Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Frederick Douglass

We started my “Monsters, Race, and Comics” course this semester by reading various texts, including Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “Hop-Frog or The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs.” These stories work as explorations of national and societal anxieties, explorations which rest at the core of the gothic and horror. Underneath the veneer of seemingly innocuous tales of a man imbibing in too much drink and killing his cat and wife and a tale about a court jester who enacts revenge on the king who enslaves him lies the national fears and anxieties of the conservative class surrounding the enslavement of human beings. I’ve written about this before with “Hop-Frog,” and today I want to look at how “The Black Cat” works within this matrix, playing on the fears of the psychological trauma induced upon the enslaver when he or she enslaves someone else.

In their collection of Poe’s short stories, Stuart and Susan Levine place both “The Black Cat” and “Hop-Frog” in the section entitled “Moral Issues,” and they position the stories in relation to alcoholism and the temperance movement. With “The Black Cat,” they also state that the overall moral rests on the ways that power corrupts: “All this tale says is that the capacity for violence and horror is within even the nicest of us: compassionate people who like goldfish, dogs, and cats.” This fear of absolute…