The black cat literary elements

Literary Analysis Paper

Death, Decay, and the Daguerreotype’s Influence on “The Black Cat”

Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross

Abstract

In “The Black Cat,” Poe’s narrator discovers an odd pictorial representation of a crime he just committed. An “impression” of the cat he killed appears with astonishing accuracy—even the rope around the animal’s neck—on his bedroom wall. This portrait resembles a daguerreotype in its placement, its durability, its verisimilitude, and its effect on viewers. The narrator’s explanation for how it was produced alludes, moreover, to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s pioneering technique for developing images on photosensitive plates that have been exposed in a camera obscura. Indeed, “The Black Cat” grotesquely parodies each step in Daguerre’s procedure, as Poe himself depicted it in his initial essay on “The Daguerreotype.” The proliferating forms, figures, and facsimiles of the black cat—including how the story’s second half recapitulates the first—recall other aspects of daguerreotypes, such as their print reproduction and their use in post- mortem portraiture. Although the processes described in this story clearly suggest daguerreotypy, they produce different results. “The Black Cat” reflects not only Poe’s familiarity with early photography but also his awareness of techniques for resisting or assisting decomposition, as explained by chemists like Humphry Davy, Justus von Liebig, and Alexander Petzholdt. Whereas early photography provided a means to preserve optical reflections—including those of family members who have died—Poe’s narrator attempts to abolish such traces of the past. By mod- eling the macabre processes that the narrator describes on Daguerre’s technique for developing latent photographic images, Poe’s horror story transforms the very nature of the daguerreotype portrait to emphasize not preservation, but decay.

Keywords

the daguerreotype and early photographic techniques, postmortem portraits, chemistry, decomposition, “The Black Cat”

the edgar allan poe review, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2018 Copyright © 2018 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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In March 1839, the Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art—a journal published in Philadelphia, where Edgar Allan Poe was then living—reported on an invention “that seems more like some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy than a practical reality: it amounts to nothing less than making light produce permanent pictures, and engrave them at the same time, in the course of a few minutes.”1 No one knows how Poe learned about this mysterious method for preserving the dreamlike visions inside a camera obscura, which Louis-Jacques- Mandé Daguerre had announced in France on January 9, 1839, thus heralding the invention of photography.2 Perhaps he read about it in the Museum or some other American journal that spring or heard it described in a lecture by W. R. Johnson, a professor, in Philadelphia the following winter.3 In any case, Daguerre’s discovery must have seized Poe’s imagination, since he was already familiar with the camera obscura and with optics in general.4 By the spring of 1840, he was pub- lishing articles on the daguerreotype in both Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, emphasizing the invention’s technical aspects.5

Not surprisingly, Poe’s interest in this discovery affected the fiction he wrote in the early 1840s.6 It influenced his own invention—in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, a year after his articles on the daguerreotype— of a new genre (the detective story); a new plot (the locked-room mystery); and a new form of narration (use of a first-person observer without direct access to the detective’s mind).7 His first experience sitting before the camera, probably in 1842,8 also led him to create a new kind of horror story, featuring a mono- maniac obsessed with obtaining a particular image: in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” which appeared in 1843, the narrator’s attempt to shine a dark lantern onto an old man’s eye reflects the process of taking daguerreotypes.9 Poe’s fascination with this technology may have shaped other stories, too.10 He refers explicitly to Daguerre’s discovery in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” when the queen recounts that a powerful magician once “directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did” (M 3:1168).

Poe’s strangest treatment of the daguerreotype occurs in a horror story about obsession, blinding, murder, interment, exposure, guilt, and confession that was published several months after “The Tell-Tale Heart.”11 In “The Black Cat,” the increasingly unstable narrator discovers an odd pictorial representation of one of his crimes. An “impression” of his dead cat Pluto—hanged from a tree in the garden the day before—appears with astonishing accuracy, even including the rope around the creature’s neck, on the inner wall of his bedroom (M 3:853). The replica’s appearance on an interior surface, in particular, suggests a camera. The way this device works is that images pass through a tiny aperture into a dark- ened chamber—hence the term “camera obscura”—to reflect upside-down on

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the opposite surface. The manifestation of optical images inside a dark space is a natural phenomenon, first observed by philosophers and scientists thousands of years ago; what Daguerre discovered was a way to preserve them.

