“A Problem in Detection”: The Rhetoric of Murder in Poe's “The Black Cat”

Author(s): John A. Dern

Source: The Edgar Allan Poe Review , Vol. 18, No. 2 (Autumn 2017), pp. 163-182
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.18.2.0163

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“A Problem in Detection”
The Rhetoric of Murder in Poe’s “The Black Cat”

John A. Dern, Temple University

Abstract
The narrator of Poe’s “The Black Cat” is a murderer penning a confession on
the eve of his execution. This much he admits. He also believes he is the victim
of a malevolent, supernatural being, a witching cat—the doppelgänger of a cat
the narrator hanged. In the end, this second cat, the narrator claims, fiendishly
worked his undoing by tormenting him mercilessly, using its “craft” to seduce
him into murder. T. O. Mabbott, in fact, calls this narrative “a story of ‘orthodox’
witchcraft.” Still, the narrator’s word choices and paragraphing offer evidence
of another hypothesis. The being who tormented the narrator, his “incarnate
Night-Mare,” was not the second cat, as such, but the narrator’s wife. In his
story, the narrator unwittingly reveals his psychological motivation, which, in
part, involves his perception of a confederacy between the wife and the second
cat—which is not to say that a coherent case for this motivation can disregard
the narrator’s otherworldly dread. Nevertheless, from his initial discussion of
domestic life to his characterization of the murder as an assassination, the nar-
rator rhetorically reveals enough about his inner thoughts, including his sexual
discontent, for a reader to hypothesize that the narrator’s crime against his wife
was personal.

Keywords
Poe, “The Black Cat”, rhetoric, supernatural and psychological, Freud

For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit / Upon his being.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prince Athanase”

the edgar allan poe review, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2017

Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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In his analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and Poe’s “The Black
Cat,” Fred Madden maintains that Poe scholarship has rendered the mingling
of the supernatural and the psychological in Poe’s story a critical fait accompli:
“The interplay between the supernatural and psychological levels of ‘The Black
Cat’ is obvious to those who have read, even superficially, in the criticism on
the story.”1 Brett Zimmerman, for instance, favors “a reading that considers the
horrendous events as genuinely supernatural.2 In fact, as Zimmerman points
out, even T. O. Mabbott calls this narrative “a story of ‘orthodox’ witchcraft”
(M 3:848). What is more, Zimmerman argues that the supernatural reading
receives support from “the narrator’s own inner-directed rhetoric (especially
his use of meiosis and litotes).”3 Then again, one can easily argue the reverse, that
is, that the narrator’s rhetoric actually exposes his psychological motivation—
which is not to say that a coherent case for this motivation can disregard the
narrator’s otherworldly dread. As Christopher Benfey suggests, “Poe aimed to
puzzle his readers.”4 More narrowly, G. R. Thompson puts a narrational focus
on Poe’s intention “to puzzle his readers” when he says that “the limited per-
spective of the ever-present ‘I’ in the tales has, carefully worked up around it,
an intricate ‘arabesque’ structure of illusion, misperception, perversity, and gro-
tesque self-torment.”5 The narrator of “The Black Cat,” in effect, “is a mystery
to himself.”6 As a result, the story may not actually be a tale of the supernatu-
ral, but, given the narrator’s preternatural disposition, it is not wholly rational,
either.7
In his discussion of “The Marriage Group,” Daniel Hoffman characterizes
“The Black Cat” as “a problem in detection”: “As in ‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,’ the crime is the murder of a woman. And, as in ‘The Purloined Letter,’
the culprit is identified from the start. The problem here is, from his confession
to deduce his motive.”8 In the story, Poe’s “ever-present ‘I’” describes the erosion
of his relationship with a once-beloved cat, Pluto, and a redux version of that
erosion with a second, unnamed cat; this second cat, at least for the narrator,
may have been the wraith of the first cat, which the narrator hanged, or it may
not have existed at all.9 The shocking events, of course, culminated in the murder
of the narrator’s wife and the harrowing discovery of that murder. As Hoffman
points out, the narrator’s culpability for the murder is never in question.10 Still,
the narrator, with his inflamed fancy vis-à-vis the fiendishness of the second
cat, finds himself at a loss to provide a rational explanation for the “mere house-
hold” events that led to the homicide: “In their consequences, these events have
terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound
them. To me, they have presented little but Horror—to many they will seem
less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found

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which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place— some intellect more
calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in
the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession
of very natural causes and effects” (M 3:849–50).11 In his analysis, Zimmerman
perceives Poe’s use of meiosis (“a lessening”) in the word “mere”: “The narrator
in that tale obviously wants to downplay, to de-emphasize, the enormity of his
crimes.”12 Through meiosis, in other words, the narrator “attempts to downplay
the events and their possible implications for his soul.”13 Zimmerman maintains,
in brief, that the narrator “uses all his suasive powers to battle his own super-
stitious nature. That is the rhetorical crux of the tale.”14 However, referring to
the narrator’s disclaimer—“some intellect may be found which will reduce my
phantasm to the common-place”—Hoffman seizes on this particular passage as
an indication of the story’s “intelligible order”: “In short, however grotesque are
the elements in the design of the ensuing Arabesque, they will declare them-
selves in an intelligible order to a ratiocinative mind of sufficient power.”15 As
Scott Peeples argues, the narrator’s story is “built on implausibilities and lame
excuses”: “As with ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ we must read against the narrator of
‘The Black Cat,’ establish which parts of his testimony should be believed and
which should not, and try to discover the deeper motivations for the crime.”16
Rhetorically, evidence for a psychological reading of the story lies between the
lines—at times quite literally.
Hoffman himself proceeds on a psychosexual reading of “The Black Cat,”
noting one or two of the doubles ententes that rhetorically link the cat and the
wife. In other words, as the story seemingly describes the erstwhile erosion
of the narrator’s relationship with Pluto and his (wraithly) successor, does
it really describe the erosion of the narrator’s relationship with his wife? As
Susan Amper proposes, “There is no doubt that the narrator projects his feel-
ings for his wife onto his cat, but the substitution is even more complete than
Hoffman suggests.”17 In fact, Hoffman goes only a short distance in pursuit of
this reading; nonetheless, his writing sets the groundwork for a more in-depth
rhetorical analysis of “The Black Cat,” whose gruesome violence overshadows
its remarkable rhetorical subtlety. The narrator, as Poe’s unreliable narrators
tend to do, ironically assures the reader of his sanity by saying that he does
not expect belief: “Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very
senses reject their own evidence” (M 3:849). He himself, he divulges, strug-
gles with his otherworldism, but in the language of a confessional he proceeds
undeterred: “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul”
(M 3:849). As Rachel McCoppin puts it, “Many of Poe’s narrators are so envel-
oped within false personas that they become unclear of their own r­ ealities and

