"The Black Cat" - the cat, the wife and the horrible sounds (Inês Carmo, Catarina Coelho, Joana Janeiro)

The Black Cat”, written by Edgar Allan Poe, was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post. It deals with themes such as guilt and murder, and is told by a first-person narrator. There is a transformation of this narrator throughout the story. We observe as a man slowly goes from being kind-hearted to being completely mad, helpless to the change in his behavior. The presence of a black cat gives the short story a sense of supernatural, as well as an interesting parallelism with the narrator’s wife.

That is what our group will be focusing on: the relationship between the wife and the cat. Thanks to various details in the short story we can establish a comparison between these two characters. We can even come to the conclusion that the narrator intended to kill his wife all along, while focusing his hatred on the cat. Climaxing in the “happy accident” where the attempted murder of the cat ends up being the actual murder of the wife, we can see that this narrator might not be as kind-hearted, nor as sane, as he thought he was.

We will also focus on the theme of the senses. As we can observe in a lot of Poe’s short stories, the senses are always a major factor in the narrator’s fate. Both in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and in “The Black Cat”, noise (both real and imaginary) proves to be the undoing of the murderer. In the end of both of these tales, the sense of hearing allows justice to prevail.

Hearing is a very important element of Poe’s short stories, but so are the other senses. Poe’s narrators provide us with visual and sensory input that allows us to look into the story teller’s mind, making us feel what he feels, and see what he sees. With several instances of alliteration and repetition (“hung it […] hung it […] hung it […] hung it […]” p.126 anthology) as well as the mention of touch (“Upon my touching it […] rubbed against my hand […]”), we can somehow connect with this narrator, even though he is beyond reason.

We hope our interpretation of the relationship between the black cat and the wife, as well as the study of the senses, will complement our colleagues’ presentation, which will be taking on the theme of perverseness. Hopefully, through our and their work, we can shed some light on Poe’s quite dark short story, and bring about some interesting discussions for the future.