A Series of Mere Household Events: Poe's "The Black Cat," Domesticity, and Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century America

Where does Edgar Allan Poe fit into our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature? Unlike writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Henry David Thoreau, Poe’s settings and topics often seem decidedly un-American. Many of his best-known stories, for instance, are set in Europe (“The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) or in dream-like landscapes where specific locations hardly seem to matter (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia”). Even more important, Poe’s stories rarely comment directly on the pressing social issues of his day—slavery, women’s rights, religious convictions. In this paper, though, I argue that “The Black Cat,” a story about a man, his wife, and his beloved pet, can be read as Poe’s commentary on nineteenth-century American domesticity. In this way, it is perhaps one of Poe’s most American stories and clearly connected to the same concerns as his contemporaries.

As I argue, Poe, whose narrator calls his story “a series of mere household events,” merges the gothic and the domestic in this tale and thus implicitly raises questions about domesticity’s potential for containing our darker desires and impulses. The narrator’s violent acts, directed first towards his cat, and then towards his wife, along with his theories on perversity and intemperance, indicates a resistance to the promises of domesticity: the calming and wholesome effects of a healthy, happy home. Key to my analysis is Katherine C. Grier’s impressive Pets in America: A History (2006), in which she argues that the care and ownership of pets served as “one product of a constellation of ideas and cultural ideals, including gentility, liberal evangelical Protestant religion, and domesticity” (18). Reading Poe’s story as a response to this new “domestic ethos of kindness to animals” sheds new light on his critical engagement with the limitations of domesticity.

Heidi M. Hanrahan is an Assistant Professor at Shepherd University, where she teaches American literature and composition. She earned her doctorate in pre-1900 American Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her articles on nineteenth-century American literature have appeared in The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Humor, and the collection Narratives of Community. In addition to an essay on Poe’s “The Black Cat,” she is currently working on a longer project on nineteenth-century writers and their editors. She has also presented papers at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and the South Atlantic Modern Languages Association Conference.