Vol. 17 No. 8 1950 - page 845

THE BLACK CAT
845
here a whole series of situations reversed, as often happens in dreams.
It
was Edgar who, as a child, must have followed his mother
round the house .and would have wished "to follow her through
the streets." Also, whereas in the tale the injured cat flees from its
tormentor, in fact, it was Poe who fled, terrified, from mutilated
woman, who could mutilate him.
Doubtless, too, it is to rid himself of the sight of this injury to
his victim, that its master decides to kill it. The deepest cause of the
perverse fit which makes the drunkard commit his second crime is,
primarily, horror of castration.
The latter's wild, inexplicable anger, however, which cost the cat
first one eye .and then its existence, is attributed in the tale to quite
other causes. Before he has even cut out its eye, before even he is
bitten, we read: "One night, returning home, much intoxicated ...
1 fancied that the cat avoided my presence." And, later, when the
injured cat flies from its master "in extreme terror," and before
"the spirit of
Perverseness"
comes into question, we find the follow–
ing sentences:
"I
had so much of myoId heart left, as to be first grieved by this
evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me.
But this feeling soon gave place to irritation."
Thus, at separate times and before each "crime," what causes this
murderous irritation in the cat's owner, is the animal's
avoidance
of
him, and its loss of affection. Surely, there is here a carry-over from
the time when the small boy saw his increasing erotic demands
in–
evitably repulsed by his mother. Such resultant resentment and anger
often persists in the unconscious through life.
Thus there would be two causes for the "criminal's" irritation
with his victim; one, manifest and admitted, the cat's lack of af–
fection; the other, the deepest and that which pervades the tale,
his
horror of the animal's gouged-out eye. All this might thus be trans–
lated, in terms of the tale's latent content: Poe, in his sadistic-anal
and already phallic phase when his mother died, must even then have
hated her for repulsing his childish sexual advances. But soon after,
his infantile sexuality foundered on the rock of his moralistic up–
bringing by John Allan and the usual castration threats.
Only then would he realize the difference between the sexes, and
767...,835,836,837,838,839,840,841,842,843,844 846,847,848,849,850,851,852,853,854,855,...898
Powered by FlippingBook