Exploratory Essay

Poe’s “The Black Cat” explored through Freadian lense

A realism fused writer, Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story “The Black Cat ”, published in 1845, addressed the illusion and how that illusion impacts a person’s mind with the myth of the black cat being a sign of the unfortunate and witches in disgust. He presented the story by demonstrating the topic of wishful impulses and displacement of disposition and argued that a person inherits violative behavior and releases those emotions on others through their actions. Poe supported this claim by telling the consequences; then he introduced the main conflict and finally the result of the conflict in his story. His purpose was to inform his audience about those particular behaviors of the narrator so that his audience become aware of those behaviors and take essential steps to treat them. Edgar Allen Poe, in his story “The Black Cat”, illustrated the concept of wishful impulse and displacement described by Freud, as the narrator portrayed various aggressive acts such as featuring tortuous and aggressive attitudes toward his cat and his wife. 

One of the major concepts elucidated by Poe in his story is wishful impulses, which means a person having a strong desire to achieve some type of goal. The narrator in the story was depicting this characteristic because, in the beginning, he was found to be absorbing the cat’s irrational behaviors like growing moody, having regardless of feelings toward others, posing a violative attitude, etc. And these behaviors overtook him so strongly that he wanted to impose his demeanor by employing himself into demolition; and this desire to harm others became a vital moral to make him feel good. Such a representation was provided in the story saying, “ My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little” (Poe). This evidence could be clarified by saying that the narrator’s wish-fulfillment was rigid that despite knowing the things he was doing was not right, fulfilling his impulse valued more than feeling the guilt; in other words, he gave priority to his happiness of fulfilling his desire rather than feeling guilty of the unjust happening to others.

Not only could wishful impulse make someone not realize the guilt of doing something wrong, but it can also lead a person to kill to make him feel good and accomplished. Because when a person’s wishful impulse takes over him, the only thing that evolves in his mind is to achieve that desire by any means. In another place of the story, the writer shows how the narrator was desperate to fulfill his impulse by saying “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” (Poe).  According to this evidence, what the narrator wanted to gain is that he wanted to kill the animal, which was a cat in the scenario, that was causing his potential discomfort of not being able to kill it. And by killing it, he could calm himself down because that is what he wished to achieve as one of his impulses. This idea of the narrator being eager to be tortuous toward others could be explained by a Freudian concept of wishful impulse where Freud says “ An acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have produced a high degree of unpleasure” (2212). What Freud meant by this connects back to the behavior presented through the narrator. It’s because thinking back to the circumstances, the reason why the narrator wanted to kill the beast was that he was intimately suffering from the discomfort of not being able to do what he desired. Which made him take action to kill the beast to fulfill his wish and come out of the unpleasant that he was feeling.

Another important concept that Poe demonstrated in his story is the displacement of the narrator’s disposition. Not only the narrator seemed to be taking violent actions to meet his wishful impulses, but he was also found to be displacing his attitudes towards others who were living around him. He would be bothered by the simplest things done by the second cat or his wife. And this all supposedly happened as a result of him adapting his first cat Pluto’s behavior. So whenever he felt the unpleasantness, he would unload that emotion on the second cat or his wife by posing aggression and torture. Such imagery was drawn in the story when the author said the cat followed him and his wife while they were walking outside,  it exasperated him to madness. So he attempted to kill the cat with an axe but ended up burying the axe into his wife’s brain with rage as she was trying to prevent him (Poe). In this text, the narrator’s negative behavior and aggressive emotion that he absorbed from the first cat,  he wanted to release it on the second cat by trying to kill it, at the same time he displaced that aggression on his wife by killing her. Meanwhile, Freud described the displacement in his lecture by saying  “But they can claim a high theoretical value…the formation of substitutes occur even under healthy conditions” (2224). Freud’s idea supports the behavior noticed in the narrator, because the narrator was a normal person without any illness or disease, yet found to be displacing his emotions onto others in theory to fulfill his wishes.

In conclusion, Poe demonstrated such violent and aggressive activities through the narrator to show how the wishful impulse affected him. Besides, how those impulses derived him to displace his hostility on others around him. As Freud already has developed these concepts of wishful impulse and displacement in his lectures, therefore, could be used to support the idea Poe illustrated in his short story of “The  Black Cat”. 

Work Cited 

Freud, Sigmund. “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis”.Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Foundation , 1909, Massachusetts, Clark University. 

Poe, E. A. (1845). The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. Retrieved from https://poestories.com/read/blackcat