Creeping in the "Mere": Catagenesis in Poe's "Black Cat" and Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper"

Aubrey Beardsley, The Black Cat from Four Illustrations for the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1901).

Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-108227.

And when on the Last Day sinful man appears in his hideous nakedness, we see that he has the monstrous shape of a delirious animal.

—Michel Foucault, History of Madness (2006)

The numerous thematic and tropic crosscurrents between Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and many of Edgar Allan Poe's tales are well recognized by scholars of nineteenth-century literature. Annette Kolodny identifies the specific parallels between the narrator's bedroom in Gilman's tale—"with its bed nailed to the floor, its windows barred, and metal rings fixed to the walls—and Poe's evocation of the dungeon chambers of Toledo" in "The Pit and the Pendulum." As essential markers of the gothic genre, both stories describe the horrific play between a hegemonic system of torturing logic and an individual's struggle with madness. Accordingly, Carol Margaret Davison argues that Gilman employs a narrative dynamic similar to Poe's: "both use . . . constitutionally nervous characters whose 'illnesses' are virtually impossible to diagnose, foreground the subversive nature of the imagination, and share the peculiar combination of haunting mood and rational design that has been deemed Poe's signature style." Gilman herself, in her autobiography, draws a connection between "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Poe's work. In her

Frontispiece to "The Yellow Wall-Paper. A Story," by Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman), New England Magazine 11, no. 5 (1892): 647.

Courtesy of Cornell University Library, Making of America Digital Collection.

response to H. E. Scudder's rejection letter (Atlantic Monthly, 1890), which made clear how dismal her story had made him, Gilman concludes: "The story was meant to be dreadful, and succeeded. I suppose he would have sent back one of Poe's on the same ground."¹

While "The Yellow Wallpaper" certainly echoes the claustrophobia of rationalism in "The Pit and the Pendulum," the hallucinatory effects of the arabesque in "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," and the theme of contagion in "Masque of the Red Death," it is "The Black Cat" (1843) that yields perhaps the most significant and active cross-textual noise. Even a cursory glance at these two narratives reveals the common threads: an unnamed narrator spiraling into madness, a haunted domestic space, women emerging from behind walls, and, most crucially from my vantage point, figurations of animality—"creeping" cats and women. This last correspondence is a highly productive substrate that has received little, if any, critical attention. In fact, Gilman's own characterization of her story as "dreadful" specifically echoes the governing emotion of "dread" that the narrator of "The Black Cat" uses to describe the overpowering sensation of being haunted by an animal. As he says of the second black cat (who arrives revenant after he kills the first): "although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing . . . chiefly—let me confess it at once—by absolute dread of the beast."² This "dread" is energized by his recognition that the animal he had thought destroyed—Pluto, the first black cat—has only returned in a more virulent, menacing form.

However, the primary source of this dread, I argue, stems less from an oppositional structure of animality that challenges the authority of the human than it does from a dawning sense that the animal Other is pervasive, unlocatable, slippery, and, most damaging, already domesticated/insinuated within the borders of an anthropocentric order that is ostensibly immune. In other words, the narrator's anxiety stems from contagious animality that permeates not only the walls of his home but also his sense of identity. While the narrator begins the narrative (his confession) the putative owner of a menagerie—"birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey" (CW, 850), [End...