Content Warnings: The present article will elaborate on gore, murder, animal cruelty, animal death, and alcoholism.
Spoiler Alert: As per its topic, this article will include spoilers of the mentioned stories. All of E. A. Poe’s works are public domain, and can be easily accessed. It is advised to read these stories first if you haven’t, so as to preserve their reading experience and narrative effect; but the stories will be gone over, and thus you do not need to have any prior familiarity with either.
It’s Friday 13th, the unofficial international slasher day! Long before there was gore galore on the silver screen, over a century before cinematic carnage became an integral slice (get it?) of ‘80s kitsch, there was macabre. No one was more notorious for it than “emo boy” Edgar Allan Poe, East Coast’s own self-confessed tortured soul, American Romanticist, inventor of detective stories (and the universal experience of being terrified of birds). Renowned for his prose and verse alike, Poe’s writing portfolio would span across genres and styles, marked and bound by their tumultuous nature, lachrymose narration, and often, gruesome details.
Among his most famous stories are The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, published within months of each other. Though the latter is highly moralising, quasi- à la William Hogarth’s Gin Lane predating it by nearly a century, they share plenty similitudes in an array of elements that are essential to their plots. Told by their narrators as if in address to the readers, both stories are about senseless killings perpetrated by delusional men, and their demise.
The Tell-Tale Heart is a shorter, albeit more fervent, recount of how the narrator fixates on what he calls the ‘vulture eye’ of the old man he otherwise loves, leading him to murder. He insists he has a disease sharpening his senses, and he is not mad. However, the insanity of the narrator is clear throughout, as he worries the heartbeat of the old man will alert the neighbours, but his own shriek as he launches his attack does not concern him. As he suffocates the old man, he is relieved the walls will prevent the neighbours from hearing the old man’s heartbeat. He carefully buries the dismembered corpse underneath the floorboards, before, at 4:00am, police officers show up upon complaint about the shriek. Just as they are leaving, satisfied with having found nothing suspicious, the narrator in his cockiness urges them to stay longer. Soon, he begins hearing the heartbeat of the old man, getting ever louder. Convinced the officers must be hearing it as well, and are mocking him, he confesses to the whole deed.
The Black Cat relates a series of events that seem to foreshadow the following link in the chain as they lead to where the narrator begins his account – a day before his execution. He too insists he is not mad, though his calmer attitude and penchant for finding logical explanations make his claim a tad more believable. He reflects back to his earlier days as an exceptionally gentle child, and even man. His love for animals is shared by his wife, so they acquire a considerable number of pets. Among them is Pluto, a cat so intelligent that it compels his wife to joke about all black cats being witches in disguise. The narrator has a special bond with the cat, but as his alcoholism makes him an ever crueler man, Pluto isn’t spared from abuse either, going as far as the narrator cutting out one of the cat’s eyes. Eventually, out of sheer perversity, the narrator hangs Pluto. That very night a fire burns down all his belongings, save for a wall that bears the impression of a hanged cat. As months go by, the narrator yearns for a replacement for Pluto. The one he finds eerily lacks an eye, and has a white patch on his breast that gradually looks like gallows. Thus he begins hating but also dreading the cat. When the narrator’s attempt at killing him is stopped by his wife, he redirects his anger at her. Before walling up her corpse in the cellar, he considers chopping it up, even burying it in the floor. On the 4th day, after a fruitless investigation, just as the police officers are about to leave, he cockily taps on the wall where his wife is buried. A continuous shriek causes the officers to discover the body, on which the cat sits.
Due to their peculiar (or perhaps clever) similarities, it’s easy to consider them in tandem. One of such similarities seems to be the cause of the ultimate murderous violence in both stories: the lost eye, the sight of which horrifies the respective narrator. Neither narrator assumes full agency of his actions; rather, they find a fault in their victims that provokes the narrators into killing them. They conceal the bodies so well that no eye can detect a disturbance, but ultimately it is this very arrogance that compels them into recklessness.
Beneath the floorboards and behind the walls, haunting guilt grows louder! louder! louder! louder!
Bensu
@versmonesprit
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