The Misdirection of Unconscious Motives in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Black Cat”

Edgar Allan Poe's “The Black Cat” (1843) offers an intriguing account of the role that unconscious conflicts play in what appears to be senseless human violence. The tale presents an unnamed convict's effort to narrate a series of his uncanny experiences which culminates in his seemingly impulsive crime of killing his wife. Although one might at first assume that a person who awaits the hangman has no reason to lie, I argue that the narrative as a whole is an elaborate attempt at misdirection with an intention to shift the blame for murder away from one unconscious agency onto another residing within the same psyche. Further, through this essay I will try to unveil the precise psychological reason behind such an ostensibly futile exercise that occurs at a moment when the fate of the entire human organism remains sealed.1

The protagonist of “The Black Cat” assures his readers that he will present the sequence of events that has led to his current predicament without any subjective intervention or commentary. In his story, thus, the narrator's original humane and docile disposition, under the influence of alcohol, progressively turns into one of “fiendish malevolence” (p. 170). When his cat Pluto happens to inflict a wound upon his hand, thus, the narrator cuts out one of its eyes from the socket and later hangs the animal to death. Eventually he comes cross a stray cat closely resembling Pluto. The animal accompanies him as he returns to his house and quickly becomes a great favorite of his wife. The protagonist, however, soon begins to feel a mysterious sense of horror in its presence and his apprehension about the new cat intensifies as he one day notices that it also has lost an eye. In a moment of fury later on, when he tries to strike this cat with an axe, his wife stops him and he kills her instead. He walls the corpse up in his cellar, without

noticing that the cat also has sneaked into the vacant space in the wall. Four days later, when the police search th