More than a year ago I read The Cask of Amontillado when I was staying at a lonely place and the impact on my exhausted soul at night was immense. You can see the process of that impact HERE.
Two months back I read The Raven and it gave me goosebumps. Last night while thinking about the author I decided to post something about my experience of Raven but I slept early. Today morning when I woke up untimely and started writing something about the Raven yet I felt an intense early morning yen for something new of Poe. And I tumbled down to this title. This is yet another grisly and macabre tale. The story begins softly as if written for a family, but it turns hideous midway and it finishes with the malefactor’s excessive exuberance coming out of his short-term sentiment of triumph in concealing his crime.
This is the story about an eccentric man living with his wife and they have a lot of pets. Among them is a black cat and her name is Pluto. The black cat is considered a witch in disguise, a superstition. I was wondering how this superstition has traveled from 1840s America to other places of the world or was it making its way from other places to America. Or are such superstitions with cats are there since antiquity in all parts of the world!
In the beginning, this man loves all his pets including the cat, and takes proper care of all of them but over the period of time, he turns alcoholic, and his behavior changes. He grew moody, irritable, and regardless of the feelings of others. He becomes violent to his wife and to the pets as well. Then one day he did a damnable atrocity and from his pen pulls out the eye socket off his cat’s eye. Ah! What a mad man. So cruel. I too shrieked in horror. When this man had slept off the fumes of the night, the next morning he experienced the sentiment, half of horror, half of the remorse.
And here onward in the story, Poe has classically described the state of mind of the man, his guilt consciousness for the crime, and his uncontrolled anguish leading his life to more and more trouble. Some psychology of a wrongdoer has been explored by the author in succinct sentences. This mad man describes how his love changes slowly to the evident dislike,
“And then came as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow The Spirit Of perverseness. Of this is spirit philosophy takes no account. Phrenology finds no place for it among its organs. I am not more sure that my soul lives than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, one of the indivisible primary faculties of sentiments that gave direction to the character of a man. Who has not a hundred times found himself committing a vile or a selection for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”
Edgar Allan Poe
This story ends in Edgar Allan Poe’s style.
Very impressive I found.
Great Mr. Poe. You wrote it not only for horror but also for expounding the mindset of crime, self-reproach, and sadistic pleasure too!
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