The black cat

(1843)

Poe’s “The Black Cat” represents, even for such a past master of the macabre, a rare form of descent into Dante’s Inferno. A tale narrated by a condemned murderer who is to die on the morrow, it tells of a double murder, as well as chronicling the destruction of a man’s soul. While alcoholism, what the narrator calls “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance, ” is the apparent cause of the narrator’s downfall, he attributes a deeper, more philosophical cause to his crimes: “the spirit of perverseness.” What the narrator calls “the unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself” drives him first to mutilate and then to hang his “favorite pet and playmate, ” the black cat Pluto. Significantly after he has committed “a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it... beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of... God, ” the narrator’s house burns and, as he acknowledges, his “entirely worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself to despair.” That the white figure of a hanged cat above the narrator’s headboard survived the fi re invokes a supernatural suspicion that the animal’s spirit—or the repressed guilt of his own foul deed—laid the crime at his head.

When the narrator, who has sunk from alcoholism to the “vile haunts” and “a den of more than infamy”—obviously opium—to secure a second black cat, he soon realizes its physical resemblance to Pluto, except that the white splotch upon its breast represents “the Gallows, ” the eventual fate of our doomed narrator. It is in an old house to “which our poverty compelled us to inhabit” that the narrator, in a rage “more than demoniacal, ” attempts to kill the cat, finds his ax wielding hand “stayed” by his wife, and so turns the weapon upon her and buries the ax in her brain. Burying her body in the walls of the cellar, “as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims, ” the narrator inadvertently seals the one-eyed cat in the tomb with his wife’s corpse. When the police arrive four days later, they find nothing and are satisfied to leave when the narrator, in what he calls “the mere frenzy of bravado” resulting from his sense of triumph over mortal justice, raps the wall of the tomb with a cane, evoking a response from the sealed cat. A “dozen stout arms” of policemen toil at the wall and disclose the decayed corpse, with the cat “upon her head, ” its “solitary eye of fire” transfixing the narrator with his “hideous murder.” Poe, in his grotesque fusion of elements, has the cat ascendant, its mouth filled with the gore of the corpse, which stands erect, a bloody, apocalyptic vision of murder, with the cat’s one eye a perversion of the Illuminati pyramid, while nature, “red in tooth and claw, ” to paraphrase Jack London, utters “strange screams of death” (Macbeth, 2.3.63).

Almost from first to last, the imagery of the tale resembles Shakespeare’s Macbeth in virtually every morbid, spiritual detail. That play, too, opens with references to witches and cats and son evolves into a tale of usurpation and political murder; of seduction by an ambitious, ruthless wife; and of demonic promises made only to be broken, to reveal “the equivocation of the fi end” (5.5.49). This last sentiment is echoed in the narrator’s false remorse at having torn out Pluto’s eye, which he calls “at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling” that soon gives way to “my final and irrevocable overthrow.” That his wife is the one to make “frequent allusion” to the popular superstition about black cats, the belief that “all black cats are witches in disguise, ” when combined with Poe’s painstaking details of mental degeneration and dementia in the narrator’s mind, leads us to the conclusion that he perceives her as a witch and the cat as her familiar. After the murder of his wife, the cat becomes the voice of her soul’s cry for justice; and its terrible, remaining eye a “solitary eye of fire” that symbolizes the “hideous creature whose craft had seduced me into murder.” Prior to his act of homicide, the narrator had succumbed to hellish thoughts: “Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of thoughts.” How similar to Macbeth’s own pledge devoting himself to an ambition that must destroy all political obstacles: “Stars hide your fires; / Let not light see my deep and black desires” (1.4.57–58). The spot of white fur on the second Pluto—for like Macbeth the tale is rife with doubles—might be the suggestion of an innocence that the narrator has destroyed and that he can no longer countenance. For the original sin in this man’s tortured history was the desire “to consummate the injury I had inflicted on the unoffending brute.” Seduction and consummation—the chief ingredients of an unnatural lust for power over a loving creature—these constitute Poe’s version of the imp of the perverse, whose ultimate malefaction is to see the agent of spiritual violence consume himself. (See Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” for a full definition.)