Poe concentrates in “The Black Cat” neither on how images enter a camera from outside (as he does in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”) nor on how the camera’s operator focuses and exposes them (as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”). Instead, he describes a bizarre method for developing an image—in this case, of an animal’s corpse—once it has been captured on a photosensitive surface. By modeling that imaginary process on Daguerre’s procedure, Poe’s horror story transforms the very nature of a daguerreotype portrait to emphasize not pres- ervation, but decay.12

The Portrait

How did Pluto’s likeness come to appear on that bedroom wall? As if the nar- rator of “The Black Cat” were a detective like Dupin or Legrand—or even like Daguerre himself, who supposedly established through a series of deductions that it was mercury vapor from a broken thermometer that had developed images on exposed plates13—he traces the incidents leading to this result. In the opening paragraph, the narrator explains that his tale comprises “a series of mere household events” (M 3:849), which a rational mind might see as “nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects” (M 3:850). The first event occurs when the narrator, who loves animals but has gradually succumbed to the “Fiend Intemperance,” deliberately cuts out the eye of his favorite pet, the black cat of the title (M 3:851). Next, annoyed because the cat now flees from him, he hangs Pluto from a tree, weeping all the while because he knows that killing his pet is wrong. That night, the narrator’s house catches fire and burns to the ground, destroying its contents along with his “entire worldly wealth” (M 3:852).

Everything is obliterated save for a single interior wall. Poe’s narrator points out that it was “a compartment wall . . . which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed.” When he returns to the site the next day, he finds a crowd of onlookers gathered around this wall, examining it “with minute and eager attention” and exclaiming over something on its sur- face. “The words ‘strange!’ ‘singular!’ and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity,” the narrator reports. Studying the wall himself, he sees Pluto’s image reproduced there “with an accuracy truly marvelous” (M 3:853). The portrait is ter- rifying not only because it depicts the cat’s dead body but also because it remains visible, in daylight, even after the house—of which that wall once formed an inte- gral part—has been demolished. This phenomenon cannot be explained away

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as the narrator’s fancy, as Susan Amper points out: “We could call it imaginary, the product of the narrator’s guilty conscience. But the figure seems the most real thing in the story, one of the few that we are told has been observed by others.”14

Indeed, the cat’s likeness recalls the verisimilitude of a daguerreotyped portrait.15 The surface on which it appears resembles an exposed plate that has been removed from a camera—where it would have been inserted along the inner wall—and developed. The exclamations it elicits from the crowd sug- gest the amazed responses of those viewing a daguerreotype for the first time. “Wonderful wonder of wonders!!” one observer remarked in an early descrip- tion of the spectacle.16 In his first article on Daguerre’s discovery, Poe described the image’s truthfulness in similarly exalted terms, as “most miraculous” and “infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.”17 The fact that the spectators in “The Black Cat” express such astonish- ment after carefully examining the likeness also recalls the daguerreotype. As Poe explained in his article, “The closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing [that is, the daguerreotype, literally an image made by the sun] discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”18

The Procedure

Faced with the uncanny visual record of his crime, Poe’s narrator remarks, “I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts—and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect” (M 3:853). His statements recall an account of Daguerre’s discovery, a year earlier, in The Photographer’s Guide: man’s intelligence “enables, and gives him a desire to see through, and explain cause and effect. What then can be more interesting and pleasing to the intel- lectual and philosophic mind, than to trace the effect of this curious operation of nature to its cause?”19 In the same spirit, Poe’s narrator proposes an expla- nation for Pluto’s portrait. He speculates that some passerby, noticing the fire, cut down the dead cat and tossed it through the bedroom window to rouse the occupants from sleep. The narrator adds that his bedroom had been recently plastered. He deduces, therefore, that “the falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it” (M 3:853).

Readers have dismissed this hypothesis as “unlikely,”20 “delusionary,”21 or “preposterous.”22 David Halliburton quotes the narrator’s explanation in its entirety before observing that in the mid-nineteenth century, “a mind like Poe’s did not have to restrain its speculations about the behavior of matter for fear

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of being corrected by someone with a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.”23 Yet despite the narrator’s unreliability, his scenario may not be all that farfetched. Ammonia—a gaseous compound of nitrogen and hydrogen—does indeed ema- nate from a corpse’s lungs in the hours after death.24 Strong bases like ammonia or lime could indeed etch a pattern onto a wall’s surface, especially in response to pressure against it.25 Poe undoubtedly knew these facts. He was interested in specific aspects of bodily decay, as shown by the early story “Loss of Breath” and later tales like “The Premature Burial,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” He read widely in natural history, chemistry, and engineering. He also published a column on new discoveries, “A Chapter on Science and Art,” in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine; surveyed recent inven- tions in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”; predicted tech- nological advances in tales of science fiction; and boldly speculated about the interconnectedness of all matter in Eureka: A Prose Poem.26

