The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe. &#39The Black Cat&#39 is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe Poe was born in 1809 died at the age of 40 in 1849 and was an important contributor to the American Romantic movement Video Duration 10 min.

Author poet and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe is credited with pioneering the short story genre inventing detective fiction and contributing to the development of science fiction However Poe is best known for his works of the macabre including such infamous titles as The Raven The Pit and the Pendulum The Murders in the Rue Morgue Lenore and The Fall of the House of Usher Format Kindle EditionAuthor Edgar Allan Poe.

The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe: Summary & Analysis Video

QuotesMarriageAppearanceSynopsisBehaviourPreparationPurposeInvestigationFor the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen I neither expect nor solicit belief Mad indeed would I be to expect it in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence Yet mad am I notand very surely do I not dream But tomorrow I die and today I would unburthen my soul My immediate purpose is to place before the world plainly succinctly and without comment a series of mere household events In their consequences these events have terrifiedhave torturedhave destroyed me Yet I will not attempt to expound them To me they presented little but horrorto many they will seem less terrible than baroques Hereafter perhaps some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplacesome intellect more calm more logical and far less excitable than my own which will perceive in the circumstances I detail with awe nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions I was especially fond of animals and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets With these I spent most of my time and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them This peculiarity of character grew with my growth and in my manhood I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable There is something in the unselfish and selfsacrificing love of a brute which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man For my own part I soon found a dislike to it arising within me This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated butI know not how or why it wasits evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed By slow degrees these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred I avoided the creature a certain sense of shame and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty preventing me from physically abusing it I did not for some weeks strike or otherwise violently illuse it but graduallyvery graduallyI came to look upon it with unutterable loathing and to flee silently from its odious presence as from the breath of a pestilence What added no doubt to my hatred of the beast was the discovery on the morning after I brought it home that like Pluto it also had been deprived of one of its eyes This circumstance however only endeared it to my wife who as I have already said possessed in a high degree that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait and the source of my simplest and purest pleasures With my aversion to this cat however its partiality for myself seemed to increase It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend Whenever I sat it would crouch beneath my chair or spring upon my knees covering me with its loathsome caresses If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down or fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress clamber in this manner to my breast At such times although I longed to destroy it with a blow I was yet withheld from so doing partly by a memory of my former crime but chieflylet me confess it at onceby absolute dread of the beast This dread was not exactly a dread of physical eviland yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it I am almost ashamed to ownyes even in this felon&#39s cell I am almost ashamed to ownthat the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me had been heightened by one of the merest chimeras it would be possible to conceive My wife had called my attention more than once to the character of the mark of white hair of which I have spoken and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed The reader will remember that this mark although large had been originally very indefinite but by slow degreesdegrees nearly imperceptible and which for a long time my reason struggled to reject as fancifulit had at length assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to nameand for this above all I loathed and dreaded and would have rid myself of the monster had I daredit was now I say the image of a hideousof a ghastly thingof the Gallows!O mournful and terrible engine of horror and of crimeof agony and of death! And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere humanity And a brute beastwhose fellow I had contemptuously destroyeda brute beast to work out for mefor me a man fashioned in the image of the High Godso much of insufferable woe! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone and in the latter I started hourly from dreams of unutterable fear to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face and its vast weightan incarnate nightmare that I had no power to shake offincumbent eternally upon my heart! Beneath the pressure of torments such as these the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed Evil thoughts became my sole intimatesthe darkest and most evil of thoughts The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind while from the sudden frequent and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself my uncomplaining wife alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness for I had at length firmly resolved to put it to death Had I been able to meet with it at the moment there could have been no doubt of its fate but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger and forbore to present itself in my present mood It is impossible to describe or to imagine the deep the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom It did not make its appearance during the nightand thus for one night at least since its introduction into the house I soundly and tranquilly slept aye slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul! The second and the third day passed and still my tormentor came not Once again I