Banality behind “The Black Cat,” an introduction by L. W.
Banality behind “The Black Cat”
Logan Williams
“…[F]or the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth…” (Genesis 8:21, NRSV)
“Cause there’s a-no such thing as an original sin” (Elvis Presley, “I’m Not Angry”)
The supposed innate inclination to do evil against society’s moral code, propelled into the modern millennium by the Christian doctrine of original sin, has become confined to what we now contemporarily define under the psychological term “psychopath.” Contrary to Christianity’s claim that all are born evil, few people are actually psychopaths, individuals compelled to commit evil by nothing alone. Such disfunction is the result of chemical imbalances within the brain, environmental influences (such as a culture which encourages violence), genetic inheritance, and/or trauma. Due to these many causes, identifying and treating psychopaths is difficult. The primary symptoms, as registered by Vicki Hester and Emily Segir (in their effort to analyze Poe characters as psychopaths, are as follows:
| Emotional/Interpersonal1 | Social Deviance2 |
| Glib and superficial | Impulsive |
| Shallow emotions | Adult antisocial behavior |
| Egocentric and grandiose | Poor behavior controls |
| Deceitful and manipulative | Early behavior problems |
| Lack of remorse or guilt | Need for excitement |
| Lack of empathy | Lack of responsibility |
1 “[H]ow [psychopaths] think and feel about themselves and others” (Hester and Segir 178).
2 How psychopaths act in relation to “social norms and expectations” (Hester and Segir 178).
One would not be remiss to note that the identifiers of a psychopath are awfully similar to archetypal conceptions around evil. Importantly, psychopaths do not view their illness as a weakness, therefore diagnosis is, again, difficult. To the psychopath, behaviors widely considered “evil” (e.g., torture) are banal3 activities; their malice is clockwork.
3 Within the parameters of this analysis, banal refers to the mundanity behind a psychopath’s conscience, not the banality of evil, which refers to the unconscious mundanity of bureaucratic evil.
Psychology was founded well after Edgar Allan Poe’s time, however, nobody understood the psychopath better than Poe. Because Poe’s narrators are often taken to be self-inserts, most readers “underestimate” how Poe depicts the disconnect between consciousness and culture, instead preferring to interpret through Poe’s own biographical unreliability (Gargano 176). “The Black Cat” is an excellent example because assuming alcoholism to be the primary cause, Poe having been an alcoholic, does little in satisfying the narrator’s psychopathic actions, thereby “exalt[ing] the very thing Poe is deriding in the narrator” (Gargano 178). Ergo, the devil is not in a bottle. No, “The Black Cat” rather adeptly paints the psychopath’s banal conscience as Poe simultaneously portrays the narrator’s normalization of his crimes while paradoxically dramatizing his reactions.4 This may appear paradoxical at first, although per the aforementioned symptoms, psychopaths are “egocentric and grandiose,” thus self-dramatization reflects how they normalize deviance, which is outwardly conveyed as banal. Main questions are as follows:
- How does the narrator normalize and/or rationalize his actions?
- How does the narrator dramatize his own conscience?
- How satisfactory is psychopathy as a lens? Is evil so easily explainable?
4 Cf. the narrator as a misogynist whose sexism materializes as violence purposefully perpetrated against women and animals, as analyzed in “The Cat’s Out of the Bag.”
Primary Source
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales II – Conscience, Natural Beauty, and Pseudo-Science, edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and and George Edward Woodberry, vol. 2, Chicago Stone & Kimball, 1894. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0203.htm.
The chosen edition of “Black Cat,” as cited above, was selected because it was the first scholarly reprint of the story, and consequently maintains the edits Poe made to the story in 1848, which are nonexistent in prior printings, and randomly dispersed among other arbitrary edits in succeeding editions, until the selected 1894 edition.
Secondary Sources
Gargano, James W. “‘The Black Cat:’ Perverseness Reconsidered,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 2, no. 2, 1960, pp. 172–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40753670.
Hester, Vicki, and Emily Segir. “Edgar Allan Poe: ‘The Black Cat,’ and Current Forensic Psychology.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 175–93. JSTOR, doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.15.2.0175.