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their own true identities, making them unreliable to the reader.”18 The narrator
of “The Black Cat” is not an exception. As Amper explains, “The ­narrator is a
man at war with himself, consciously trying to hide his crime, while subcon-
sciously seeking to reveal it.”19 His false persona is that of a victim of a malev-
olent, supernatural being, but his word choices and paragraphing provide
evidence of a more human motive: the narrator’s wife is the being he regards
“with unutterable loathing” (M 3:854). In the narrator’s mind, for instance, the
wife and the second cat were confederates, and the former betrayed him for
the latter: “Whenever the narrator mentions his wife, a black cat is close by.”20
Fred Madden even suggests that “the black cat can be seen as an externaliza-
tion of the narrator’s hatred of his wife.”21 Indeed, from his initial discussion
of domestic life to his characterization of the murder as an assassination, the
narrator rhetorically reveals enough about his inner thoughts, including his
sexual discontent, for a reader to hypothesize that the narrator’s crime against
his wife was personal.

A Most Homely Narrative

The story begins with an unusual example of antithesis: “For the most wild,
yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor
solicit belief ” (M 3:849).22 The contrast here is between “wild” and “homely.”
The latter, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, carries the sense of
“domestic life; ordinary, everyday; simple, plain, unsophisticated.”23 The sig-
nificance of the former is less clear, but it may suggest more than a lack of
domestication in the sense of excitement or agitation.24 Nonetheless, the
effect of this opening contrast is narrative ambiguity with regard to ordinary
domestic life and that which opposes it. As Paul Lewis puts it, “Like so many
domestic narratives, this story is ‘homely’; like so many gothic tales, it is also
‘wild.’”25 This is the fundamental tension of the story, but the source of this
tension remains to be uncovered despite the foreshadowing of the story’s title,
which, according to a psychological rendering, functions as a bogey of the
narrator’s false persona.
Early in the story, the narrator emphasizes his youthful fitness for domestic
life, particularly in terms of pet keeping: “From my infancy I was noted for the
docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so
conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond
of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With
these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and
caressing them” (M 3:850).26 In adulthood, the narrator claims, his “docility and

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humanity” only increased: “This peculiarity of character grew with my growth,
and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure”
(M 3:850). Fortunately for him, the narrator met and married a pet lover not
unlike himself. As a result, the narrator and his wife proceeded to make their
home a menagerie with a black cat—Pluto—as the focal point of the n ­ arrator’s
attention and affection: “I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went
about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from
­following me through the streets” (M 3:851).
Domestic bliss, however, became domestic violence directed toward
the narrator’s wife and cat. Early in the story, the narrator blames “the Fiend
Intemperance” for his having, after a time, engaged in spousal abuse: “I suffered
myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her per-
sonal violence” (M 3:851).27 Interestingly, at this point in the story, the narrator
only vaguely treats of his violence against his wife.28 He is much more specific
about the violence against the cat, which bit the narrator in a moment of fear
after the narrator arrived home intoxicated, and the cat (he believes) avoided
him: “I took from my waist-coat pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the
poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!”
(M 3:851).29 In truth, despite the fact that both the narrator’s wife and Pluto
were victims of the narrator’s violent behavior, the first part of “The Black Cat”
focuses much more explicitly on the relationship between the narrator and the
cat, the climax of the first part being the description of the senseless hanging
of the once affectionate animal. In contrast, the latter part of the story climaxes
with the ghastly murder of the narrator’s wife. Yet, according to the narrator, a
second black cat, uncannily like the first, figures prominently in the second part
of the story, and it, like the narrator’s wife, remains nameless.30 It mysteriously
entered his life and, ironically, tormented him mercilessly through a surfeit of
affection and attention:

With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to
increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be
difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch
beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loath-
some caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus
nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress,
clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed
to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a
memory of my former crime, but chiefly—let me confess it at once—by
absolute dread of the beast. (M 3:855)

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This cat, according to the narrator, cunningly worked the narrator’s d­ estruction,
seducing him into murder: “The ending of the story, with the protagonist still
being haunted by the cat, shows the true horror of the narrative.”31 Of course,
this reading of the story depends at least to some extent on granting the second
cat agency, either real or perceived, for the cat appears to haunt the narrator
even as the narrator recounts the events. Zimmerman reasons that “the rhetoric
of the tortured protagonist in ‘The Black Cat’ fails to convince him that he is
not the victim of supernatural malice.”32 In this interpretation, “domestic life”—
that which is “homely”—comes up against a “wild” destabilizing force that is
at once feral and fiendish. Still, as Amper maintains, “Such an interpretation,
while offering logical consistency, is far from satisfying. It seems entirely out
of keeping with the psychological tenor of the tale and with the body of Poe’s
work.”33 What if the being who filled the narrator with “absolute dread” was not
the second cat, as such, but the narrator’s wife? As Peeples proposes, “What the
narrator does is horrible, shocking, and yet perhaps his motivations are com-
mon to marriages and other intimate relationships.”34

