Since its publication in 1843 in the United States Saturday Post commentators on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat” have found difficulties identifying the main idea of the story and the motives that drive the nameless narrator/protagonist to commit his vicious crimes. Joseph Stark, in “Motive and Meaning: The Mystery of the Will in Poe's ‘The Black Cat’” (2004), subtly states that “We are still unable to explain why the narrator killed his wife” (260). Many of the readings focus on the narrator’s derangement, though he clearly asserts that he is not mad. Others ascribe his cruelty to an inferiority complex, resulting from humiliation, “repression” and maltreatment in childhood. The most fascinating study of the story is that of Lesley Ginsberg (1998) and Leland S. Person (2006) who find in it an allegory of racial relations in abolitionist times. Nevertheless, these readings miss the main point of the text and fail to account for the reasons that motivate the narrator to kill his wife.
I think that it is time to name the nameless characters and to identify them with popular literary figures, namely Shakespeare’s Othello and Desdemona. Nothing can more account for the narrator’s aberrant behavior than analyzing the story as an allegory of marital relations and excessive, unjustified jealousy.
Why do you believe that the homicidal husband panics whenever the wife offers the two black cats any kindness?
To what extent black cats are associated with evil spirits, witches, and ominous things? Do you believe that the cat is a symbol of an intruder on this marital relation, in what is traditionally known as triangle love relationships?
There is not any sign of infidelity on the part of the wife in the story and the narrator always refers to her as "my poor wife." Is she a Desdemona-like figure?
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