27 pages • 54 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Black Cat
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1843A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Sources of Sin
Content Warning: This section references animal cruelty, alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and mental illness.
In its depiction of the narrator’s guilt, “The Black Cat” relies on a Christian framework of sin. Other than his alcohol addiction, the narrator can give no reason for why he murdered his beloved Pluto beyond a “spirit of Perverseness” (225). This tendency, which he describes as an inclination to do wrong simply for its own sake, roughly resembles the notion of original sin—the innate propensity to do wrong, in Christian theology. In other words, while the devil might have tempted humanity into its initial sin, the primary locus of evil in Christianity is internal rather than external.
If sin is universal and inevitable, the best one can do is repent of it, and this is what Christianity typically teaches: that virtually any sin is forgivable if one seeks forgiveness. Here, however, the narrator encounters a stumbling block. For one, it is unclear whether he believes his sin as pardonable; he describes killing Pluto as “a deadly sin that would so jeopardize [his] immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God” (225). This description is ambiguous, evoking God’s relationship to humanity both after and before Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice. The narrator also displaces the guilt of his actions, at least at times, which implies that he does not feel he needs to seek forgiveness after all. For example, he likens the removal of Pluto’s eye to demonic possession: “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame” (224). Lastly, the narrator’s commitment to repentance is ambivalent. Months after killing Pluto, the narrator says that “there came back into [his] spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse” (226).
The narrator is thus unable to fully repent his actions according to the normal cycle of absolution. Furthermore, he does not reform, resolving to murder the second cat and actually killing his wife, after which he experiences little to no guilt. By this point, the narrator has thoroughly externalized the notion of sin, blaming the cat for both the crime and his own moral decay. When the cat disappears, he therefore feels wholly unburdened by conscience, concluding that evil has departed: “Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little” (229). This understanding of his actions persists through the novel’s conclusion, where he associates the cat with the devil—its eye even seems to flame—and calls on God to “shield and deliver [him] from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend” (230). Far from being a cry for forgiveness or even for protection from temptation, this prayer demonstrates that the narrator has come to see himself as the victim of sin rather than its perpetrator.
The Consequences of Alcohol Addiction
The narrator cites his alcohol addiction as a direct cause not only of the story’s events, but also of a radical change in personality. As a young man, the narrator says, caring for and showing affection for animals was one of his “principal sources of pleasure” (223). His cruelty toward his pets thus flies in the face of a central element of his identity, implying that “the fiend Intemperance” has effectively made him a totally different person (224).
Beyond hardening his nature generally, alcohol directly fuels many of the story’s violent incidents. He describes removing Pluto’s eye as follows: “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence” (224). As he attempts to grab Pluto, the cat bites him, sending him into the rage that sparks the maiming. It is pertinent that he describes himself as “much intoxicated” since alcohol lowers one’s inhibitions. Some people become belligerent, and the narrator is no exception. He is looking for offenses from Pluto, and though he has until this moment refrained from treating him cruelly like his other pets, he impulsively takes the cat’s supposed avoidance as grounds for committing his violent act.
It is significant that the narrator finds the second cat while “half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy” resting on “the immense hogheads of gin, or of rum” (226). If one reads the story as the spirit of Pluto enacting revenge on the narrator, then the discovery of the second cat in a “den of infamy” is poetic justice for the intoxicated violence against the first cat. Even in the absence of supernatural elements, the circumstances of the discovery figuratively suggest that it is the narrator’s alcohol addiction that undoes him, as the cat will lead the police to the narrator’s wife’s corpse. The tale therefore contains a cautionary warning for those following the same path as the narrator, whose addiction exacerbates the worst parts of his personality, causes harm to those around him, and eventually results in his death.
Science Versus the Supernatural
Poe wrote “The Black Cat” at a time when scientific advances had heightened interest in rational explanations for supposedly supernatural phenomena. The narrator repeatedly invokes this skepticism, beginning in the story’s first sentences. Here, the narrator notes that while the tale’s events seem incredible—i.e., inexplicable without resorting to supernatural explanations—he hopes that a future reader “may reduce [his] phantasm to the commonplace” (223). Likewise, he promises to relate his story in empirical fashion, noting what he observed without subjective commentary.
Such promises soon fall by the wayside. Only two paragraphs later, he mentions the superstition that black cats are evil—“witches in disguise” (223), according to his wife’s unserious remark. This plants the seed of the supernatural in the readers’ minds, and later rhetorical choices merely heighten the atmosphere of mystery and Gothic horror: The narrator becomes a “demon” in the moment he cuts out Pluto’s eye, the “apparition” of Pluto appears on the burned-down wall, and the yowling that alerts the police to the tomb in the walls can have “arisen only out of hell” (230).
These remarks are evidence of the narrator’s unreliability; he does not adhere to the skeptical standards that he himself lays out. While discussing the conflagration that burned down his home, he claims that he is “above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity” (225). However, the narrative placement of this event immediately after the murder of Pluto inevitably establishes such a “link.” With that said, what is most notable about the episode is the narrator’s effort to cling to some sort of scientific explanation for the image of the cat on the wall—one that will dispel his immediate response of horror. The result is a strained rationalization, full of words like “must” and “probably” and relying on an improbable sequence of events:
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 (226).
Assuming the narrator is not imagining or fabricating the story’s supernatural elements wholesale, the effect of such passages is to cast doubt on skepticism rather than on superstition. This is in keeping with Poe’s Romanticism, as Romantic literature pushed back against the Enlightenment-era faith that science could eventually explain all aspects of human existence.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