Cat = Wife

For Hoffman, the identification of the cat with the wife hinges on a syllogism
deriving from the wife’s alleged comment to the narrator linking black cats and
witches. Early in the story, the narrator, while describing Pluto, cleverly ­suggests
that the cat is a witch: “In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was
not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient
popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise” (M 3:850).
Still, the narrator offhandedly dismisses his remembrance of the wife’s insight:
“Not that she was ever serious upon this point—and I mention the m ­ atter at
all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered”
(M 3:850). Hoffman offers a perceptive interpretation of what the narrator dis-
misses as an afterthought: “Wife suggests, but husband may in truth believe,
that black cat = witch. This, and other evidence soon to be introduced and
offered in the present brief, lead me to suggest that, in the synoptic and evasive
glossary of this tale, witch = wife. Ergo, black cat = wife.”35 Zimmerman iden-
tifies litotes (“like meiosis, another form of understatement”) in the narrator’s
characterization of his wife (“not a little tinctured with superstition”), and, like
Hoffman, he finds the narrator’s de-emphasis of the recollection significant.36
Overall, Zimmerman concludes that the narrator’s “fervent belief in the world
of the supernatural is his source of terror and the target of his self-directed
rhetorical efforts.”37 However, the narrator’s belief in the supernatural nature

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of the events does not authenticate the supernatural nature of those events.
Fiendish involvement may or may not be so, but it is not so simply because the
narrator believes it and cannot convince himself otherwise. Peeples argues that
“we must read against the narrator of ‘The Black Cat.’” Much of the evidence for
a supernatural reading of the story lies in the narrator’s “self-directed rhetorical
efforts.” The evidence for a psychological reading, conversely, lies not so much
in what the narrator is actively trying to control rhetorically, but in what he is
failing to control.
To this end, the psychological identification of the cat with the wife receives
support from some subtle rhetoric that bolsters Amper’s reading of the narra-
tor’s subconscious intentions. For instance, the narrator describes “the intensity
of the gratification” that comes from a pet’s noble affection: “There is something
in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the
heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and
gossamer fidelity of mere Man” (M 3:850). Tellingly, the first line of the next
paragraph, which is the next line of the story, includes the first mention of the
narrator’s wife: “I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition
not uncongenial with my own” (M 3:850). On the page—and in the narrative
of his thoughts, which he is rendering after he has murdered the wife whose
disposition professedly once made him “happy”—the narrator juxtaposes “the
paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man” with the first mention of
his wife! Through this juxtaposition, the narrator, for the first time, reveals that
he had developed negative feelings about his wife, with whom he more overtly
claims to have shared a “not uncongenial” domestic outlook. What is more, his
feelings toward his wife complement those he developed toward Pluto’s succes-
sor in that the narrator came fully to loathe both his wife and the second cat.
After he hanged Pluto, the narrator discovered Pluto’s doppelgänger sitting
atop a hogshead “in a den of more than infamy” (M 3:854). The cat accompa-
nied him home: “When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and
became immediately a great favorite with my wife” (M 3:854). Not only has the
narrator established a connection between his wife and the second cat, but he
also has laid the groundwork for another telling juxtaposition. The word “wife”
in the sentence above is the last word in the paragraph. The next paragraph is
as follows:

For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was
just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but—I know not how or why
it was—its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed.
By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the

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 ­ itterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and
b
the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from phys-
ically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently
ill use it; but gradually—very gradually—I came to look upon it with
unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from
the breath of a pestilence. (M 3:854)38

Superficially, of course, the narrator is speaking here of the second cat. None-
theless, his final thought before beginning this rumination was “my wife.”
Suggestively, the narrator never uses the word “cat”—or even the word “brute,”
which he uses on other occasions—to identify the paragraph’s subject.39 His
references include the personal pronoun “it” and the word “creature,” which
can refer to a person as well as an animal.40 In other words, as he speaks of the
cat, the narrator is also thinking of his wife. After all, the phrase “my former
deed of cruelty” could refer to his mutilation or hanging of Pluto, or to the
“personal violence” with which he has admitted victimizing his wife. More-
over, in regard to future violence, he notes that he held his hand “for some
weeks,” but, though he intended to do so at one point, he never afterward
claims actually to have harmed the second cat in any way. He did fatally strike
his wife!
Pluto’s successor, ostensibly, was the catalyst for the narrator’s murder-
ous attack on his wife. As the narrator’s aversion to the second cat grew, the
narrator perceived that a patch of white fur on the cat’s breast had morphed,
a phenomenon to which the narrator’s wife apparently called his attention
“more than once”: “It was now the representation of an object that I shud-
der to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have
rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image of a hid-
eous—of a ghastly thing—of the gallows!—oh, mournful and terrible engine
of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!” (M 3:855). The narrator’s
own words suggest that his wife may have been complicit in the second cat’s
psychological torture of the narrator—it is his wife, after all, who called the
narrator’s attention to the apparition on the second cat’s breast more than
once.41 What is more, this cat, once in the narrator’s household, quickly became
“a great favorite” of the narrator’s wife. In addition, the narrator noticed that
this cat, like Pluto, was missing an eye: “This circumstance, however, only
endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree,
that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the
source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures” (M 3:855). In using the
word “endeared,” the narrator indicates that an emotional connection existed

