"Mere Household Events" in Poe's "The Black Cat"

"MERE HOUSEHOLD EVENTS" IN POE'S "THE BLACK CAT" William Crisman Oakland, California Any reader of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" remembers the odd observations with which the narrator begins his horrific story of beatings, blindings, hangings, and uxoricidal axe murders: that the account will be of a "most homely narrative" concerning "a series of mere household events" (p. 63). ! As often as these remarks have attracted attention, however, no consensus has emerged about how to interpret them. At issue is to determine with what seriousness and in what way to take the narrator's claim that he is telling a "mere household" story. Commentators on the story's "household" character traditionally divide into two camps. Some readers take the opening declarations ironically . Harry Levin, for instance, sees "the task of reducing the phantasm to the commonplace" as a way of indicating "the pointless cruelty" of the narrator.2 Other proponents of an ironic reading detect a comic intent; echoing James Gargano, who sees in the narrator an eagerness to "introduce ... a concept that eliminates the onus of responsibility and guilt,"3 John McElroy considers the story's purported "household" nature as part ofa "skillfully wrought hoax" ofthe narrator's to shift blame from himself.4 At the opposite extreme, critics from Marie Bonaparte5 on have read the "household" remarks with full psychoanalytic seriousness. Daniel Hoffman understands the tale as a psychosexual account of husbands' loathing for, and desire to murder, their wives.6 Following an economic approach, David Halliburton interprets the story as a "domestic tragedy" in which the bourgeois narrator wants to "reign over others with the same absolute power that . . . a wealthy man [enjoys] over the things he owns."7 In most such interpretations, the cat becomes a surrogate for the wife, so that in Hoffman's phrase "the synoptic and evasive glossary of this tale" is "black cat = wife."8 Neither of these two extreme readings is satisfactory. The critics who take as ironic the references to the story's "household" nature leave unnoticed that the story is insistently about "households" and marriages. In contrast, critics who take the story as a fable about husbands and wives assume too earnestly that the cat and the wife are co-identical. True, the cat associates with the wife; most noticeably, the intended killing of the cat turns into murder of the wife, and the wife's tomb becomes that of the cat.9 Nevertheless, close association does not necessitate co-identity and, as Richard Frushell points out, as much evidence from association exists that 88Notes the cat "is identified with the narrator."10 While accepting that the story is a serious domestic drama of some sort, a satisfying reading must determine what sort of domestic drama the story is. What traditional psychoanalytic readings of the story seem to miss is the genesis of the narrator's relation both to the black cat and to his wife. The narrator's attraction to animals comes from his appreciation for "the unselfish and self-sacrificing love ofa brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity ofmere Man" (p. 63). From the narrator's "infancy," his "tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make [him] the jest of [his] companions" (p. 63). In short, the narrator is someone ostracized by friends and particularly sensitive to "frequent" infidelity and rejection. He is also someone who expects animals to have the opposite relation to him, that is, to be faithful and help safeguard fidelity. Finally, he is someone who has tried to secure marital fidelity quickly, since he "married early," in fact so hastily that only afterward he was "happy to find in [his] wife a disposition not incongenial with [his] own" (p. 64). What happens in "The Black Cat" is simply the psychopathic reversal of these expectations. The black cat should be the ultimate of faithfulness. From childhood the narrator "cherished" the memory of"a faithful and sagacious dog," and the cat is "sagacious to an astonishing degree" (p. 63); the black cat should represent supreme fidelity. Instead it becomes a rival for the wife...