combination with the ammonia in the cat’s decomposing carcass to produce the "bas relief" image of the cat with the rope around its neck, which the narrator and a crowd of witnesses see the next morning. The reader should be falling off his seat with laughter at this point.
In the first place, if all of these suppositions had serially happened, the rope could not have been reproduced because it had no ammonia in its composition. In the second place, had the first part of this happened, up to the part where the narrator supposes falling walls pressing the hanged cat into the fresh plaster, the carcass of the cat and the rope would both have been consumed in the fire because the thickness of plaster on an interior wall could not possibly have been thick enough to envelop such objects and keep them from burning up. But all of this is mere quibbling, compared to the great fact that the image is a bas relief That is, it bulges out. It is a raised image, bulging from inside the wall. The narrator’s explanation is thus no explanation at all. It is obfuscation for the sake of exculpation.
From the authorial perspective, the explanation of this bas relief of the hanged cat, having "an accuracy truly marvellous," which many witnesses see, and which the narrator must therefore explain, is: after hanging the cat, the narrator cut it down, took it to his bedroom, excavated a hole for it in the not very thick bedroom wall behind his bed, and replastered the wall. That night, the heat of the fire, dehydrating and shrinking the wet plaster, drew it tight over the excavated cavity containing the hanged cat, revealing its image, including the rope around its neck, in bas relief. This, and not what the narrator claims, is what must have happened. But the narrator was not willing to admit his agency in immuring the hanged cat.
One strongly suspects that the narrator set the fire which almost proved fatal to the narrator’s wife and servant, and, he claims, himself. But there is no definite physical evidence to prove this nonessential point. What the reader does definitely know is that someone put the hanged cat inside the narrator’s bedroom wall behind his bed, and then replastered the entire wall, just a few hours before a terrible fire destroyed the house. So short a time elapses between the immuring of the cat and the fire that a still large amount of water in the plastering preserved this wall when all others tumbled down or burned up. Beyond any reasonable doubt the person who hanged the cat is identical with the person who immured the cat and plastered the wall, although any reader remains free to accept the narrator’s absurd hypothesis of a Good Samaritan who throws cats as
111
fire alarms, the deft placement of the thrown cat between headboard and wet plaster, the pressure of falling walls, ammonia in a decomposing carcass combining with lime, et cetera. This identification of the narrator as the prime cause of the image of the hanged cat is crucial to properly understanding the later explanation that he gives of killing and immuring his wife.
The narrator is not lucky in immuring cats. They keep re-emerging in various ways from the walls where he puts them. The second time occurs when he immures his wife’s corpse. The live cat that he walls up with her body really is his undoing by making it impossible for him to deny agency for her death. But the narrator is game. He refuses to admit to guilt of willful mayhem. Consistent with his earlier posture of being the victim of the spirit of perverseness, a metaphysical force beyond his control, he finally says of this second cat that it "seduced me into murder" (V, 155; [italics added]).
The narrator would have us believe about his wife’s death the following account as the complete truth:
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan. (V, 152)
What "household errand," the reader should ask, required this husband to take his wife downcellar ("she accompanied me"), especially when the man appears to have had an axe ready at hand. (The indefinite article in the narrator’s statement "Uplifting an axe. is exquisitely exculpating.) A common household event, a cat getting tangled in the narrator’s legs on a steep stairs, is what he would have us believe caused the murder of his wife, which he never intended or planned.
Furthermore, we must query the absolutely perfect condition of this cellar for purposes of concealing a corpse at the moment of the murder. With an evident tone of pride, the narrator recounts how he solved the problem of disposing of the corpse after the murder. (The question of when he solved this problem, before or after the murder, is, of course, all-important, for if he made preparations to conceal his
112
wife’s body, then his story of spontaneous manslaughter falls completely apart.) His description of how he solved this problem occupies a long passage in his manuscript (V, 152-154). Having reasoned that he could be detected if he tried to take the body out of the house, he thought of getting rid of the evidence of his felony by dismembering and burning the corpse, or putting it in a grave in the cellar floor, or throwing it down the backyard well, or shipping it away in a box of merchandise. He rejected each of these possibilities in turn, as involving too much risk of detection, and decided finally to wall up the corpse in the cellar. For such a purpose, he says, he discovered after the murder, that the cellar was at that particular time particularly "well adapted." Not only does it have a disused chimney, the bricks of which could be "readily displaced," but the whole chimney could be rebuilt with the corpse inside and then plastered over "so that no eye could detect anything suspicious" because at the moment of the murder the entire cellar had "lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening" (V, 153). Therefore the fresh plaster on the chimney will be indiscernible from the fresh plaster throughout the cellar. How laughable that this could be considered fortuitous! Yet that is what the narrator expects us to believe. Probably the same readers who never notice anything extravagant (given the narrator’s craziness) or important about his hypothesis on how the bas relief of the hanged cat got on his bedroom wall in his previous residence, without his agency, also go along unquestioningly with the narrator’s claim that he discovered how admirably suited the cellar in his second house was for hiding his wife’s corpse only after he had accidentally killed her.
