“A series of mere household events”: Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Domesticity, and Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century America

“A series of mere household events”: Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Domesticity, and Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century America HEIDI HANRAHAN I n 1846, Mary Gove Nichols visited Edgar Allan Poe and his family in their Fordham cottage. Nichols remembered seeing Poe’s beloved wife Virginia sick in bed (she would die the next year after a long battle with tuberculosis) and later wrote: “She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband’s great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat on her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer’s only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands, and her mother her feet.”1 In the Poe family’s domestic space, a cat played an essential role, that of loving comforter to a dying woman. This rather sentimental image contrasts sharply with some of the most famous lines Poe ever wrote about a cat: “One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;—hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;—hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offense;— hung it because I knew that in doing so I was committing a sin” (Works, 3:852). This dark scene from “The Black Cat” reminds us that depictions of domesticity and horror often share settings, character types, and signifiers, a truth reinforced by the narrator’s opening description of his story as a “most homely narrative” (Works, 3:849). Thus, this story of murder and madness is also a story about pets, family, and domesticity. In this essay, I argue that “The Black Cat,” a tale first and foremost about a man and his beloved pet, can be read as Poe’s commentary on nineteenthcentury American domesticity. In this way, it is perhaps one of Poe’s most American tales and clearly connected to the same concerns as his contemporaries . Poe here merges the gothic and the domestic and thus implicitly raises questions about domesticity’s potential for containing our darker desires and impulses. The narrator’s violent acts, directed first toward his cat and then toward his wife, indicate a resistance to the promises of domesticity: the calming and wholesome effects of a healthy, happy home. Reading Poe’s story as a response to what historian Katherine Grier calls the “new domestic ethic C  2012 Washington State University 40 P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 P O E ’ S “ T H E B L A C K C A T ” of kindness to animals” in the nineteenth century sheds new light on Poe’s critical engagement with domesticity.2 Recent cultural-critical approaches to “The Black Cat” have been especially ambitious, since it is one of Poe’s “most socially grounded stories,”3 taking as its main characters a rather ordinary couple living, at least initially, a normal middle-class life. Critics have read the story as a critique of the criminal justice system as well as in the context of both the temperance movement and the nineteenth-century charitable home visit.4 Each of these approaches surely enriches our understanding of this most perplexing story, but none fully illuminates it. In The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman speak to this desire to place Poe in conversation with his contemporaries, yet they remind us that cultural and historicist critics must respect the “the process by which Poe’s fictions simultaneously attempt to abstract themselves from and allude to the particulars of their cultural moment.”5 We must be careful not to make Poe’s works into something they are not in an effort to make them more political, more racially aware, or more invested in domesticity.6 With this caveat in mind, I offer another contextualization of Poe’s story with one important disclaimer: the story resists full explanation or understanding, and that is precisely what is so disturbing about it—and why Pluto, the...