Ariadna García Carreño - 3º Estudios Ingleses - UAL

THEMES AND SYMBOLS OF ​THE BLACK CAT​, BY E. A.

POE

UNIVERSAL THEMES IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S WRITINGS

● Love/ Hate:
The Black Cat is a short story based on a continuous game of contrasts. One of the
major types of reconciliation of opposites can be found in the opposed feelings of love
and hate.
The narrator is always (or so it’s what he thinks) loved by the people around him:
firstly, his pets; secondly, his wife.

“I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my
own.’’ (Poe: 4)

However, this love supposes a clear contrast with his own misanthropy; his hatred of
humankind, which reach its climax in the moment he murders his wife.

● The ‘self’ against the own ‘self’: the creation of the alter ego

The narrator does not only hate humankind, but also himself: he is aware that he has a
mental problem, that he is not able to control his impulses and thus he is ‘unfit’ for
social correct performance; nevertheless, instead of facing his problem, he tries to
hide it even from himself by projecting his psyche into an alter ego: the black cat,
which would represent the own narrator’s madness, impossible to avoid.

“(...) he attended me wherever I went about the house’’(Poe: 4)

 Ariadna García Carreño - 3º Estudios Ingleses - UAL

At the moment of the arising of the second black cat, this alter ego shows even more
clearly to the protagonist his flaw: the growth of his madness which will end up in the
murder of his wife, represented by the growing of the white spot on the fur of the cat.

GENERAL THEMES

● Romantic features: as a work written in the XIXth century, ​The Black Cat ​embraces
the main characteristics which built the bases of the spiritual and artistic movement of
the moment, the Romanticism.
- Social isolation: the narrator is an outcast; he defines humankind as something in
which nobody can trust and instead he spends time with animals, more faithful
creatures.
- Conscious VS. Subconscious: the range of action of the protagonist, as a psychopath,
is completely dominated by uncontrolled basic impulses (necessity of killing,
aggressiveness, bipolarity). These impulses, those passions which nobody can show in
the ‘public sphere’, belongs to the subconscious domain of the individual, which
happens to be degenerated into madness in the case of our protagonist and, thus,
manifested publically (with the horrible consequences it implies)
❖ The subconscious, as something so ‘terrible’ that it can not be shown in
public, is represented in the Romantic particular genre known as Gothic
through the usage of terror ​and horror​: the things that in Gothic stories scares
us (as in this case the cat) are a symbol of those individual unmentionable
‘sinful’ instincts.

● Traditional folklore: apart from the personal perspective that Poe gives to his work,
motifs which are part of popular beliefs are to be found in this story.
- Cat = Witch = Satan
- Black colour = Evil (for instance, the mortal illness which took place in
Europe during the XIVth century is commonly known as ‘The Black Death’)
 Ariadna García Carreño - 3º Estudios Ingleses - UAL

● Freudian analysis perspective:

- What the individual does in childhood is a consequence of his/her future
behaviour.
- From the very beginning of his life, the narrator reveals that he is always
going to be an isolated being, probably with problems to socialize:

“I was especially fond of animals (...) With these I spent most of my time, and never
was so happy as when feeding and caressing them’’ (Poe: 3)

KEY ELEMENTS OF THE AMERICAN LITERATURE FOUND IN THIS

SHORT STORY

● The Frontier:
- The subconscious (maniac part of the narrator’s mind) represents the
unknown, what society does not know about it and that, if manifested, would
be dangerous.

● The Adamic Myth:

- The protagonist’s impossibility for avoiding immoral acts can be seen as the
consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve from Paradise: according to the
Book of Genesis, since that moment humankind cannot avoid being sinful.
- Even the movement of ‘falling’ from the ‘goodness’ to ‘evilness’ symbolized
in Adam is represented in the constant moral ‘falling’ of the narrator: firstly,
he insults his wife; secondly, he hits her; thirdly, he kills the cat; finally, he
murders his wife.
 Ariadna García Carreño - 3º Estudios Ingleses - UAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

- POE, E.A. 1843.​ The Black Cat.​ ​https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Poe/Black_Cat.pdf

- SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 6 Mar. 2019.