Quote of the Day (Poe)

“Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place- some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.”—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat”

(A typical Poe horror tale, “The Black Cat” was published on this date in United States Saturday Post in 1843. It features the kind of mad, unreliable narrator found in other Poe tales of the macabre such as “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” You’d be mad, too, if, like the protagonist in this story, you had become alcoholic, gouged out the eye of a cat, hung it, tries to kill another cat but ends up killing his wife instead, then walls her up in the cellar wall with the cat to conceal evidence of the crime.

The question arises how autobiographical this story is. Well, Poe at one point owned a black cat, and he supposedly killed a pet fawn belonging to his guardian’s wife, but that’s about it. Someone else actually identified with the events of the tale far more: Richard Wright, who as a child set fire to his grandmother’s house and later hanged a kitten with a string. Wright was impressed enough with Poe’s tale to allude to it in his 1940 novel Native Son, in which Bigger Thomas at one points confronts a cat and its “two green pools—pools of association and guilt.”

Incidentally, that 1934 film starring Bela Lugosi? It’s got virtually nothing in common with this story except the title. Actually, the film treatments that came closer to its essence were D.W. Griffith’s Avenging Conscience and a 1968 Japanese version.)