THE BLACK CAT
lSI
her knees or at her bosom. "I alone fed him," our narrator said
earlier, speaking of Pluto and, this, correctly transposed, should read:
"My mother alone fed me."
Yet every effort the mother makes, to recapture her son's af–
fection, proves useless. Nothing, not even the memory of her care
for him as a babe, ,at her breast, can lessen the horror she inspires
as a castrated being.
It
is too late, the cat's eye is already out. "At
such times," he says, "although I longed to destroy it with a blow,
I was yet withheld from so doing ... chiefly ... by absolute
dread
of the beast."
The unfortunate wretch now tries to define this terror: "This
dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil-and yet I should
be
at a loss how otherwise to define it."
It
is, in fact, an excellent defini–
tion of the castration-fear; "a physical evil" and yet, far more, given
the vast unconscious psychic ramifications this fear implies and did
imply, as we see, in Poe's psyche.
But now, we must ourselves admit that we have been carried
away by this plea of milk, and the affection thus attributed to the
son for this second embodiment of the mother. Something like a sim–
ilar feeling of discomfort, an echo, as it were, of what the cat's
owner felt so intensely, when pestered by its affection, should have
warned us, earlier, that this tableau of motherly affection might
conceal some dour mockery of the son's. But, under this mockery, as
we shall see, something more specific is, in fact, mocked and that more
bitterly; namely, this milk on which her plea rests. For we must re–
member that Elizabeth Arnold, the frail, consumptive actress, can–
not have breast-fed her son abundantly or long.
As
a nursling
Edgar, doubtless, would often suffer those pangs of hunger and
thirst, and cravings for milk, which later inspired the vast blanched
Polar background of
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym.
Thus, the
white splotch on the second cat's breast represents as much an ac–
cusation-phantasy, as a wish. Moreover, in
The Black Cat,
Poe, as we
saw, employs a disguise-mechanism familiar in dreams, that by which
things are represented by their opposites, which process also deter–
mines mockery. To the grim mockery of rephal1izing the castrated
mother, by hanging, we must now add the mockery which relactifies
her dry breasts by attributing the large splotch of milk.