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between his wife and the second cat, just as the narrator himself once shared
such a ­connection with Pluto.42 By his own admission, the narrator’s disposi-
tion changed markedly, but his wife retained the “humanity of feeling” that
was once his “­distinguishing trait.” As Ann V. Bliss notes, “His earlier portrayal
of himself as not simply respectable but loveable might indicate why he feels
irritation and then ‘perverseness.’”43
The narrator’s wife, then, served as a daily reminder of what the narrator
had lost. Her sensibility put his woolly “feelings of disgust and annoyance” in
relief. Of whom, in that case, is the narrator speaking when he describes his
day-to-day torment? “Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing
of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone;
and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the
hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight—an incarnate Night-
Mare that I had no power to shake off—incumbent eternally upon my heart!”
(M 3:856). Again, ostensibly, the narrator is here speaking of the cat, and admit-
tedly, in the paragraph that includes this sentence, the narrator does use the
phrase “a brute beast” twice with emphasis.44 Zimmerman, in fact, reiterates
Gayle Anderson’s suggestion that Poe has an eighteenth-century painting in
mind: “Poe is alluding to the famous Gothic painting The Nightmare, by John
Henry Fuseli.”45 As Zimmerman observes, in a 1790–91 version of the painting,
“a creature with cat-like ears sits heavily upon the chest of a sleeping woman
who, judging from her unnatural, contorted, position, seems to be having a bad
dream.”46 The Fuseli-informed reading, not to mention the antecedental phrase
“a brute beast,” ­supports figuratively identifying the “incarnate Night-Mare”
as the second cat—a bolster for the supernatural interpretation. Nevertheless,
the reference to a “Night-Mare” also allows the reader in pursuit of a psycho-
logical interpretation to construe “the thing” in question as the narrator’s wife.
According to the OED, a “nightmare” is a “female spirit or monster supposed to
settle on and produce a feeling of suffocation in a sleeping person or animal.”47
A “nightmare,” then, is by definition female, but the narrator clearly refers to
the second cat as male when he describes how the two first met: “Upon my
touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand,
and appeared delighted with my notice” (M 3:854). In other words, when the
narrator refers to “the hot breath of the thing,” that is, the “Night-Mare,” he may
be referring to the breath of his wife, not the breath of the cat, as he and she lay
abed. After all, argument suggests that he already has referred to his wife as “it”
and as a “creature.” What is more, he refers hyperbolically to the “vast weight”
of his tormenter. Admittedly, the narrator describes both Pluto and his dop-
pelgänger as large cats.48 However, would not a human being like the narrator’s

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wife—much larger than even a large house cat—exert something more akin to a
“vast weight” as she lay up against her husband in bed? The n ­ arrator’s ­rhetoric—
the gender ambiguity inherent in the phrase “the thing” and the g­ ender specific-
ity of “Night-Mare,” as well as Poe’s use of the phrase “a brute beast” to antecede
the word “Night-Mare”—collapses the distinction between the second cat and
the narrator’s wife, for either may be “incumbent eternally” on the narrator’s
heart.49

In the Manner of Dreams

Identifying the narrator’s wife, as opposed to the cat, as the “Night-Mare” that
tormented the narrator facilitates a Freudian reading of the murderous act. To
begin, as Bliss points out, the narrator and his wife are childless.50 This fact pro-
vides a concrete starting point for asserting the sexual aspect of the narrator’s
motivation, which finds expression in the trappings of the crime itself.51 In the
context of a “Night-Mare,” these trappings take on the significance of dream
symbols. In fact, the narrator describes the slaying of his wife with reference to
specific and telling details:

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 forget-
ting, 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. (M 3:856)52

In his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Sigmund Freud analyzes

­various dream symbols, including stairs: “Ladders, steps and staircases, or,
more precisely, walking on them, are clear symbols of sexual intercourse.”53
Moreover, the narrator’s “axe” without a doubt fits into the category of Freud-
ian symbols for the “male organ,” which finds representation “in objects
which share with the thing they represent the characteristic of penetrating
into the body and injuring—thus, sharp weapons of every kind, knives, dag-
gers, spears, sabres . . . ”54 The crudely phallic shape of an axe, combined with

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an axe’s potential for “penetrating into the body and injuring,” plainly qualify
it as a Freudian dream symbol for the “male organ.” With his axe, therefore,
the narrator put an end to his “Night-Mare.” The combination of the stairs,
a symbol of sexual intercourse, and the axe, a symbol of the phallus, suggest
that the narrator’s crime was, at least in part, a sexual one “in the manner of
dreams.”55
Still, one might argue that despite the rhetorical evidence that the wife,
not the second cat, is the narrator’s “Night-Mare” the narrator was not dream-
ing as he murdered his wife, so Freud’s dream symbols do not apply. On one
hand, the narrator of “The Black Cat” himself introduces the metaphor of
the “Night-Mare” (“the narrator’s own inner-directed rhetoric”), thus estab-
lishing a basis for reading the story more broadly with reference to dream
elements despite one of the narrator’s early assertions: “very surely do I not
dream” (M 3:849). On the other hand, Freud’s dream symbols have application
apart from the world of dreams. In fact, Freud himself addresses his readers’
potential incredulity on this point. An imaginary interlocutor asks him, “Do
I really live in the thick of sexual symbols?”56 Such symbols, Freud contin-
ues, find expression not only in dreams, but also in jokes, folklore, poetry,
and “colloquial linguistic usage”: “In all these directions we come upon the
same symbolism, and in some of them we can understand it without further
instruction.”57 In his own discussion of the narrator’s psychosexual motiva-
tion, Hoffman himself points out, “The human being is a devious creature.
Imagination can offer substitutes for the forbidden fruit.”58 In other words, the
symbols that inform our dreams are the symbols that inform our stories, tales,
and poems. The stuff of dreams is also the stuff of language and literature.
The stuff of waking life. As Benfey admits, “We don’t need Freud to point out
the erotic connotations of steep stairs in dreams to feel that this man finds
intimacy intolerable.”59
The narrator, however, provides even more rhetorical evidence of his moti-
vation, revealing, at last, that his crime against his wife was not only sexual, but
personal and depended on her apparent collusion with the second cat. When the
narrator describes Pluto’s hanging, he argues that a peculiarity of human nature
spurred him on: “the spirit of perverseness” (M 3:852). He asks, “Have we not
a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which
is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?” (M 3:852). Admittedly, as
an oddity of human nature, perverseness or something not unlike it receives
acknowledgment even in the ancient and highly rational work of Thucydides.60
Nonetheless, as Heidi Hanrahan recognizes, “It is an explanation that does not
explain anything.”61 The narrator’s sophistical and impassioned treatment of

