27 pages • 54 minutes read
The Black Cat
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Symbols & Motifs
Black Cats
Content Warning: This section references animal cruelty, domestic violence, and mental illness.
Black cats are a traditional symbol of evil, associated particularly with witches and thus the devil. Although Pluto, the narrator’s first black cat, is initially his favorite pet, the name suggests an association with death and darkness from the start (Pluto being the Roman god of the underworld). This is certainly the role the black cats play in the narrator’s version of events, as the narrator repeatedly links them to witches, ghosts, and demons. The black cats are therefore convenient scapegoats for his own crimes.
Various details call the narrator’s interpretation of the cats into question, including the fact that the narrative function of the second cat is not to torment the narrator but rather to bring him to justice. It is likewise suggestive that the narrator feels mocked by the fact that “a brute beast” has shown him the image of the gallows (227). He takes this as an affront to his supposedly elevated status as a human, belying his earlier claim that he holds animals in higher esteem than people. Lastly, the behavior that sparks his frustration with the cats is significant; the narrator maims Pluto when he believes the cat is avoiding him but turns on the second cat because it is too affectionate. All of this suggests that the black cats serve as doubles for the narrator, symbolizing the repressed elements of his own psyche—his pride, cruelty, spite, etc.
Lastly, the cats’ connection to the narrator’s wife is significant. She establishes the black cat’s symbolic resonance at the beginning of the tale by mentioning the superstition about them. She is also the one who seeks to protect the second cat from the narrator, ensuring both of their deaths. Her fondness for both cats plays into the narrator’s impulsive decision to murder her because it is another reminder of his divided nature—in particular, the compassion that he himself has fallen away from.
The Walled-In Corpse
The tale’s final image is the uncovered corpse of the narrator’s wife, which negates all his prior attempts at subterfuge. The relatively graphic description of the body cuts through the narrator’s rationalizations of the crime, ensuring that readers grasp the narrator’s nature in the same moment the police do: “The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators” (230). The fact that the narrator entombs his wife in the walls of their home also adds a grisly twist to his earlier claim that the story will be a “series of mere household events” (223). The body’s proximity to domestic life is the culmination of the story’s consideration of The Sources of Sin, highlighting how close evil has been all along; it is inside the home and inside the narrator.
A similar motif is present in several other stories by Poe, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where a murderer buries the titular heart beneath the floorboards, and “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a wealthy man entombs his rival alive in his basement by tempting him with a rare vintage of amontillado, a Spanish wine. In the latter tale, the narrator is unpunished for his crime; in the former, the narrator’s guilty conscience causes him to give the heart’s location away to the police. “The Black Cat” strikes yet a third note, as it’s the accidentally imprisoned cat that brings the narrator to justice.
The Gallows Image
The appearance of a gallows on the second black cat is doubly significant. First, it invokes his murder of Pluto, which he committed by hanging. Because the narrator will later face execution himself, the image retroactively links narrator and cat, suggesting the role the latter plays as the narrator’s double. The image also foreshadows that eventual execution, which is why the sight inspires such terror; the narrator describes the gallows as a “mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime—of Agony and of Death!” (227). Yet the symbol that foreshadows the narrator’s fate comes at a point before he has done anything legally actionable: The image of the gallows accords with Gothic horror conventions in that it is an omen as much as it foreshadows. Its metamorphosis is also one of the ways the story calls the narrator’s mental state into question, highlighting his unreliability.
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By Edgar Allan Poe