Ligeia

(1838)

The tale “Ligeia, ” which Poe considered his finest, synthesizes a number of characteristic themes in Poe’s work, not the least of which is his fascination with the theory of metempsychosis, a belief in the transmigration of souls after death. Derived from Eleusinian Orphism, the idea that the soul is immortal and can move through time and space to inhabit another form of material life finds its way into several dialogues of Plato. Between 1838 and 1850, Poe fashioned a number of stories that deal with or allude to the subject, such as “Metzengerstein, ” “Eleonora, ” and “The Oblong Box.” Poe’s immediate literary model appears to be Coleridge’s vampire poem “Christabel” (1816), in which the conventional notions of virtue suffer a literal rape, and a demonic, female nature triumphs without pity. In her sadistic desire to preserve what time and death strip away, an aggressive Mother Nature usurps daylight values and regresses into the womb of night. Poe ascribes such power to Ligeia’s indomitable will, which subjugates first the narrator and then his second wife, the lady Rowena.

What makes Poe a romantic writer, beyond his penchant for the gothic, is his absolute equation of love and death, a motif Denis de Rougemont has traced, via the Tristan myth, in his study Love in the Western World. Moreover, in his theory of poetics, Poe expressed the belief that the most perfect subject for a poem (and, therefore, by extension, a short story) would be “the death... of a beautiful woman” as told through “the lips... of a bereaved lover.” This short story fits that description perfectly. Even though the narrator marries the lady Rowena, he can never put aside, or ignore, the power of his love for the lady Ligeia, and it is possible that it is this all-abounding, all-absorbing love that helps the lay Ligeia to return to the narrator at the end of the story. Lady Rowena is the antithesis of the lady Ligeia. She is also beautiful, but she is blonde, simple, and unsophisticated. Whereas the lady Ligeia was superior to this world, Lady Rowena, whom the narrator grows to loathe “with a hatred belonging more to a demon than to man, ” is merely earthly and temporal. In contrast to the metaphysical and spiritual qualities of the lady Ligeia, whom the narrator calls “the august, the beautiful, the entombed, ” Lady Rowena embodies the material and mortal qualities of this physical world. Thus, in one simplistic interpretation of the story, the narrator exchanges a world of beautiful, transcendent, ethereal reality for a world of material reality. On another plane, however, we see the tendency for Poe’s male persona to yield authority to a “fascinating” female who cannot be approached sexually except in death. Ligeia, moreover, evinces an impressive array of “masculine” qualities that convert her “Orphic” status into that of psychic rapist. While a “prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion, ” she exerts her daunting erudition upon the passive narrator: “How singularly—how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! ” The epithets wild and fierce characterize Ligeia’s character, and the narrator persistently celebrates “her infinite supremacy” and “vast... triumph, ” to which the narrator resigns himself “with a childlike confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation.” After her loss, the alchemy of their master-slave relationship reveals its inverted status: “Wanting the radiant luster of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead.” Perhaps the entrapped male finds temporary relief in his loss of Ligeia, since he claims that “in death only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.”

Ligeia presumably takes her name from Milton, in which she appears as one of the Homeric Sirens. The narrator speaks of “her low musical language, ” which by degrees takes his heart in thrall. The narrator invokes an amorous blasphemy in his love, when he calls his love—or “caprice”—a “wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion.” Ligeia’s attractiveness, beyond the physical, involves her uncanny erudition, a preoccupation with studies “adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world.” Oddly Ligeia has no paternal name; she seems a parthenogenetic phenomenon, self-created and creating, like Alph, the sacred river in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Throughout the tale, the epithet wild permeates every vivid memory of the narrator’s experience of Ligeia. Always the narrator’s language, his metaphors and superlative conceits, insinuates the inevitable apotheosis of Ligeia. She is more a force than a mortal woman, and she cannot be subject either to common morality or to mortality.

The tale opens in some “dim and decaying city by the Rhine” and then, after the death of Ligeia, shifts to a nameless abbey “in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England.” Commentators have pointed out Poe’s borrowing from aspects of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” for the description of the abbey. Its subsequent invasion by a vampiric figure easily points to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. With Ligeia’s death Poe’s narrator speaks of himself as having been “crushed into the very dust with sorrow, ” imagery from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The narrator subsequently trades one form of bondage for another: He becomes a slave to opium, and he speaks of his marriage to the lady Rowena as “a moment of mental alienation” attributable to his addiction, a weakness he characterizes as “child-like perversity” and “incipient madness.”

