The psychological context of three tales by Poe.

Abstract

‘ The Black Cat ’ is one of Poe's neat little studies of obsession. Joseph Moldenhauer has said that these first-person tales of terror should be regarded less as studies of deranged minds than as controlled exercises in madness. We may take his point that there is little ‘ clinical ’ observation and that the obsession is seen from within, but may add further that the subjects of these tales are the irrational motives themselves, and therefore Poe does not need to create a motive for the motive. That is, ‘ The Black Cat ’ is a study of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ of the sort noted by Benjamin Rush in his Sixteen Lectures (1811) by whose account of a famous poisoner of cats it may have been suggested. It is not particularly a study of the effects of the ‘ murdering impulse ’ but rather of the impulse itself, which Poe simply cloaks in a non-specific narrator ‘ self ’. Poe's habitual use of the monologue or confessional form, and his claustrophobic interiors, are both calculated to produce a sense of internalized action, and the scenery of the tales is usually the chamber of the haunted mind, of which the poem ‘ The Haunted Palace ’ is only the most explicit version. The lack of a touchstone in ‘ real ’ surroundings, of an objective point of view, together with the sense of identification induced by first-person narration, combines to ensure that the internalized action is not seen from a position safely outside the distorted consciousness but, necessarily, from within.