Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote ‘The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature’(Norton 548). Emersonian individualism has had a burning influence on American society, where the individual mind is perceived as something divine, where man stood alone, independent and all-knowing. A contemporary author, Edgar Allan Poe, had a different take on this. What if you look inside and you cannot find anything? What if instead, you find something abhorrent and repulsive? Worse yet, what if you look inside and find that you are mad?
Poe’s view on the individual was far from the romanticized man you find in Emerson’s “The American Scholar”. Poe, in company with Hawthorne and Melville, set in motion a new literary sub-culture as a response to the Romantic wave that had reached Americas shores. The so called Dark Romanticism ‘held less optimistic view of nature, mankind and divinity’(Lawrence 43). In this essay, we will look at Poe’s short story The Black Cat, and see how it can be an example of Dark Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) led a short, but turbulent life.
During his forty years he experienced the loss and abandonment of both his parents, the loss of his brother, being kicked out and betrayed by his foster parents and the death of his wife. In addition to this, he suffered from poverty, alcoholism and a feeling of alienation from the world. Still, no matter how little money it gave him, he never gave up on his writing. Poe believed prose and poetry to be a form of art and one of the most effective ways to express literature. It should also only appeal to the sense of beauty.
He wished to make an impression on his readers, to shake them a little, and ‘sought ways to get its [his audience] attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophical, cultural and psychological issues’ (Norton 687). The poet played with the human mind and the human consciousness. This is why we often find deranged sociopaths, macabre settings and tragic fates in his works. Poe’s writing has often been described as dark, twisted and disturbed.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that his literary works has had a great impact on America’s literary history. As previously stated, Poe was a part of the literary genre known as Dark Romanticism. This sub-genre can be looked at as the dark side of the coin that is Romanticism. Man was no longer an example of perfection, he had no longer any divine qualities or wisdom. ‘Nature was also an ambiguous force - dark, decaying and destructive’ (Lawrence 43). Dark Romanticists thrived in mysteries and superstition, pulled on the strings of imagination and plays with human complexity.
Poe uses these ideals to create settings where the reader is immediately drawn into his macabre world, as well as the minds of his characters, which are often quite unblanced. The Black Cat was published for the first time in 1843, and it tells a story about a mans slow descent into madness. The story introduces a man who, after having experienced a major change in character, kills his cat by hanging it. He finds a new one a few months later, but when he tries to kill the second cat as well, he ends up killing his own wife instead. Hiding the body in the wall, he is convinced no one will ever find it.
Without the mans knowledge, he had trapped the cat inside the wall as well, and this leads to his capture. Poe uses language to draw the reader into the story, by creating a gloomy and dismal background. At the very beginning of the story, he writes ‘these events have terrified - have tortured - have destroyed me’. Already, he has provided us with a sense of darkness and evil. Words such as ‘demon’, ‘atrocity’ and ‘haunts’, helps support this background throughout the story. In addition, the use of 1st person narrative emphasizes the gloom even further.
The combination of language and narrative makes it impossible for the reader to distance himself from the actions in the story, because he reads them like it it happening inside his own head. Every feeling and every notion comes directly to him, and the reader can perceive the mind of the protagonist like it is his own. Because of the narrative used in the story, it is only appropriate to begin with a characterization of the protagonist. When we first meet him, he describes himself as ‘noted from my docility and humanity of disposition’.
Through the course of the story, however, he grows ‘day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless to the feelings of others’. There is an interesting exchange of natures in the story. As the man becomes more animalistic, the cat becomes more humane. Poe turns the protagonist in on himself, shows what is really going on inside his head. What we find is something raw, violent and capable of cold-blooded murder. This, Poe says, is the terrifying dimensions of the human psyche. Imagery and symbolism were literary devices often used by the Romantics, and Poe was no exception.
The first example we can find of symbolism is the first cats name, Pluto. In Roman mythology, Pluto was the god of the dead and of the underworld. This makes us associate the cat with this delusion and view him as a demonic creature, something that is always present, something that you can never really get rid of. Poe also mentions the superstition which saw ‘all black cats as witches in disguise’. Witches are famously known for being burned at the stake or hanged. The night of the day he hanged his cat, the protagonists house is set ablaze.
The next day he finds that everything is destroyed in the fire, save one thing; a compartment wall which bore the ‘picture of a great cat... There was a rope around the animals neck’. The narrator blows it of as a coincidence, saying the cat had probably been thrown in through the window to wake him, but you still cannot shake the feeling that the cat had, somehow, something to do with the fire, despite the fact that it is unarguably dead. Driven by a sense of remorse for Pluto’s fate, the protagonist searches for a new cat. To his delight, he finds one ‘closely resembling him (Pluto) in every aspect but one.
Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast’. At first, this mark seems to be something indefinite, but as the days grew on, the mark turned into something more and more discernible; a picture of the gallows. ‘Oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime - of Agony and of Death! ’ as the narrator describes it. As you can remember, he killed his old cat by hanging, and the second cat becomes not only a reminder of his past actions, but also an accusation.
It almost feels like the cat is saying ‘I know what you did, and you’re not going to go unpunished’. In the end, the narrator get caught because of the cat, ‘whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman’. I think that, with all this in mind, we can rightfully look upon the cat as the devil himself. We have already made the association of him as the god of the underworld, but now we can add something more; the devil is watching and following you. He accuses the cat of ‘seduc[ing] him into murder’, and he cats watching eye is what drives him insane.
This notion is only emphasized by the fact that the protagonist stabbed one of Pluto’s eyes out while he was still alive. Poe was fond of drawing on certain literary strings; the double, enclosure or entrapment, and the power of the dead. We can find all these recurring themes in The Black Cat, the double, being of course the second cat the protagonist finds. The discovery of the second cat leads us to theme number two; entrapment. The narrator tells us how he slowly finds a dislike to the creature, but that the memory of his ‘former deed of cruelty’ spared the cat from any violence.
Nevertheless, the more he tried to distance himself from the cat, the more attached the cat got to him. He describes how ‘it followed me around with pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend’. It even got to the point where the narrator could no longer sleep, for he felt the ‘hot breath of the thing upon my face’. The feeling of entrapment is only accentuated by the outline of the gallows upon the cat’s breast. The power of the dead has already been mentioned, it being the first cat coming back to him in the second, constantly reminding him of his actions and promising revenge.
In conclusion, we find there is no doubt The Black Cat is an example of Dark Romanticism. We have discovered the force in Poe’s language, themes and imagery, and how he used it to show his readers the true power of nature and the human psyche. As we have seen, he gives his character an emotional complexity we have never seen before. As in The Black Cat he destroys the protagonists ability to think rationally, he is overpowered by his guilt, superstition and anger. He looks inside himself and finds that he is indeed mad. This is what makes Edgar Allan Poe and his works a part of the genre Dark Romanticism.
He introduces the idea that man is not a divine and flawless creature, they are rather grotesque animals who play with dark forces he cannot hope to control. He puts and end to the glorification of nature, and shows moral is hard to obtain. By writing his stories and poems, Poe showed the world ‘the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending democratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimensions of one’s own mind’ (Norton 687).
He explored the human mind in ways few had done before him, he saw something new in the world others had never seen before. He embraced ‘the grotesque, the gloomy, the morbid, the fantastic’ (Lawrence 43), and became a pioneer in Dark Romanticism, creating tales so gloriously morbid, they continue to fascinate readers centuries after his death.
