Edgar Allen Poe definitely had a thing for all things horrific - murders, evil incarnate cats, and guilt. It has been suggested that this is mainly due to Poe's own miserable life - it is well known he struggled with depression and alcoholism, and it is possible he wrote in this manner as a warning to the reader about his own world view.
Here I read through two of his stories - The Black Cat (1845) and The Tell-Tale Heart (1850), both dealing with murders in their own right, and the way the human psyche deals with the act of murder. To read the stories, click on the links above. For the analysis, read on below.
Quick Summary - The Black Cat
The narrator is to be executed next day, and has decided to tell us his story in an attempt to unburden his heart. He talks of his childhood, and how he had a love for animals. In time he grew to adopt multiple animals, and in his wife, found a woman who shared his love. Of all his pets, his favourite was his cat, Pluto.
With time though he became addicted to alcohol, and this changed his disposition for the worse. He began getting very irritable, and started abusing, first verbally and then physically, his wife and his pets. One night, under the influence, he feels that Pluto is avoiding him, and seizes him. When the cat paws him in defence, he gouges out an eye from the cat. Feeling guilty in the morning, he starts to drink even more than before. Naturally Pluto is terrified of him now, and runs at his sight. First, the narrator feels guilty, then irritated, and finally perversive of the cat's behaviour towards him. In this blind hatred, he grabs hold of the cat and hangs it by its neck in the garden.
That night he is awoken by cries of "Fire!", and escapes as all the wealth he has collected in his life burns down in front of him. In the morning, only one wall is standing, his bedroom's, and there lies the dead cat. Following this, apparent remorse haunts the author, who decides the best way to be rid of the feeling is to get another cat, similar to Pluto.
He finds a cat similar to Pluto, the same black colour, but with a white patch on its breast. He finds that it has no owner, and brings it home, much to the happiness of his wife. He however, starts to find dislike for the cat brewing in his heart, and it does not help matters when it turns out that the cat only has one eye. However, the guilt of his previous misdeed is the only thing that stops the narrator from hurting this second cat as well. So he begins to avoid the cat, which in turn only gets more and more attached to him and starts following him everywhere.
One day, while visiting the cellar with his wife, the narrator is tripped by the cat. Enraged and drunk, he loses the little something stopping him and takes an axe to kill the cat. His hand is stayed by his wife, which infuriates him further, pushing him to swing the axe at her, lodging it in her brain, killing her instantly. Immediately the narrator devises multiple ways to hide the body, finally deciding to wall her up in the cellar itself. When he then looks to kill the cat, he cannot find it. Happy to be rid of the cat, the narrator relaxes.
The police eventually arrive and question him about his wife's disappearance, and he calmly shows them around the house. They search his place multiple times, filling him with confidence that he will not be caught, prompting him to boast about the walls at his place, striking the one which has his wife in it. The second he strikes the wall, a loud wail comes from within, prompting the police to open up the wall. The corpse is found within, rotten and gore, and the cat on its head, with red on its mouth.
Quick Summary - The Tell-Tale Heart
The narrator tells this story to establish that he is not mad. He claims the murder he committed is not caused by insanity. He killed the man neither for money or out of revenge, but because of his fear of the man's pale blue eye. He defends his sanity by noting the cool thinking that went behind his measured actions at the time of the murder. Every night, he goes to the old man's apartment to kill him, but he is sleeping. Without the eye being open, he is not able to kill the man. In the morning, he behaves as if nothing is out of the ordinary.
When the narrator arrives a bit late on the eighth night, the old man wakes up and cries out. The narrator remains, and watches the old man's eye, while the old man sits terrified. The narrator can hear the old man's heartbeats as they get faster and faster in fright. When they get so loud that he is afraid the neighbours might hear, the narrator attacks and kills the old man before he can shout for more than a moment. He then calmly dismembers the corpse and hides it beneath the floorboards of the bedroom.
He hears the knock, and finds the police at the door, responding to a complaint regarding a shriek. He claims it to be his own from a nightmare, and then allows them the search the house. He seems normal and is chatty, and even asks them to sit and rest at the scene of the crime. The police of course suspect nothing, but the narrator begins to hear a thumping sound, which he knows is that of the old man's heart. Panicking, he is convinced that it can be heard by the policemen as well, and believes they are mocking him by feigning ignorance. Not able to handle the loud banging of the old man's heart, he screams at the police to tear open the floorboards, and confesses his crime in an attempt to make the noise stop.
Analysis
There is a clear use of murder here to show the deterioration of mental health of a person, either through simple paranoia, as depicted in The Tell-Tale Heart, or through alcoholism, as shown in the Black Cat. It is established that Edgar Allen Poe was a chronic alcoholic, and posits a reason as to the gore and darkness that often surrounds his works. Poe shows the ghosts that haunt him when inebriated through the man who murders his own wife, and doesn't bear the guilt, laying it all on his black cat, and yet admits to the guilt within, even when not admitted to the self, through the narrator of the Tell-Tale Heart, whose guilt manifests in the form of the dead man's heart beats.
There is also a celebration of mystery and a fascination with death in Poe's writings. Look at the focus on hiding the body - either by walling or by dismembering and burying beneath the floorboards in either story. The narrators celebrate themselves as masters of removing evidence, and then go ahead and cause their own downfall. Poe posits that it is not over confidence, but an innate desire to get caught that causes this - the narrator in the black cat talks about the construction of the house, and bangs the very wall he has hidden the body within to show off his skill, while the narrator of the tell-tale heart himself shows the police what he did with the body. While guilt is the driving force behind the sounds heard by the narrator in the latter, there is no remorse or guilt displayed by the narrator in the former.
The use of watch as an agent of time, and hence a march towards death, the narrators set the tone wherein the reader already knows the conclusion before it occurs. The fact that both narrators talk from their jail cells also support this argument. In the Black Cat, it is the time of day that marks most deaths - the cat is hanged at night, and same with the burning of the house. The wife is also fatefully killed at the night.
Perhaps the most important motif in the two stories is the power of the eye. It is the eye of the old man that drives the narrator of the tell-tale heart to murder. It is then the eye represented through the heartbeats that drives the narrator off the edge and force him to reveal them, so that the eye may see again. In the black cat, the narrator gouges out Pluto's eye, and this forms an accusatory notion whenever he sees his new cat, also without an eye. In the end, the cat stands witness to his murder of his wife, and acts as the whistle blower when the police arrive to search for her body.
No comments:
Post a Comment