THE BLACK CAT
857
eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into
murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hang–
man. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"
Thus the tomb, under the double urge of his remorse and his
compulsion to exhibit the crime, opens and spews forth, to the son's
horrified eyes, the dead mother's corpse crowned with this multiple
castration-image. For now the dreadful cat is not content merely to
display its hideous eyeless socket, but opens and distends its menacing
jaws, red as the vagina-wound cut into the women's body. Further,
it is immured in a chimney-that same symbolic recess in which was
thrust Mlle. L'Espanaye's body-which recess opens before the mur–
derer's eyes, as though a horrible gaping wound in the house's body.
Per contra, the grim and horrible mockery, so evident in this tale,
determines that the wife's body, in its entirety-as earlier, that of her
double Pluto--is represented, not as hanged but as "erect," in her
tomb-chimney. This erect posture in which the murderer buries
his
wife, after splitting her skull with an axe-equivalent to castration
and counterpart to the pen-knife excision of the cat's eye-is also
a sort of counterpart to the hanging of Pluto; yet another mockery
in the form of rephallization. That it is never anything more than
a gruesome mockery, we clearly see from the fact that, even in the
tomb, the great crime of which she remains accused is castration, as
is obvious from the effigy with which she is finally crowned; the one–
eyed cat with distended jaws.
Such is this tale which revolves round phantasies of woman as a
castrated being, a tale so much the more moving and impressive in
that this theme, naturally, is never expressed. Many of our readers,
if they have not already thrown aside this book will, doubtless, not
have followed us into these caves of the unconscious, ever darker and
more menacing than the cellar in which the narrator walls up his
wife and cat. Poe also, no doubt, would never have followed us there,
for the latent content of his tale lay altogether too far from conscious–
ness, owing to the overstem repression, in his childhood, of anything
to do with sex. Yet, no more than a dreamer's denials invalidate the
latent content of his dreams, which underlies their manifest content
and which psychoanalysis uncovers, would Poe's denials invalidate the
deepest meaning of this tale.