Then Poe describes the bridal chamber, whose careful detail of color imagery, its “sole window” with its “single pane... tinted of a leaden hue, ” conjoined with the “melancholy vaulting” of the room, with its “single chain of gold with a long link, ” suggest that an evil alchemy is at work, and that Ligeia’s invasive appearance well may be the result of her having discovered the philosopher’s stone. That the “stone” may have altered its form so as to undo the new wife becomes apparent when Lady Rowena drinks some wine into which “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored liquid” have invaded. The narrator forbears to mention the “poison” to Lady Rowena, since he may have been unduly influenced by “a vivid imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by the hour.” The unholy trinity of causation trivializes Lady Rowena’s imminent demise and simultaneously imparts a “sacred” power to Ligeia’s command of dark forces. As Camille Paglia puts it, “She defies God’s law of mortality because she, not he, is the resurrection and the life”. The Eastern sensibility of the room, its bridal couch and “pall-like canopy, ” along with the constant reference to “draperies, ” convey the eerie, Byzantine admixture of betrayal and sterile constancy the narrator must enact in order to remain worthy of his true beloved, Ligeia.

By the end of “this hideous drama of revivification, ” the narrator sits “rigidly upon an ottoman, ” a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions. The shrouded form of Rowena awakes and advances toward him, and the narrator remains “paralyzed—... chilled... into stone.” His beloved Ligeia has indeed risen, but her affect is Gorgonian, for even transfixed as he is, we witness “a mad disorder” and an “inexpressible madness” as the resurrected female advances. The huge masses of long, black hair— blacker than the raven wings of the midnight —reveal the horrid truth of Ligeia’s ascension, her “black and wild eyes” causing her lover to shriek in full recognition of his dearest wish fulfilled. Medusa has entered to claim her steadfast admirer.

“The Fall of the House of Usher”

(1839)

If Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be categorized as “the tragedy of thought, ” Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be regarded as “the disintegration of the artistic mind.” The tale is ambitious, even for Poe, as it embraces several gothic and romantic conventions—such as premature burial—along with any number of biblical and classical allusions. The very shape of the Usher castle, juxtaposed with the phrenological details of Roderick Usher’s features, suggests that we have entered into the labyrinth of the mind, in this case, the psyche of an artist cut off from the source of his creativity. On another plane, Poe’s narrative persona offers a rare glimpse into the horrific intricacies of the pagan birth process, an incestuous relationship that precedes moral civilization, as the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris are said to have copulated in the womb. The intensity of the epiphany afforded our narrator is a blinding truth, and he will force his visions, these “considerations beyond our depth, ” downward, into the dark abyss of the triumphant tarn, the muddy world of the libidinous subconscious.

The tale proceeds as a social call: A nameless narrator answers the request of an old boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, to provide social solace from some nameless, debilitating malady that has rendered Usher neurasthenic to a pathological degree. Usher has become morbidly acute in all his senses, literally too sensitive to endure life. Both the House of Usher and its environs have no specific locale other than “a singularly dreary tract of country, ” a wasteland, and the melancholy atmosphere of the House of Usher, its aura of moral oppressiveness and self-containment, has another revealing trait: the “barely perceptible fissure” that proceeds down the length of the structure of the building, a suggestion of bifurcated consciousness or schizophrenia. The narrator finds the state of Usher’s health shocking; Usher reveals that part of his moral gloom is traceable to the imminent death of his cataleptic twin sister, Madeline, “his last and only relative on earth.” The narrator indicates that the Usher family suffers hereditary physiological degeneration as a result of inbreeding, of what Poe tactfully calls “collateral issue... undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony of the name.” Madeline dies and is buried in the family crypt, after which a fearful tempest arises. As the narrator and Usher spend the night reading the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning, life imitates art as the literary knight Ethelred shatters the hermit’s door, and we hear the death cry of the dragon; so, too, the resurrected Lady Madeline enters in full fury through the portals of the library. She falls upon her brother and kills him. As the narrator flees the scene, the “full, setting, and blood-red moon” expands the fissure of the House of Usher, and the edifice sinks below “the deep and dark tarn at my feet.”

