Analyzing Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Black Cat'
Shania Perez
Kambui
English 102
24 October 2014
In the Mind of a Maniac After reading “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe a reader might question, why write about killing a cat? What kind of satisfaction would an author get out of that? What kind of satisfaction does an author think a reader would get out of it? Edgar Allen Poe is most popular for his dark, twisted stories, but probably even more popular for how he wrote them. His nonchalant tone throughout “The Black Cat” is maybe what surprised readers most. Critics initially believe that this story is not about morals or whether the act of killing the pet cat he loved was good or evil. This story rather stressed the strong anatomy of a person with a dark mind and/or the dark mind itself …show more content…
Even if “The Black Cat” was meant to be about having a good morality basis in life, all that would go out the window because of the “act of sin” committed in this story. The narrator starts off the story off very, maybe even too nonchalant. This also gives a clue as to where the narrator and author are psychologically. He writes “Yet I will not attempt to expound them” (Poe 520) when explaining how exactly he is going to tell this story of unfortunate events, showing that he is not going to focus on the bad of the story, but the simple facts and events. In the beginning of the story he displays he did not wish to emphasize the killing of the cat, but simply wanted to tell of the acts he committed and the …show more content…
She criticizes that he did not show his masculinity in everyday life, so when committing these crimes he showed masculinity. “Poe situates the story within the household, thus aligning the narrator with the feminized domestic sphere. The male narrator’s feminine traits are apparent, and he struggles to recast this inappropriate femininity into a sensitive masculinity. He attempts to actively maintain a benign persona that masks his femininity; however, he performs a kind of hyper masculinity that manifests itself in increasingly horrific acts of violence” (Bliss). There are a lot of excuses and reasons to why the narrator committed these crimes, but no one will ever criticize or say otherwise to the fact that the narrator was
Kambui
English 102
24 October 2014
In the Mind of a Maniac After reading “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe a reader might question, why write about killing a cat? What kind of satisfaction would an author get out of that? What kind of satisfaction does an author think a reader would get out of it? Edgar Allen Poe is most popular for his dark, twisted stories, but probably even more popular for how he wrote them. His nonchalant tone throughout “The Black Cat” is maybe what surprised readers most. Critics initially believe that this story is not about morals or whether the act of killing the pet cat he loved was good or evil. This story rather stressed the strong anatomy of a person with a dark mind and/or the dark mind itself …show more content…
Even if “The Black Cat” was meant to be about having a good morality basis in life, all that would go out the window because of the “act of sin” committed in this story. The narrator starts off the story off very, maybe even too nonchalant. This also gives a clue as to where the narrator and author are psychologically. He writes “Yet I will not attempt to expound them” (Poe 520) when explaining how exactly he is going to tell this story of unfortunate events, showing that he is not going to focus on the bad of the story, but the simple facts and events. In the beginning of the story he displays he did not wish to emphasize the killing of the cat, but simply wanted to tell of the acts he committed and the …show more content…
She criticizes that he did not show his masculinity in everyday life, so when committing these crimes he showed masculinity. “Poe situates the story within the household, thus aligning the narrator with the feminized domestic sphere. The male narrator’s feminine traits are apparent, and he struggles to recast this inappropriate femininity into a sensitive masculinity. He attempts to actively maintain a benign persona that masks his femininity; however, he performs a kind of hyper masculinity that manifests itself in increasingly horrific acts of violence” (Bliss). There are a lot of excuses and reasons to why the narrator committed these crimes, but no one will ever criticize or say otherwise to the fact that the narrator was