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the subject may sound somewhat persuasive, but it lacks cogency. Thus, the
­narrator describes his hanging of Pluto:

One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung
it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes,
and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that
it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;—
hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly
sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it—if such a
thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the
Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. (M 3:852)62

At first glance, the narrator seems to have hanged Pluto because the cat loved
him, a perverse motivation, to be sure. Still, his verb tense reveals that some-
thing other than perverseness is at work: he specifically says “it had loved me.”
The verb tense in this clause is past perfect, which “indicates action completed
before another past action took place.”63 Here, the two actions in question are
loving and hanging, respectively. In other words, Pluto had stopped loving
the narrator before the hanging, the removal of the cat’s affection serving as a
catalyst for the narrator’s “deadly sin.” Indeed, the narrator explains that after
he gouged out Pluto’s eye in a fit of intoxication the cat routinely fled from
him “in extreme terror”: “I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first
grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so
loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation” (M 3:852). Withdrawal
of the cat’s affection irritated the narrator, and his irritation grew into a fit of
homicidal pique. Subsequently, the second cat’s “loathsome caresses” reinvigo-
rated the narrator’s feeling of irritation—this time because the narrator viewed
the second cat’s affection as mockery, which caused “disgust and annoyance”
to grow into “the bitterness of hatred”: “Evil thoughts became my sole inti-
mates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual
temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the
sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly
abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the
most patient of sufferers” (M 3:856). If, as the narrator believes, the second
cat was the reincarnation of Pluto, then the cat returned to take vengeance on
him, and, for this purpose, allied itself to his wife: “The black cat that replaces
Pluto is certainly a kind of doppelgänger: uncannily, he too is missing an eye,
he too is loved by the wife, and he too torments the narrator.”64 As a result, the

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final and most brutal of the narrator’s “ungovernable outbursts” came with the
murder of his wife, whose attempt to save the second cat must have marked
her once and for all as a collusioner with her “great favorite,” her grasp on
the narrator’s arm a figurative indication of the firmness with which she acted
against him—and a personal reminder for the narrator of how he grasped Plu-
to’s throat as he gouged out the cat’s eye.65

The Wife of My Bosom

The narrator’s rhetoric suggests that he had conflated his wife and the s­ econd
cat for some time before the murder. His description of his behavior after
the murder only adds to the evidence for this conflation. Consider Hoffman’s
reading: “Is narrator overcome with remorse, prostrated with grief? Does he
weep, does he lament the terrible accident? Not at all. ‘This hideous murder
accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task
of concealing the body.’ This hideous murder! As though he can now admit it
had been his unacknowledged purpose all along. How more plainly, without
violating the dynamics of his tale, could Poe have told us that from the first the
cat had been but a displacement of the wife!”66 With respect to Hoffman, Poe
does indicate the n ­ arrator’s intention “more plainly” when the narrator labels
the murder an “assassination” (M 3:858). According to the OED, an “assassi-
nation” is “a planned attack.”67 As noted heretofore, when the narrator suppos-
edly describes his g­ rowing irritation with the second cat, he claims, “I did not,
for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it.” Again, the narrator is
­writing this account after the fact. He knows that he never struck the second cat.
The only being to whom he can realistically be referring in this passage is his
wife. As Freud warns in his discussion of parapraxes, “So do not let us under-­
estimate small indications; by their help we may succeed in getting on the track
of something bigger.”68
After the murder, and after he had concealed his wife’s body in her bricky
tomb, the narrator searched for the second cat, intending to “put it to death”
(M 3:857). When he could not find the cat, he assumed it had fled: “It is impos-
sible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the
absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom” (M 3:857). In consid-
ering this passage, Hoffman asks, “Which creature? Is it the cat whose absence
by night delights his bosom with blissful relief? Not a word does he say of
his feelings at the simultaneous disappearance from his bed and bosom of his
wife.”69 As Hoffman suggests, the narrator’s language is (once again) a­ mbiguous,

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allowing the reader to infer that the narrator is referring either to the second cat
or the wife. The word “bosom,” however, provides yet another rhetorical signal
of the narrator’s hidden thoughts. In his only true act of perverseness, the nar-
rator gave himself away to the police who came to inquire about his missing
wife. Speaking of perverseness in Poe’s stories, John Reilly writes, “Although
Poe’s villainous narrators see this impulse as antagonistic to their own well-­
being, the principle of perversity consistently and ironically operates in Poe’s
tales as an instrument for the discovery and punishment of the evil perpetrated
by the narrators, in effect an agent of God’s providential justice. And so it is
with ‘The Black Cat.’”70 According to the narrator’s account, as the police pre-
pared to depart, the narrator stalled them with inane talk of the house’s con-
struction: “‘These walls—are you going gentlemen?—these walls are solidly put
together;’ and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily,
with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work
behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom” (M 3:858).71 In short,
the creature whose absence occasioned relief in the narrator’s bosom was the
wife of his bosom. In fact, the narrator describes a very suggestive action of his
own as the police searched the cellar: “I walked the cellar from end to end. I
folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro” (M 3:858). How
curious that the narrator covered his own bosom with his arms, shielding from
view that part of himself associated with his wife! His arms hid his bosom—in
one sense, the “repository of secret thoughts and counsels”—from the police
just as the nearby brickwork hid his wife’s body from them.72
Throughout “The Black Cat,” the narrator unwittingly reveals the ill will he
felt toward his wife. As a result, the narrator’s crime against his wife was per-
sonal, in part sexually motivated, in part motivated by perceived betrayal. Even
so, in the penultimate sentence, the narrator referentially drops the pretense
that he mentioned witchcraft only in passing near the beginning of the story.
After he tells how the police tore the brick façade from in front of the wife’s
ghastly corpse (at which time the narrator presumably unfolded his arms from
his bosom), the narrator describes the second cat grotesquely perched atop the
corpse’s head: “Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of
fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose
informing voice had consigned me to the hangman” (M 3:859).73 With the word
“craft,” the narrator rhetorically leaves no doubt that he believes infernal forces
worked his ruin.74 He has seemingly forgotten his alcoholism altogether, not
to mention perverseness! Thompson, therefore, has good reason to character-
ize the ending of “The Black Cat” as “an ambiguous conclusion suggesting the
agency of malevolent fortune at the same time that it suggests subconscious

