THE BLACK CAT
841
partment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the
house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plaster–
ing had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire-a
fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About
this wall a dense crowd were collected. . .. I approached and
saw, as if graven in
bas relief
upon the white surface, the figure of a
gigantic
cat.
The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvel–
lous. There was a rope about the animal's neck."
"When I first beheld this apparition . . . ," says the cat's
murderer, "my wonder and my terror were extreme." He then re–
flects that, since the cat was hanged in the garden adjoining the
house, which garden was then thronged by the sightseers to the fire,
"the animal must have been cut from the tree" by one of them and
the gruesome missile thrown through his bedroom-window to rouse
him from sleep.
"The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty
into the
substanc~
of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which,
with the flames, and the
ammonia
from the carcass, had then ac–
complished the portraiture as I saw it."
So the murderer strives to rationalize this terrifying miracle.
It
is
not surprising that, despite these rationalizations, the apparition should
make a "deep impression" on his fancy. "For months . . . " he
says, "I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat...."
Let us now interrupt our narrative to consider whom the cat
represents. Though a tom and named Pluto, we should not be mis–
led, for the Black Cat, as it were, is a
totem
of Poe's mother, conjured
up by Catterina's presence round the house and bed of his consump–
tive mother-figure, Virginia. Even the metamorphosis of the tor–
toiseshell Catterina into the black Pluto bears this out, for his coat
is "raven-hued" like the locks of the Lady Ligeia or Elizabeth
Arnold.
We saw, once before, how Poe represented the mother, in totem
guise,
as the giant horse in
M et<:engerstein.
Now by what is more
than mere coincidence, the cat, in its tum, expands to similar colossal
dimensions, in the way that primitives magnify their ruling deities–
deities the magnified projections of the male and female parent
which more than retain the proportions of parent to child-in fact,
