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

(2) While biographical links with "The Black Cat" are not the focus of this essay, there are details from Poe's life that may have influenced the composition of the tale. Ingram, one of Poe's early biographers, may have had "The Black Cat" in mind when he commented on Poe's "morbid sensitivity to affection," seeing it as "one of [his] most distinguishing traits." Ingram further noted that this trait prompted Poe "frequently to seek in the society of dumb creatures the love denied him, or which he sometimes believed denied him, by human beings" (1: 26).

Ingram quotes the second paragraph from "The Black Cat," noting that it is conspicuous for its "autobiographical fidelity" (27). There were events in Poe's young manhood that, considered collectively, may have had an impact on his loss of sensitivity toward his fellow human beings. To mention one that seems to relate closely to the narrator's rejection of his childhood friends in "The Black Cat," Silverman points out that when Poe returned to Richmond after his University of Virginia sojourn, he had incurred considerable debts of between $2,000 and $2,500, and so he felt "ostracized by the notoriety," and, as he wrote, by "taunts & abuse ... even from those who had been my warmest friends" (34). This kind of treatment by his friends was not new to Poe. Even before his brief stay at the University in Charlottesville, he seems to have experienced ridicule and humiliation from friends. According to Hervey Allen, as a schoolboy Poe was offended by some of his young friends who made fun of him for using the name "Gaffy" in a story he had read aloud to them (1: 174). In a parallel incident that occurred later when Poe was a cadet at West Point, Silverman notes that Thomas W. Gibson, a fellow student, remembered that Poe "fretted over any joke at his expense," particularly the story based on "his being slightly older than his classmates" (62). Incidents like these bear a striking similarity to what we know of the early life of the narrator of "The Black Cat." More recent to the time period when Poe wrote this story, several events occurred in his life that no doubt affected him as a person and may have had some impact on him as a writer when composing "The Black Cat' in 1842. Not venturing so far as to claim unequivocally that "The Black Cat" is autobiographical, Elizabeth Phillips does draw on the medical views of Poe's time in establishing a possible connection between mental illness and drunkenness she perceives in the tale. She does specifically mention that Poe's

   insanity and drinking in the course of his wife's recurring and fatal
   illness which began in January of 1842, his quitting his job at Graham's
   Magazine in May of 1842 and the subsequent financial difficulties, his
   self-defeating behavior in spite of his fierce judgment and acumen, his
   captiousness, the despair he fought against in spite of the fact that he
   expressed it sometimes analytically and sometimes pathetically--[noting
   that] all these tensions must inform "The Black Cat." (136)