No matter how much "The Black Cat" may appear to be a variant of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Imp of the Perverse," the resemblance among these stories is superficial. The narrator in "The Black Cat" is not riven by any subconscious compulsion to have his crime detected and punished. He is, quite the contrary, full of anxiety not to be detected in it. Evidence of his state of mind with regard to punishment exists in several important details of the story that are perfectly congruent.
For example, the body of the wife is not detected the first time the police search the narrator’s house. Rather, it is found during a second investigation of the house. This detail is as significant as the narrator’s careful preparations to hide his wife’s corpse by plastering the entire cellar except for the false chimney before he axed her, because the narrator did not expect the police to make a second
113
search: shortly after the murder, within the first three days, "a search" is "instituted" (V, 154). Nothing is found. On the fourth day following the murder a party of policemen come back to the house, "very unexpectedly," and proceed "again to make rigorous investigation of the premises" (V, 154; [italics added]).
In light of these details, the question must be asked: if the murderer is riven by subconscious guilt as his sympathizers claim, why did it not compel him to do something to expose his crime during the first search of his house? Furthermore, during the second search, it is only on "the third or fourth" descent of the police into the cellar (V, 154) that the narrator strikes the false chimney with his cane, the place where he immured his wife (in mockery of the inability of the police to find any clue to the corpse’s location). His reaction to the cat’s shriek resulting from his loud disturbance of the wall shows an immediate, subconscious reaction far different from that of someone who wished to be detected in a crime: he staggers backward, clear across the cellar, in surprise and mortal fear at this feline yowl from inside the wall ("Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall"; V, 155). The narrator’s evident sense of having triumphantly baffled the police in their second thorough search of the house, and their third or fourth investigation of the cellar during this search, turns in a twinkle into a complete debacle. The narrator had forgotten that the cat could stay alive inside the false chimney by feeding off the corpse.
The narrator’s subconscious fear of detection and punishment for his contemplated murder of his wife is manifested in more than his reaction to the cat’s unexpected yowl from within the wall. He is so afraid of the hangman that he sees a gallows on the breast of the second black cat, the one he walled up with the corpse of his wife; and he says that she pointed it out to him. Indeed there is a strong implication that the two black 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.
Again the narrator has miscalculated, as he did in killing and immuring the first cat. This time he either walled up the cat inadvertently, which is not very likely to have happened to a cat, or he walled up the animal deliberately, thinking it would die in the wall. (That the cat had been feeding off the wife’s corpse is evident in the description of it perched on her cloven head with a "red" mouth; V, 155.) In either case, the narrator bungled his planned murder. Whether the murderer knew the cat was in the wall is not nearly so
114
important as his startled reaction at its lively cry when he raps the wall.
It cannot be said, finally, that "The Black Cat" has meaning only as a diddle, but merely that it was designed as a skillfully wrought hoax requiring alertness to details to appreciate. Or, to put the matter in slightly different terms: the coincidence of the fresh plasters in the plot of this story may not encompass all possible meanings, but no good interpretation is possible that does not take that coincidence into account in relation to other details.
One should never overlook in reading "The Black Cat" that it is a remembered action and that the narrator is not free to invent episodes. He is only free to rationalize them. What he is not free to invent are the matters of public information at his trial, principally the public knowledge of the bas relief of the hanged cat in the freshly plastered wall of his first residence, his wife’s corpse immured with another cat in the freshly plastered cellar of his second residence, and probably too his history of drunkenness and physical violence against his wife (V, 145, 148). These are things the narrator has to deal with as best he can to get the reader’s sympathy. They are the coordinates, the givens, of the dramatic framework of this fiction as Poe designed it.
In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, Poe wrote of the difference between aiming for "absolute novelty" in compositions, which would embarrass, disturb, and "in some degree even [pain]" the reader by making him aware of his "want of perception," and "true originality," which Poe defined as novelty that ‘becomes nothing novel" because it "subsides into the commonplace" (Poe’s italics). Poe theorized that the effect of this latter type of originality, which he urged writers of short fictions to try to accomplish, doubles the pleasure of the reader: "He is filled with an intrinsic and extrinsic delight. He feels and intensely enjoys the seeming novelty of the thought, enjoys it as really novel, as absolutely original with the writer—and himself [Poe’s italics]. They two, he fancies, have, alone of all men, thought thus. They two have, created this thing."8 In "The Black Cat" we have an application of this theory of partnership in "true originality" between writer and reader, for the thought behind "The Black Cat" is the commonplace truth that wrongdoers tend to put the blame for their action on others or on circumstances. But the form in which this commonplace is worked up by Poe in "The Black Cat" gives the reader who is able to appreciate it the double pleasure of not only being able to agree to a truism but having that truism so originally presented as to create an illusion of having
115
discovered its truth with the author.