We cannot interpret the tale realistically, as weird commentary on mismanaged real estate. Clearly the narrator has penetrated into some inner sanctum, which may well be some form of Egyptian pyramid. In Roderick Usher, the aging and withered “pharaoh, ” Poe has created an archetypal creative neurotic, the model for further studies by Loris Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. The narrator notes Usher’s “passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science.” As the narrator proceeds to Roderick’s studio, he notes “the Gothic archway, ” and then, led by a silent valet “through many dark and intricate passages, ” he encounters the physician of the family, who wears “a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity.” When we add to these descriptions Roderick’s “ghastly pallor” of skin, the “miraculous lustre of the eye, ” and the “silken hair... with its wild, gossamer texture” that “floated rather than fell about the face, ” we have indeed met the living incarnation of Coleridge’s fearful visionary in “Kubla Khan”: “Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair! ”.

The archway may well suggest Dante’s gate of hell, and the troubling physician whom we meet after passing by way of “meandering with a mazy motion” through Usher’s castle provides a “mingled measure” of anxiety as to the mental and moral health of the protagonists. The narrator later describes the “wild improvisations” of Usher’s “speaking guitar, ” a parody of the legendary Orpheus, whose “floating hair” signifies his decapitation by the maenads. Long hours with Usher leave in the narrator no clear recollection of their character, since an “excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous luster over all.” The two are dedicated to hellish rites, and the litany of words Poe invokes, such as “a want of moral energy, ” “a constitutional and family evil, ” a “darkness” that “poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom, ” all point to some original sin, since, as James Joyce points out in his “fire sermon” in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “the fires of Hell give forth no light.” The culmination of this “evil music” is Usher’s original poem “The Haunted Palace, ” whose theme appears to be the fall of thought. Critics of Poe’s short story consistently point out that “transcendence” in this tale is downward, and that the grim, unnatural union of Roderick and his sister, Madeline, at the end has its source in the father-daughter incendiary bonding in Medea, and in Coleridge’s equally chilling line describing “woman wailing for her demon lover! ” (“Kubla Khan”).

Madeline Usher is, of necessity, a more elusive figure. The narrator glimpses her but once, and he remarks of his “utter astonishment not unmingled with dread, ” another pass at “Kubla Khan, ” whose other female figure is of “a damsel with a dulcimer”, an image more fitting for Roderick himself. That Roderick and Madeline remain androgynous figures is typical of Poe, who always wrestles with issues of sexual identity. Madeline provides Roderick’s female perspective, and he has both isolated her and violated her. His painting that most captivates the narrator is of an underground vault or tomb, illuminated by “a flood of intense rays” that “bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.” Roderick depicts Madeline’s burial chamber, and its moral degeneracy is implied, so much so that the narrator compares its effect to that of the “reveries of Fuseli, ” noted for his study The Nightmare. When he and Roderick place Madeline within the “donjon” of the castle as her resting place, the narrator complains that “there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm, ” a depiction of Fuseli’s vision exactly!

With the apparent death of Madeline, Roderick enters the last phase of his own dissolution, “a species of mad hilarity in his eyes.” A whirlwind combines with “the rank miasma of the tarn, ” and we recall Hamlet’s disgust with things “rank and gross in nature” (Hamlet) after learning of the unnatural circumstances of his father’s death. As the infuriated Madeline approaches and penetrates the library, Roderick assumes his final, feminine guise by asking, “Whither shall I fl y? ” a direct echo of hapless Lady Macduff in Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy (Macbeth). Like a Fury out of Erebus, Madeline appears out of “the ponderous and ebony jaws” of the house. “There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle, ” which captures both her breaking of the vault and her brother’s violation of her virginity. That he supposed her dead at the time only adds to the apocalyptic horror of the vision, confirmed by the “fierce breath of the whirlwind” and the final music of destruction, “the voice of a thousand waters” (Ezekial 43: 2) that marks the Ushers’ ghastly marriage as Persephone delivers the coup de grace to her misbegotten Hades.