"The Black Cat" by Edgar Allan Poe has elements of the
supernatural common in many of Poe's short stories and
poetry.
The black cat that lives with the main character
appears supernatural. The idea is introduced with his wife's concern about the cat's
color and witchcraft.
...my wife, who at heart was not a
little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular
notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in
disguise.
The cat's name is
"Pluto," which could refer to the Greek's mythology and religion as the god of the
underworld...
the god was also known as Hades, a name for the
underworld itself
"Plutos" is
at times used in Latin literature as the ruler of the dead. We can surmise that Poe
intentionally used this name to symbolize death and promote the motif of death in the
story. The reader sees the growing intensity of the speaker's madness and drunkenness
with his violent attack of Pluto, cutting out his eye. Time passes and the speaker's
madness intensifies until he takes the cat out and hangs it from a tree next to his
house. That same night, the house catches fire. The link here between "disaster and
atrocity" seems supernatural as well.
The "other-wordly"
does not stop. The next day there is a "three-dimensional image" on one of the house's
walls. It is the figure of a giant cat with a rope around its neck. The speaker is at
first petrified by what he sees, but soon rationalizes the image and forgets about it.
The narrator calls himself "perverse," and he shows this trait when he decides to get
another black cat. There are two strange things about
this cat: it has sight out of only one eye
(like Pluto), and a white patch on its chest that grows in size after the speaker takes
it home—into the shape of a gallows.
The narrator's
insanity intensifies and he begins to hate the cat. The more he avoids it, the more
attached the cat becomes. This could be an eerie sort of supernatural punishment for
killing Pluto. One day while walking into the cellar with his wife (with an axe in his
hand), the speaker takes a swing, trying to kill the cat. His wife stops him; he pulls
the axe back again and instead, kills his wife, but the cat
disappears.
It is imperative for the speaker to hide his
wife's body and he wants to avoid taking it outside, so he puts the corpse in an
enclosure behind a reconstructed wall.
I determined to wall it up in the cellar—as the
monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their
victims.
Four days later, the
police arrive and want to search the house. The speaker must accompany them. He is calm
and unworried, but then as the police prepare to leave, he tells them to look at the
wall.
"...these walls are solidly put together”; and
here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with [my] cane...upon that
very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of [my]
wife.
As he taps on it, a
"hair-raising" sound is heard:
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...
He had
walled the cat up with the body. A superstitious perception might
be that Pluto has returned in the form of the second cat, and—in
triumph—has his revenge on the man who
killed him.
No comments:
Post a Comment