Understanding Poe’s theory of how best to pleasure the reader does not touch upon possible meanings about human psychology centering in the self-characterization of the narrator of "The Black Cat." Like the narrators in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Imp of the Perverse," he makes reference to differences between the senses and reason. Then, too, there is Poe’s little known sketch in an 1840 issue of Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, discovered by Clarence S. Brigham several decades after Harrison’s edition of Poe’s complete works, which T. 0. Mabbott, in reprinting the sketch in his Modern Library selection of Poe’s Poetry and Prose (1951), denoted as "the original of his story The Black Cat."9 This brief sketch, "Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat," takes as its proposition the idea that the so-called instinctive behavior of creatures is often worthy of, and even beyond, the greatest powers of human "reason." When thought of in connection with "The Black Cat," "Instinct vs Reason—A Black Cat" raises the distinctly intriguing possibility that Poe, qua artist, and the narrator in "The Black Cat," qua narrator, represent respective approximations of reason, which is free to create, and instinct, which is restricted to reaction to the Creation. The implication of such an interpretation would be, obviously, that reason is the greater faculty, however marvelous instinct may be in its operations, because the brilliance of "The Black Cat," as Poe’s story, is greater by far than the observable operations of the narrator’s convincingly represented instinct for self-defense, which is evident in the rationalizations he concocts in reacting to his situation as a condemned felon. In short, the action of creating by design (reason) is always going to be nobler than the noblest reactions to necessities (instinct).
But this interpretation cannot be completely discussed in this essay, which is an attempt merely to see the comic design in "The Black Cat."
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
NOTES
1G. R. Thompson in Great
Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1970) suggests that perhaps nearly half of
Poe’s fictions have comic elements ("Introduction," pp. 1-2, 26, 38).
2Graham’s Magazine, May, 1842, as quoted in The
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), XI, 108. In
1847 Poe elaborated this review in Godey’s Lady’s Book, with incidental
improvements of diction in the second and third sentences of the passage quoted but no
variance at all in his statement on the requirement of "a kindred art" in the
reader (cf. Complete Works, XI, 108, and XIII, 153).
3See "Diddling Considered As One of the Exact Sciences,"
Complete Works, v, 210-223, for
116
Poe’s comments on the diddle, especially its
consummate feature of’ "grin," which indicates the personal
enjoyment of the artful diddler in the perfection of his contrivance. This interesting
sketch strikes me as a conceit on literary art, particularly the artist’s need to
make money while satisfying his aesthetic drive. Poe published it two months after he
published "The Black Cat."
4In their now famous discussions of’ intentional
fallacy’ (Dictionary of World Literature [New York, 1942], pp. 326-329;
The Verbal Icon [Lexington, Ky., 1954], pp. 3-18), W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C.
Beardsley never denied the existence of authorial intent. They merely, and, from the
standpoint of traditional literary scholarship, radically, denied that intention could be
discerned and judged by any other standard than the text of the work itself.
5"The Black Cat," Complete Works. v, 146-148.
This text is quoted throughout, hereafter parenthetically.
6The narrator’s second paragraph suggests an origin for his
sadism and tendency to substitute animals for humans as objects of emotion. There he
claims that from infancy his tenderness of feeling was "the jest" of his
companions. His next statement suggests, through juxtaposition, that because of this
rejection he spend most of his time as a boy ‘feeding and caressing" a variety
of docile pets with which his parents indulged him. He was never so "happy,’ he
says, as when caring for these nonhuman companions, and his preference for pets may
contain the reason for his problem with his wife, for the narrator’s deepest
psychological need would seem to be passive and total affection. The greater attachment of
his pet cat Pluto to his wife may have had something to do with his punishment of it.
7Thompson’s passing comments on "The Black Cat" are
typical of those in full-length studies of Poe, in seeing the story as a "more
clearly’ detailed "Tell-Tale Heart," expressing ‘the irrational
desire, almost the ultimate irony, to act against oneself, with an ambiguous conclusion
suggesting the agency of malevolent fortune at the same time that it suggests subconscious
self-punishment" (Poe’s Fiction [Madison, Wis.. 19731, p. 172). Stuart
Levine in Edgar Poe: Seer and Craftsman (Deland, Fla., 1972) more succinctly
accepted the narrator’s perspective in seeing his felony as "an unpremeditated
crime" committed in a fit of maniacal rage" (p. 89). Such acceptance is also
evident in Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge. Mass.. 1957). p.
190; The[Viking] Portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Philip van Doren Stern (New York.
1945), p. 288; and Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New
York, 1941), p. 430. The most sensitive and most nearly complete reading, by far, of
"The Black Cat" is the only essay before this devoted entirely to an analysis of
the story: James W. Gargano’s "‘The Black Cat’ Perverseness
Reconsidered," Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 2 (Summer,
1960), 172-178.
8Complete Works, XIII, 146, 14.4.
9See "Instinct vs
Reason—A Black Cat," Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T.
O. Mabbott, pp. 357–359 and 426–427n.
117