176 John A. Dern

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self-punishment.”75 To be sure, uncoupling the supernatural and psychological
elements of “The Black Cat” may not be possible (or advisable). Even so, reading
against the narrator, as Peeples recommends, unearths rhetorical evidence for a
psychological interpretation. Not without some justification, then, Amper calls
“The Black Cat” a “masterful pre-Dostoevsky, pre-Freud profile of the psychol-
ogy of crime and punishment, and at the same time a first-rate detective story.”76

John A. Dern is an Associate Professor of Instruction in Intellectual Heritage

at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. He has published one book, Martians,
Monsters and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis, and
essays on a variety of subjects in journals such as The Edgar Allan Poe Review,
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, Pennsylvania
English and The Radio Journal. He has also published pedagogical articles in
The Teaching Professor newsletter.

Notes

1. Fred Madden, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ and Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny,’” Literature and
Psychology 39, nos. 1–2 (1993): 52.
2. Brett Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 2005), 41.
3. Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 41. Emphasis in original. All emphases in ­quotations
are in the original source unless otherwise noted.
4. Christopher Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable: ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale
Heart,’” in New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27.
5. G. R. Thompson, introduction to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed.
­Thompson (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 11.
6. Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 29. More fully, Benfey writes, “Poe’s interest in
motiveless crime, however, had less to do with human freedom than with human knowl-
edge. He was drawn to two ideas connected with it: one, the ways in which a murderer
is a mystery to himself (a dominant idea in ‘The Black Cat’), and two, the related ways
in which the murder results from some barrier to the killer’s knowledge of other people
(a major theme in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’)” (29–30).
7. According to Madden, “Poe’s creation of an interplay between the supernatural
and psychological levels in ‘The Black Cat’ is not solely directed at revealing the nar-
rator’s self-deceptions nor in producing a feeling of the uncanny. It is also a vehicle
through which he probes the intricacies of human irrationality.” See Madden, “Poe’s
‘The Black Cat,’” 59.
8. Daniel Hoffman, “The Marriage Group,” in Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 82.
9. As Madden points out, if the second cat did not exist, then, horrifyingly, the
revealing caterwaul at the end of the story would have to be “the narrator’s own.” See
Madden, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” 55.

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 10. Discussing “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Benfey echoes Hoffman on
this point: “If there is a mystery in these tales, it is the mystery of motive: not who did it
but why.” See Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 29.
11. In an endnote to the story, Mabbott writes, “Barroques here means bizarre. Poe’s
spelling of French words is undependable.” See Poe, “Black Cat” (M 3:859n.). According
to the Oxford English Dictionary, “baroque” means “grotesque or whimsical ornamenta-
tion.” See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “baroque, adj. and n.,” def. B. All
OED definitions cited in this article were in use in the nineteenth century.
12. Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 248.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 43.
15. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 82. Of the narrator, Zimmerman adds, “The type
of person he longs for is, like Poe’s detective Dupin, the very model of rationality.
Such a person could explain apparently supernatural manifestations rationally.” See
­Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 47.
16. Scott Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998), 96.
17. Susan Amper, “Untold Story: The Lying Narrator in ‘The Black Cat,’” Studies in
Short Fiction 29, no. 4 (1992): 479. Amper proceeds on a reading that emphasizes, in
part, chronological problems in “The Black Cat.”
18. Rachel McCoppin, “Horrific Obsessions: Poe’s Legacy of the Unreliable and
Self-Obsessed Narrator,” in Adapting Poe: Re-imaginings in Popular Culture, ed. Dennis
R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 105.
19. Amper, “Untold Story,” 484.
20. Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited, 97.
21. Madden, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” 58.
22. On “antithesis,” see J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and
Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 51.
23. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd. ed., s.v. “homely, adj.,” def. 2a. Zimmer-
man, once again, identifies meiosis in the narrator’s use of “homely.” See Zimmerman,
Edgar Allan Poe, 248.
24. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “wild, adj. and n.,” def. 1 and
def. 10. Of “The Black Cat,” Heidi Hanrahan remarks, “Poe here merges the gothic and
the domestic and thus implicitly raises questions about domesticity’s potential for con-
taining our darker desires and impulses.” See Hanrahan, “‘A series of mere household
events’: Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’ Domesticity, and Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century
America,” Poe Studies 45, no. 1 (2012): 40. Also, see Madden, “Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” 56,
for a Freudian reading of the story’s opening sentence.
25. Paul Lewis, “A ‘Wild’ and ‘Homely Narrative’: Resisting Argument in ‘The Black
Cat,’” Poe Studies 35, nos. 1–2 (2002): 7.
26. “As a story about a white man who, while professing his benevolence, first tor-
tures and hangs his cat and then murders his wife, ‘The Black Cat’ has been read in
relation to antebellum discourse on class, race, crime, and reform.” See Lewis, “A ‘Wild’
and ‘Homely Narrative,’” 2.
27. As Hanrahan observes, “Simply put, alcohol isn’t enough of an answer for why
this narrator does what he does.” See Hanrahan, “A series of mere household events,”
50. Lewis adds, “No doubt Poe held opinions about temperance reform efforts and his
own use of alcohol, but in ‘The Black Cat’ he appears to be interested in disturbing and
terrifying his audience in part by undermining approaches to intemperance familiar to
readers of reform fiction. His intention seems particularly evident in the way alcoholism

