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George S. Hellman examines the subjective voice of the narrator in Poe's story "The Black Cat." Excerpted from a longer article, "Animals in Literature," from The Atlantic, March, 1901.
[In Poe's story "The Black Cat,"] the animal is bound up not alone with the man's consciousness, but intimately with his conscience. The cat is terrible for us, not as an animal in itself terrible, bue because of its hold on the soul of the murderer; and awful, not through any inherited awfulness, but because of its character as an instrument of retribution and justice. Here, then, in a far different manner, we have another indication of the truth that our chief interest in animals in literature is to be associated with our interest in men.
Poe's story illustrates another truth: the modernity of the intensely subjective point of view. When Arthur Dimmesdale, at the climax of Hawthorne's wonderful novel, is about to reveal the scarlet letter on his breast, he says of the red stigma that it is "no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart." In the same way, the cruel drunkard in Poe's tale sees the outline of the gallows on the breast of the black cat, because in his own soul there is murder, and the cat has become the mirror, as it were, of the man's nature, and the personification of the spirit of fate. The loathsomeness and terror that the man finds in the cat are qualities which his morbid imagination has created,--qualities so intensely perceived because of his own loathsome and terrible inclinations, and not qualities that a normal person would attribute to the animal, a kind and affectionate creature. To interpret animals in terms of one's own personality; to embody and then to portray in an animal emotions, passions, moods, existing primarily in the writer; to let, in a word, the animal representation be a subjective reflection rather than an objective image,--this is the subjective method. It is, indeed, a method more common to poetry than to prose; and by it the poet projects his spirit into the animal world, giving it an individual, vital, suprabestial interest.