breathed as a freeman The monster in terror had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little Some few inquiries had been made but these had been readily answered Even a search had been institutedbut of course nothing was to be discovered I looked upon my future felicity as secured \\”Gentlemen\\” I said at last as the party ascended the steps \\”I delight to have allayed your suspicions I wish you all health and a little more courtesy By the by gentlemen thisthis is a very wellconstructed house\\” [In the rabid desire to say something easily I scarcely knew what I uttered at all] \\”I may say an excellently wellconstructed house These wallsare you going gentlemen?these walls are solidly put together\\” and here through the mere frenzy of bravado I rapped heavily with a cane which I held in my hand upon that very portion of the brickwork behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the archfiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!by a cry at first muffled and broken like the sobbing of a child and then quickly swelling into one long loud and continuous scream utterly anomalous and inhumana howla wailing shriek half of horror and half of triumph such as might have arisen only out of hell conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak Swooning I staggered to the opposite wall For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless through extremity of terror and of awe In the next a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall It fell bodily The corpse already greatly decayed and clotted with gore stood erect before the eyes of the spectators Upon its head with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman I had walled the monster up within the tomb I married early and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own Observing my partiality for domestic pets she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind We had birds goldfish a fine dog rabbits a small monkey and a cat This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal entirely black and sagacious to an astonishing degree In speaking of his intelligence my wife who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise Not that she was ever serious upon this point and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens just now to be remembered One night as I sat halfstupefied in a den of more than infamy my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of gin or of rum which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon I approached it and touched it with my hand It was a black cata very large onefully as large as Pluto and closely resembling him in every respect but one Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body but this cat had a large although indefinite splotch of white covering nearly the whole region of the breast One night returning home much intoxicated from one of my haunts about town I fancied that the cat avoided my presence I seized him when in his fright at my violence he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth The fury of a demon instantly possessed me I knew myself no longer My original soul seemed at once to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence ginnurtured thrilled every fiber of my frame I took from my waistcoatpocket a penknife opened it grasped the poor beast by the throat and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush I burn I shudder while I pen the damnable atrocity I continued my caresses and when I prepared to go home the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me I permitted it to do so occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once and became immediately a great favourite with my wife This hideous murder accomplished I set myself forthwith and with entire deliberation to the task of concealing the body I knew that I could not remove it from the house either by day or by night without the risk of being observed by the neighbours Many projects entered my mind At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments and destroying them by fire At another I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar Again I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yardabout packing it in a box as if merchandise with the usual arrangements and so getting a porter to take it from the house Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these I determined to wall it up in the cellaras the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted Its walls were loosely constructed and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening Moreover in one of the walls was a projection caused by a false chimney or fireplace that had been filled up and made to resemble the rest of the cellar I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point insert the corpse and wall the whole up as before so that no eye could detect anything suspicious Upon the fourth day of the assassination a party of the police came very unexpectedly into the house and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises Secure however in the inscrutability of my place of concealment I felt no embarrassment whatever The officers bade me accompany them in their search They left no nook or corner unexplored At length for the third or fourth time they descended into the cellar I quivered not in a muscle My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence I walked the cellar from end to end I folded my arms upon my bosom and roamed easily to and fro The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained I burned to say if but one word by way of triumph and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.

'The Black Cat'—Plot, Symbols, Themes, and Key Quotes

Edgar Allan Poe could do was stand and watch it burn to the ground I thought of the cat as I watched it burn the cat whose dead body I had left hanging in the cellar It seemed almost that the cat had in some mysterious way caused the house to burn so that it could make me pay for my evil act so that it could take revenge upon me File Size 140KBPage Count 4.

The Black Cat (short story) Wikipedia

Adaptations In 1910–11 Futurist artist Gino Severini painted “The Black Cat” in direct reference to Poe&#39s short story Universal Pictures made two films titled The Black Cat one in 1934 starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and another “The Black Cat” was adapted into a sevenpage comic Author Edgar Allan Poe 晶 渡部Country United StatesPublish Year 1843Language English.