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functions as only one of the shifting frames that never quite contain or even adequately
describe the narrator.” See Lewis, “A ‘Wild’ and ‘Homely Narrative,’” 5. What is more, the
narrator’s use of the word “personal” in the phrase “personal violence” is ambiguous.
Superficially, an obvious meaning for the word “personal” in this context would be as
follows: “Affecting one’s body; relating to one’s physical safety or well-being” (Oxford
English Dictionary Online, 3rd. ed., s.v. “personal, adj., n., and adv.,” def. 3b). Still, if the
narrator intends this meaning, why does he not say “physical violence”? Intriguingly, the
word may also have a more sinister significance: “Having an individual as object; relat-
ing to a person in his or her individual capacity; directed towards, aimed at, or referring
to a particular person or to oneself, esp. in a disparaging or offensive sense or manner”
(Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd. ed., s.v. “personal, adj., n., and adv.,” def. 4a).
In other words, the narrator’s violence may well be personal, that is, “directed towards,
aimed at, or referring to” the narrator’s wife. Speaking generally of how Poe’s fiction
portrays women, J. Gerald Kennedy writes, “The pattern of violence against women
throughout Poe’s fiction repeatedly betrays the male protagonist’s outrage at his own
helplessness and insufficiency.” See Kennedy, “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying
Women,” in New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales, ed. Silverman, 126.
28. See Ann V. Bliss, “Household Horror: Domestic Masculinity in Poe’s ‘The Black
Cat,’” Explicator 67, no. 2 (2009): 97.
29. Discussing the cat’s bite, Hoffman writes, “But see, there’s more to chew on here
than at first glance appeared. As Mme Bonaparte intuited, identifying the cat’s mouth
as the feared vagina dentata.” See Hoffman, “The Marriage Group,” 84. Of the narrator’s
weapon itself, Benfey adds, “The weapon here is a pen-knife, which was used to sharpen
a quill pen. Poe wants us to divine a connection between violence and the act of writing.”
See Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 36.
30. As Hoffman recognizes, “The narrator of ‘The Black Cat’ is a husband, yet his
wife is never named. It is as though she has no name, or he cannot remember it, or he
dare not speak it.” See Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 82. Interestingly, the namelessness
of Pluto’s successor has mythological precedent. In Classical Mythology Mark Morford
and Robert Lenardon write, “Sometimes Hades (this word may mean ‘the unseen one’)
is given no name or is addressed by some complimentary epithet, as is the custom with
all dreadful deities or spirits—including the devil.” See Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J.
Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1991), 325.
31. McCoppin, “Horrific Obsessions,” 107.
32. Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 48. See also ibid., 41. James W. Gargano writes,
“The temptation to accept the events in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ as inexplicable
is enforced by the narrator’s repeated assertion that he cannot understand his own story.”
See Gargano, “‘The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered,” Texas Studies in ­Literature
and Language 2, no. 2 (1960): 172.
33. Amper, “Untold Story,” 481. Interestingly, Madden suggests that “it is possible that
Poe did not intend his reader to choose either the psychological or supernatural level
to the exclusion of the other—but, rather, to entertain both.” See Madden, “Poe’s ‘The
Black Cat,’” 53.
34. Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited, 98.
35. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 82–83. Hoffman’s logic is persuasive, but a minor
complication arises in regard to the popular understanding of the gender of a “witch.”
In popular culture, a witch is a female figure. However, Poe’s narrator repeatedly refers
to Pluto as male. (Mabbott does note that in an 1843 printing of the story the pronoun
“her” is used to refer to Pluto in one instance. See Poe, “Black Cat” [M 3:850n]. Also, see

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Mabbott, introduction to “The Black Cat” [3:849]. Of Pluto’s name, Zimmerman writes,
“Interestingly, the first cat’s name is Pluto, the name of the god of Hades in Roman
mythology. Here is a connection with witches, who, as servants of the Devil, are also
associated with the underworld.” See Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 45.) The etymology
of the word “witch” itself, though, makes a moot point of this objection and in doing
so strengthens Hoffman’s deduction that “cat = wife.” According to the OED, the oldest
known meaning of the word “witch” (Old English wicca) is unambiguously male, both
in grammatical gender and meaning: “A man who practises witchcraft or magic; a magi-
cian, sorcerer, wizard” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “witch, n.1,” def.
a). The grammatically feminine word “witch” signifying a “female magician, sorceress”
(Old English wicce) is about a century more recent (Oxford English Dictionary Online,
2nd ed., s.v. “witch, n.2,” def. 1a). Nonetheless, the popular use of the word in this latter
sense has sometimes required clarifying compounds like “He-witch” when the necro-
mancer is male, but the original male definition of the word was still in use in Poe’s time
alongside the common female definition. (For illustrations of “clarifying compounds,”
see the usage examples under the OED entry for “witch, n.2,” def. 1b. Also, the OED entry
for “witch, n.1,” def. a, includes a usage example from 1828.) In other words, the word
“witch” itself etymologically serves as a bridge between Pluto’s gender and the wife’s
gender, facilitating Hoffman’s deduction that “cat = wife.”
36. See Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 43–44.
37. Ibid., 44.
38. Emphases added.
39. The narrator uses the word “brute” on four occasions. See Poe, “Black Cat”
(M: 3:850, 852, 855 and 856).
40. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “creature, n.,” def. 2, def. 2c,
and def. 3a.
41. Peeples writes, “It is his wife who calls his attention to the gallows shape of the
white spot on the cat’s breast—appropriately so, for the gallows not only reflects Pluto’s
fate but forecasts the narrator’s punishment for killing his wife.” See Peeples, Edgar Allan
Poe Revisited, 97.
42. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “endear, v.,” def. 3.
43. Bliss, “Household Horror,” 97.
44. See Poe, “Black Cat” (M3: 855–56).
45. Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 45. Gayle Anderson alludes to the Fuseli painting
in a marginalia entry. See Anderson, “Demonology in ‘The Black Cat,’” Poe Studies 10,
no. 2 (1977): 43.
46. Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 45.
47. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “nightmare, n. and adj.,” def. 1a.
Special thanks to Victoria Laynas for alerting me to this meaning of the word. Emphasis
added.
48. See Poe, “Black Cat” (M 3:850, 854).
49. Denotatively, the word “nightmare” does not reveal the same gender ambiguity as
the word “witch.” As addressed above, the etymology of the word “witch” in itself allows
the critical reader to collapse the distinction between the wife and Pluto.
50. See Bliss, “Household Horror,” 97.
51. For a discussion of onanism in “The Black Cat,” see Sean J. Kelly, “‘I blush, I burn,
I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity’: Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The Black
Cat,’” Edgar Allan Poe Review 13, no. 2 (2012): 81–108.

