I ...
PARTISAN REVIEW
penises in time, and goes on believing that grown women at least and,
especially,
his
mother-are so endowed. When, however, that last
line of defense must be abandoned and his mother appears as a cas–
trated being and he realizes that women, by way of the mother, once
and for all prove him wrong, he revenges himself by hating and
scorning women. Despite the sex attraction which later covers and,
at times, submerges such feelings,
all
men, in the depths of their
souls, feel more or less scorn of woman as a
castrated being.
How great, then, would be this scorn, in the case of a man who
was impotent? And impotent through fear of castration; castration
not only of the woman but
by
her, too, by reason of the vagina con–
ceived as the
vagina dentata?
Such would seem to have been Poe's
case and it is
hatred-hatred
above all of the castrated and castrating
mother, embodying both active and passive castration-from which
the tale of
The Black Cat
most deeply derives.
Why, because of a bite-unusual in cats, which generally claw
-does a demonic fury instantly possess Pluto's master, if not because
it harks back to the
cloaca dentata,
which theme recurs so often in
Poe's works? The mother has wounded her son's hand (that com–
mon phallic symbol and masturbatory member), and the son replies
by pulling out his penknife, that undramatic equivalent of the razor
in
The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
Seizing the mother-totem cat by
the throat, he inflicts upon it the mutilation and symbolic castration
for which he hates the mother and, thus, identifies himself with the
omnipotent father, as we earlier saw, in the shape of an orang–
outang. This is the penalty he exacts: he "cuts" the mother but,
instead of her throat, it is one of her eyes he cuts out. We know,
however, from dreams and myths and, in especial, from the ffidipus
myth to which we shall revert, how universally blinding is a cas–
tration symbol.
By degrees, Pluto's wound heals, but the socket of the lost eye
presents "a frightful appearance." No less frightful and repulsive, to
certain men, Poe doubtless among them, is the appearance or idea
of the vulva which, unconsciously, is likened to some frightful
wound, left from the severed penis. Thereafter, the terrified cat
flees from its master as swiftly as, before, it had sought and attended
him and that so as<Iiduously, that
his
master had often found it
difficult to prevent
him
following him through the streets. We have
