Poe's "The Black Cat" as psychobiography: some reflections on the narratological dynamics - Edgar Allan Poe - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Ed Piacentino

Finally, drawing on some of the references to cats in Poe's letters and biographies, David M. Rein even goes so far as to assert that Catterina, the Poe family cat, "who remained with the Poes as long as [Poe's wife] Virginia lived, and even afterwards," may have been the inspiration for the cat in the story (38). This same critic, who sees the story as a failed revenge fantasy in which the narrator (whom he sees as representing Poe) sought to "destroy symbolic enemies" without "suffer[ing] retribution" (41), and who claims that the narrator's fear of the second black cat was a reflection of "hostility ... within Poe himself," further observes that "it was not the cat, really, that Poe was afraid of, but all that it stood for in his own feelings, all the people and situations in the world and in his private life which stood in the way of his happiness or oppressed him" (40-41).

(3) Also see Genette's Narrative Discourse Revisited, his later study in which he responded to critics of Narrative Discourse and in which he clarified and refined some of his more complex ideas on narrative that he had addressed in the earlier book.

(4) McElroy, on the other hand, sees the narrator, whom he calls the "talking voice," "as pretending remorse for what he has done, despite his protests of sincere recognition of his heinous crimes" (104).

(5) McElroy regards the narrator's commentary on the events of the story line as "self-serving interpretations" whereby "he is busy accounting for each step of his way for the unaccountable fact he, intrinsically the innocent victim, is a convicted felon awaiting execution" (108). Throughout the story, McElroy continues, "the narrator pities himself and appeals for reader sympathy; the filament of feeling that he spins to trap the reader is his doctrine of the perverseness of human nature" (108).

(6) Crisman, who points out that to the narrator the black cat "should be the ultimate of faithfulness ..., should represent supreme fidelity" but does not, interprets the narrator's perception of the cat as a "rival for the wife, the narrator's other possible source of fidelity through compulsive early marriage" (88). In developing this notion of the cat as a competitor for the narrator's wife and the narrator's "long standing, compulsive fear of betrayal" (89), Crisman seems less convincing. He states: "The competition becomes particularly acute, since the narrator and Pluto share the relation first of `favorite ... playmates' and then of `friendship,' metaphorically the relation of close friends for life. The narrator is in the position of being betrayed in love by his best childhood friend" (88).

(7) Sec Hoffman who, recalling the wife's superstition about all black cats being witches, cleverly pushes the connection further and draws the following analogy: "witch = wife. Ergo, black cat = wife" (231).

(8) McElroy posits that "there is a strong implication that the two cats in the narrator's married life are subconsciously surrogates for his hostility toward his spouse, because he is afraid of the consequences of killing her" (114).