice. When the police come to ask for the whereabouts of his wife, he does not even confess what he did because of his perverse character. If it was not for the cats cry, he was just quiet about the crime he had committed.
The events in the Black Cat tale makes the reader understand that the main character has gone through extreme transformation that led him into the perverse side of his human nature. The negative effects of alcohol make a man’s nature to be divided between good as they cannot think rationally (Einhorn 67). The narrator was a pet lover and due to drinking, his character changed into wickedness. He began hating his pets to a point of even killing them where he ended up killing his own wife. His mind was not working well and it became uncontrollable and this made him resort to violence, mutilation and eventually murder of his own wife. His irrationality was uncontrollable and all consuming and because he was under the influence of alcohol, no one and nothing could stop him from doing the irrational acts. Perversity became the narrator’s threshold which led him into doing wrong without thinking straight. In the story, he confesses his guilt after successfully committing and getting away with a crime, this act is of confessing crimes already committed is an act of pervasiveness. Perverseness took over the narrator’s character and personality and it led him into taking his anger to commit crimes like killing.
In conclusion, Allan Edgar Poe’s uses the key element of perversity in his tale The Black Cat through a nameless narrator. The tale illustrates best the capacity of the human mind to observe its own deterioration and the ability of the mind to comment upon its own destruction without being able to objectively prevent or halt that deterioration. The narrator is fully aware of his mental deterioration because, he confesses from the beginning of the story that he is insane. Moreover, after recognizing that he is going insane he tries to do something about it but he is unable to reverse his situation of being insane and so he continues doing irrational things. The narrator’s acts are without logic since he does irrational things that are merely out of perversity. In The Black Cat, pervasiveness due to alcoholism and madness provokes the narrator to murder his cat and wife.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat. New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter and Richard Yarborough. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
Einhorn, Anja. Perverseness in Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2002. Print.
