The black cat by Edgar Allan Poe

INTRODUCTION

Even before the field of Psychology was introduced and brought into practice some American writers, threw a spotlight on the mechanism of the human brain in their works. Edgar Allan Poe "as one of them who seems to be keenly aware of the complexities of the human brain and its effects on human behavior. His understanding of the human mind is marked in his various short stories and “The Black Cat” is one of them.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze and explain the reason behind the behavioral change of The Black Cat’s Narrator. The narrator who was once an animal lover gradually changed into an animal abuse and abuser. "The Black Cat" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" . The story is presented as a first-person narrative using an unreliable narrator.

In using the Psychoanalysis approach of literary criticism in this story, the narrator’s character development will be elaborated based on Sigmund Freud’s division of human personalities of id, ego, and superego. It is of no surprise to conclude the narrator of the story The Black Cat has a very peculiar and complex mind.

The Black Cat’s Narrator by Edgar Allan Poe

According to the Oxford Dictionary Psychoanalysis itself is a form of therapy which aims to cure mental disorders “by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the mind” . As described by Freud “unconscious” is the epicenter of repressed experiences, traumatic memories, fears, thoughts, sexual desires and aggression.

The psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. The Austrian, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) plays an important part on this literary criticism, he believes that every character we see in a story is the representation of writer’s unconscious mind.

Freudian Psychoanalytic Critics focus on stressing the distinction between the conscious to the unconscious mind, paying close attention to unconscious motives and feeling of the author or characters, demonstrating the presence in the literary work of classic psychoanalytic, making a large-scale application of psychoanalytic concepts to literary history in genre and identifying a ¨ psychic context for the literary work, at the expense of social or historical context. Freudian Interpretation includes questions such as; What was the writer's intention? - What does he not want to tell the world? - What is it that he did not want to write?

Allan Poe is a very interesting writer, he shares part of his personal life in his literary work, that is the way he expresses himself, in the Black cat story there is a lot that can be discovered as part of his personality and who he really is.

The “Black Cat” is a story that leaves the reader perplexed. The narrator of the story gradually changes from being a soft-hearted animal lover who also adores his life to a person who tortures regularly his animals and life. It certainly contains all the ingredients necessary to satisfy the appetite of any Poe enthusiast; alcohol, mutilation, strangulation, murder, and, last but not least, one of Poe's slight obsessions, perversity in the story, The Black Cat, there is a lot of symbolism regarding hidden attributes of his life.

The black cat itself represents not only a hidden meaning but a meaning the narrator wished to keep hidden. The black cat symbolizes the narrator's or Poe's alcoholism. Edgar Allen Poe has been accused of being an alcoholic throughout his life and it may have actually led up to the cause of his death. The short story may give a view at Poe's fight with the disease. The black cat may not only be a symbol of the alcoholism that Poe faces but perhaps just his conscious in general. Another interesting fact is that in creating the narrator of “The Black Cat” , Poe exaggerated all the faults of his personality while drunk. Even though the narrator denies this, we become aware of his superstitious belief as the story progresses from the fact that he calls his cat, Pluto, who in Greek and Roman mythology was the god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld.

Conclusions

·Allan Poe could consciously or unconsciously present himself as a cat and thepsychoanalytical analysis helped to understand the behavioral change expressed by the author.

·The questions for a Freudian Interpretation; What was the writer's intention? What does he not want to tell the world? What is it that he did not want to write? Really helps to do a psychoanalytical analysis.

Abigaíl Lourdes Galicia López 201706235