Samuel Owens
Dr. McDaniels
Senior Seminar
March 23rd, 2014
Psychological
Analysis of the Black Cat
Edgar
Allan Poe had an obvious fascination for the perverse side of the human
psyche. It is the realm that troubles us
the most, since our society imposes strictures that urges us to repress our
darker side which yearns for destruction, while attempting to convince
ourselves that we are uniquely good. We
are told it is the world that is evil and selfish, and that we should guard
against allowing the evil into our hearts.
Yet Poe shows us that the evil exists within us all, and we protect it
through well fortified walls of rationalized denial against what is real within
ourselves, as well as our relation to the real world around us. He does this by using a good natural quality
of empathy that allows us to assume a first person understanding of the madness
within ourselves, and thus a good understanding of the madness within us all by
highlighting various defense mechanisms that is a clever usage of dramatic irony;
we are clued into his uses of projection, denial, self-fulfilling prophecy and
the like, but he is not. All of this
would highlight the subservience of reason to unconscious drives that seem to
conflict to any rational will, and would not reflect our autonomy to
unconscious drives.
Last
week Karl Rove made an ass of himself when he very publicly succumbed to denial
of Mitt Romney's loss of the election, and so we are taken to the narrator who
introduces us with that basic concept by stating “mad am I not-...” (Poe pg.
697). Even when he is facing the
gallows, it is not that he is about to die that would trouble him, but rather
that he should have to face the fact that he is a little mad. It speaks to a common flaw; we are more
likely to accept negative outward circumstances than admit to a personal
failing. In describing his descent into killing he appears to suffer from a
dissociative personality disorder that allows him to avoid feeling personally
responsible for his descent into madness.
He seems to give the personality a name via a capitalized descriptor of
“the Fiend Intemperance”(Poe pg. 696).
He then goes on to proclaim that he was possessed by a “demon”, and
attempts to rationalize his responsibility for what he terms as a horrific
crime.
God
is noticeably absent from this text, but there is a mention of the god of the
underworld by naming the cat “Pluto”.
God is love, and his character as a young person personifies love;
therefore, it could be argued that by abandoning himself he abandons God. Satan in the book of Job is seen as God's
servant. When he kills the cat, it could
be argued that he incurred the wrath of God as administered by his servant the
devil seen as the flames that burned all of his worldly wealth. The reference of the wife to the cat as a
witch also infers the devil because witches were thought to have familiars such
as cats who assisted them in their work with their pact with the devil. By associating theological thoughts in a mad
mind, then it would not be a far leap to the conclusion that the author is
associating theological understanding with madness. The story also mocks redemption with the
return of a cat that would give vengeance to the offending narrator. He is already damned when he is driven mad,
as he proclaims that he is “even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the
Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.” (Poe pg. 697) God is shown to be the main product of
delusion as exemplified in the narrator, and perhaps his most perverse portion
regarding his state of mind.
Alcohol
is what the narrator blames for his increasing rudeness and disregard for
others, but it is his guilt which aims to rob him of his reason. When he first kills the cat and the fire
ensues the cat winds up back in his room noose and all. This plagues his guilt that consumed him from
the moment he does the deed as a sign of vengeance beyond the grave; however,
he then regains his reason and deduces that someone must have seen the fire
from the garden and thrown the cat into his room in order to wake him up. It is from this sense that we observe that
his calculating skills have not necessarily been deprived. We see in Poe that he loses his capacity for
empathy, love, compassion, and good manners but that he does not lose his
ability to think logically. When he is
acquainted with a new black cat, we see his guilt further consume him. The tuft of white hair on his chest slowly
grows into a noose. He is set into
madness as he fancies that the cat intends to send him to the gallows for what
he had done. One day the cat almost
tripped him, and he attempted to kill it with an ax. Unfortunately, his wife stopped him, and he
then aimed his rage at her instead. He
finds no fault however, in his reasoning his way to avoid responsibility from
the police with the way he hides the body.
This further illustrates that his reasoning was only a method to escape
responsibility, or otherwise ease his guilty conscience. In no way was reasoning not aimed to enable
his madness, rather than reason against it.
Even when he appears to accept what he did is wrong, it only serves to
appear to attempt to convince the reader, and therefore himself, that he is
indeed sane.
Projection
is obviously one of the purveying themes throughout the story. He projects his own guilt, and own
shortcomings onto the cat, and unfortunately his wife. By labeling the cat as a vengeful spirit from
beyond the grave, he is able to project his guilt onto an outside source. When he attempts to kill his cat, and then
his wife, he projects the blame that the guilt calls for onto something on the
outside. He labels himself as loving and
kind, but projects his own problem onto some outward fiend, or alcohol. Supernatural sources also conspire against
him. In one instance, it is God who
cannot forgive him. At another point, it
was “Pluto” or rather the devil that would come to bring vengeance upon
him. This is directly in line with what
psychologists differentiate between an internal locus of control, and an
external locus of control. An internal
locus of control plays more to a non-theistic line of thought in that our
present circumstances our in our locus of control contra religious reasoning
that everything is in God's hands and that we are all passive players in His
plan. Poe could be arguing that belief
in God leads to a thought involving an external locus of control, and would
unleash the horrors within the human psyche by denying personal responsibility.
The
mystery of all of the rationalizations and excuses along the way do leave open
one question: how do we account for his apparently motiveless murder of his
wife and cat. It is not sufficient to
say that it is simply because he was an alcoholic. I'm sure that many of us can name several
alcoholics who never stooped to murder their pets or spouses. In all, there was a debate between “'a
resurgent evangelicalism and conservative Natural Theology' but increasingly
challenged by 'a positivist science that was to have its nineteenth century
culmination in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species' (Stark pg. 255).” With this understanding it seems clear that
Poe inserts himself directly into the middle of a debate and thus asserts that
they are both wrong. God is not the
cause of all good and evil, and our reason can not necessarily conquer our
problems. In this story we seem to get
from Poe a rejection of all fairy tales.
This gives testament to Poe's genius.
We are only naturally going to assume that when there is a heated
argument between two opposing view-points that one side must be right and the
other is wrong. Perhaps Poe's point is
that when that assumption slips into our consciousness is the very moment that
critical thinking also stops.
Throughout
the tale there are many instances of several attempts at self-deception, and
self delusion. All of these were defense
mechanisms aimed at avoiding seeing the evil that is us, and not necessarily
just something that happens to us. This
inability to own up to our own evil allows the evil to own us, and we would
fall prey to demons on the rationalization side and theological side. Their unbridled faith in God or reason is
what allows men to stop taking responsibility for them and allows them to be
slaves to their impulses. Another point
is that God gave man dominion over the animals, and his cruelty of his animals
could be taken as a perverse way to see God's dominion of the animals through
his agents in humanity. Neither side of
the debate has it right, nor no matter who wins, does Poe seem to have a
cynical outlook that evil will always prevail in the hearts of man, no matter
which side of the debate is “winning”.
Works
Cited
Poe, Edgar Allen. The Norton Anthology
American Literature 1820-1865. “The Black Cat.”
W.W.
Norton and Company Inc.: New York, NY, 2012. Print.
Stark, Joseph. “Motive and Meaning:
The Mystery of the Will in Poe's ‘The Black Cat’.” The
Mississippi
Quarterly 57.2 (2004): 255. Print.
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