842
PARTISAN REVIEW
multiply them. Just as the horse appeared hugely outlined in smoke
on the sky over the blazing castle, so the giant cat is outlined on the
wall of a similarly burnt dwelling. In each case the blaze must have
a similar significance and represent both the expression of, .and
punishment for, that urethro-phallic erotism which characterized the
small boy's genital desire for his mother and for which he was
punished. "The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth
was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair."
Unconsciously, Poe here alludes to the loss of the mother-house of
which, so early, he was bereaved, while the lost fortune perhaps, in
part, symbolizes the male potency of the poet, "swallowed up" in the
catastrophe which cost him his mother. The only heritage Elizabeth
Arnold left her despairing, grief-stricken son, was the magnified
image of herself; an image which would haunt his art and existence.
To the reader, this identification of the mother with a tom cat,
may seem somewhat forced. In its support, however, we would ap–
peal to common speech and thought, where cat is a usual symbol for
the female genital organs as, for instance, in the well-known French
folk song:
«Mon pere m'a donne un man,
Mon Dieu! quel homme, quel petit homme!
Le chat l'a pris pour une souris .
..
" 5
The sexual symbolism is unmistakable here, even to the non–
analyst. The "little man" obviously represents the husband's penis,
which is even likened to a mouse whose significance, as a phallic
symbol, in the mouse-phobias we find so frequently in women, is
well known. Per contra, the cat which wishes to eat it up, stands
for the woman's genitals into which the penis disappears or, in other
words, by which it is "devoured."
Moreover, the cat, like the female organ, has thick hair, exciting
and sensuous to the touch. Where the man has a
penis,
the woman
has a
cat,
and all the ways of this little feline are feminine in their
grace and treachery, even though a claw, at any moment, may issue
from the velvet paw.
Legend follows this universal symbolism in making the cat the
familiar of witches. Witches are the projection, in myths, of the
wicked mother, as the good fairy is that of the good mother; the
mother here, by a stock device of the unconscious, being split into
