A little bit of human nature in "The Black Cat" in relation to the concept of Distopia

A couple of years ago I was given the book called “Narraciones Extraordinarias” which is a compilation of 6 short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. After reading them I wondered whether the protagonists of the murders were actually conscious about what they were doing or if maybe they were driven by a dark force or mental illness. In this entry I attempt to analyze some excerpts of Poe’s short stories and hopefully make you reflect upon human nature.

To put forward my point, I will exemplify with the story “The Black Cat”. In this story we find a man who is about to die and decides to confess about what he considers “a series of household events”. He proclaims that he is not mad and starts remembering himself in the past. He describes himself as an animal lover since he valued a lot the fidelity, unselfishness and true love of animals compared to men. He had a lot of pets but among all, his favorite was the black cat names Pluto. Despite his love for animal, he starts mistreating his pets and also his wife, accompanied by drinking habits. One day he thought that Pluto was avoiding him and that triggered his rage which ended up in the cutting of Pluto’s eye. Then he confesses:

“When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty.”

Does this excerpt lead us to guess that he was unconscious of his behavior at the moment of cutting off the black cat’s eye? Was alcohol what made him react in such irrational way? At this part I wonder how it is possible for an animal lover to create a sort of alter-ego that performs such horrible act. According to Jung, the self is divided in three major layers which are the conscious, the subconscious and the shadow. The last one is mostly present in Poe’s tales, either in the shape of a psychological manifestation or in the form of a character assuming the role of the murderer / exorcist of the victim. (Popescu, A. 2013) Following this idea, we can conclude that there is a “murderer” inside of us that may come to the light in certain circumstances and that we should not be amazed by it because it is inherent in human nature.

Later on in the story, the protagonist kills his wife and determines to wall the corpse up in a cellar. After doing so he thought:

“Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates—the darkest and most evil of my thoughts”

When I read that excerpt I came to understand that the murderer was actually aware of the inner struggle between good and evil –as in most of Poe’s characters do-. The true depth of the narrator’s brutality does not become evident until he openly reveals the loathing he actually feels for his wife, identifying her death as a “hideous murder” and suggesting that he has been plotting the crime all along. (Sova, D. 2007)

My first conclusions is that in most of Poe’s tales there is depicted the conflict between good and evil. To me that is something very interesting that the author acknowledges both good and evil and that the latter is the one that comes to light in his stories because it is the evil what reveals more of the human nature. Also the fact that the murderers are not identified with any name it represents that Poe does not want to confine the psychological “procedure” depicted in this tale to a specific person but to generalize and analyze the nature of human kind in general.

If we look back at Whitman's optimism, love, relation with nature and the self, sense of equally among human beings (" for every atom that belongs to me, as good belongs to you") and all these concepts that depict "light" that are addressed in his writings we can compare it to Poe's concepts that we can relate to "darkness" like despair, fear, horror, chaos, control of the murderer over the victim, it creates the perfect analogy for the concepts of utopia and dystopia. In the sense that Whitman's concepts addressed in his poems can be compared to the atmosphere of an utopia and the concepts addressed in Poe's tales can be compared to the atmosphere of the distopia. And it is in the distopia, in this context of chaos and darkness that we can witness issues related to human nature like the discover of one's own identity and the search for individual liberty. (1984 and V for Vendetta)

References: 

Popescu, A. (2013) Immolation of the Self, Fall into the Abyss in Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales

Sova, D. (2007) Critical companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A literary reference to his life and work