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 52. Emphases added. In terms of his alcoholism, the narrator’s blow to the wife’s
head may be symbolic, indicating the narrator’s rejection of temperance. One defini-
tion of “head,” according to the OED, is as follows: “A person’s ability to tolerate the
effects of alcoholic drink or (in later use) other intoxicating substances.” Oxford English
­Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “head, n.1,” def. 2c(a).
53. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, ed. and trans. James
Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 194.
54. Ibid., 190.
55. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 83. Considered in light of Freud’s discussion of
dreams, the supernatural and psychological readings of “The Black Cat” fit together
well. Freud claims that “the dream as a whole is a distorted substitute for something
else, something unconscious” (Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 139). Analog-
ically, the narrator’s “self-directed rhetorical efforts” are what Freud would call “the
manifest dream-content” or “what the dream actually tells us” (Introductory Lectures
on ­Psycho-Analysis, 147). Poe’s narrator, Madden adds, “fabricates a supernatural level
which becomes for him the manifest or surface level of the tale” (“Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’”
55). By reading against the narrator, as Peeples advises, we come to “the latent dream-
thoughts” or “the concealed material” (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,
147.) In short, the supernatural goings on are akin to the manifest content of “The Black
Cat,” and the narrator’s feelings toward his wife are “the concealed material.”
56. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 195.
57. Ibid.
58. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 85.
59. Benfey, “Poe and the Unreadable,” 41.
60. Thucydides writes, “Each human condition is dominated by some great and
incurable passion that impels people to danger.” See Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and
Human Nature, ed. and trans. Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 73.
61. Hanrahan, “A series of mere household events,” 51.
62. Gargano calls it “an outrageous excess that the narrator should, for the hanging of
a cat, condemn himself as having committed ‘a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my
immortal soul as to place it—if such a thing were possible—even beyond the reach of the
infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.’” See Gargano, “Black Cat,”
173. Peeples adds that the narrator “responds to killing the cat as he ought to respond to
killing his wife, a sin that is deadly and unforgiveable because of his wife’s innocence,
because she died for loving him.” See Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited, 97.
63. Toby Fulwiler and Alan R. Hayakawa, The Blair Handbook, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2003), 497.
64. Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited, 96.
65. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “grasp, n.,” def. 2a and def. 3a.
66. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 84.
67. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “assassination, n.,” def. 1.
68. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 32.
69. Hoffman, “Marriage Group,” 84.
70. John E. Reilly, “A Source for the Immuration in ‘The Black Cat,’” Nineteenth-­
Century Literature 48, no. 1 (1993): 94. As his title hints, Reilly uncovered a news item
that describes the discovery of a murdered woman’s walled-up body in a Massachusetts
house. As Reilly notes, the item appeared in Philadelphia’s Public Ledger on July 16, 1842,
the timing, he argues, being well suited to Poe’s composition of “The Black Cat.”

“A Problem in Detection” 181

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 71. As Mabbott notes, Poe had used the phrase “wife of my bosom” in Ligeia: “And
now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the p ­ aternal
name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the p ­ artner of
my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom.” See Poe, “Ligeia” (M: 2:311). “The
phrase,” explains Mabbott, “echoes Deuteronomy 13:6 and 28:54.” See Poe, “Black Cat”
(M 3:860n). A similar phrase also appears in the Book of Sirach 9:1: “Be not jealous of
the wife of your bosom, / lest you teach her to do evil against you.”
72. Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “bosom, n. and adj.,” def. A.6a.
73. Emphasis added. In this passage, the word “craft” is ambiguous. Two meanings
apply. The first is as follows: “In a bad sense: Skill or art applied to deceive or overreach;
deceit, guile, fraud, cunning.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “craft, n.,”
def. 4a. The word is also, of course, part of the compound “witchcraft.” See def. C3 of
“craft, n.”
74. See Anderson, “Demonology in ‘The Black Cat,’” 43.
75. Thompson, introduction to Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 41. Drawing
an analogy with Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Paul Lewis more colorfully asks, “Does the
cat then play Matilda (Lewis’s fiendish seductress) to the Poe narrator’s monk? Or is the
reborn cat a deliberate fabrication of the narrator’s or a hallucination induced by delir-
ium tremens?” See Paul Lewis, “A ‘Wild’ and ‘Homely Narrative,’” 5.
76. Amper, “Untold Story,” 485.

182 John A. Dern

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