Poe must have had a reason, then, for including this detailed account of chemical reactions in “The Black Cat.” In their essay on Poe and early daguerre- otypists in Philadelphia, Benjamin J. McFarland and Thomas Peter Bennett observed that the etching of the cat’s image is “faintly analogous to the chem- ical processes of photography and may serve as a metaphor for the process,” although they did not develop this notion any further.27 More recently, Tiffanie Itsou described it as “a figurative daguerreotype—a one-of-a-kind image taken directly from its original subject and rendered through the effects of light and chemicals.”28 I suggest, however, that the narrator’s explanation for the portrait not only alludes to Daguerre’s remarkable discovery but also parodies each step in the procedure he established.29

It may seem strange to think that Poe—who is known for caricaturing his enemies, from his foster father, John Allan, to the Boston literati—would mock the inventor of the daguerreotype in this way. Daguerre was someone he greatly admired, one of the few individuals admitted to his “private hall of fame.”30 Poe clearly appreciated the magnitude of Daguerre’s accomplishment; understood the science behind it; and recognized the affinity between his own interest in visual phenomena and the new technology’s emphasis on reflections, represen- tations, and facsimiles. By the time that he wrote “The Black Cat,” however, Poe may have already expressed his admiration for Daguerre’s ingenuity in describ- ing aspects of his detective hero, C. Auguste Dupin—who, like Daguerre, was a Frenchman, a Parisian, an analyst par excellence, and someone accorded the rank of chevalier in the Légion d’honneur. Besides, Poe’s horror story focuses on a brutal, selfish monomaniac, not a supremely rational intellect. In the open- ing paragraph, the narrator even acknowledges that he cannot reason clearly,

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addressing a hypothetical reader with a mind “more calm, more logical, and far less excitable” than his own (M 3:850). The narrator’s volatility and impulsive- ness suggest that, as a thinker, he is the opposite of Daguerre.

Poe’s first essay on “The Daguerreotype” demonstrates his familiarity with Daguerre’s complex procedure for preserving images in a camera obscura. Eventually, the daguerreotype process would include several additional steps, from trimming the metal plate to gilding and framing a finished daguerreotype portrait (Fig. 1). In his essay, Poe describes in detail the series of chemical reac- tions that form the essence of Daguerre’s procedure:

A plate of silver on copper is prepared, presenting a surface for the action of the light, of the most delicate texture conceivable. A high pol- ish being given this plate by means of a steatitic calcareous stone (called Daguerreolite) and containing equal parts of steatite and carbonate of lime, the fine surface is then iodized by being placed over a vessel con- taining iodine, until the whole assumes a tint of pale yellow. The plate is then deposited in a camera obscura, and the lens of this instrument directed to the object which it is required to paint. The action of the light does the rest.31

The process of preparing, exposing, developing, fixing, and displaying a daguerreotype plate. Susanna Celeste Castelli, DensityDesign Research Lab, 2014.

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fig. 1

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Three years later, in “The Black Cat,” Poe’s narrator presented a crude, gro- tesque, even macabre version of this sequence to explain how a cat’s likeness came to appear on his bedroom wall.

To begin with, the first link in the narrator’s “chain of facts” (M 3:853)—that the cat’s body must have been flung into an open window—recalls the optical phenomenon of an external image traveling through the aperture of a camera obscura. In Poe’s story, it is a black cat’s corpse, not a moving figure’s illuminated reflection, that has passed through the opening.32 Although the narrator’s bed- room may have been dark, since it was nighttime and the occupants were appar- ently sound asleep, the house itself must have been ablaze; the narrator claims that he did not awaken until his bed curtains caught fire. Indeed, “The Black Cat” replaces the sun, as the light source generating images inside a camera, with a raging fire—implying heat as well as brightness and evoking the infernal regions. Poe thus describes not a sunlit reflection penetrating a darkened cham- ber during the day, but instead a black object entering a blazing room at night.

The next link in the narrator’s chain—his observation that the wall against which the animal’s corpse was thrown had been freshly plastered—alludes to the necessity of preparing a smooth surface to take the image. More precisely, as Poe’s article explains, the daguerreotypist first fuses a copper plate with sil- ver foil; next, he polishes it with a fine sand, a mixture of carbonate of lime or calcium carbonate (that is, limestone) and steatite (composed largely of mag- nesium or talc);33 then he coats it with iodine fumes, making the surface pho- tosensitive. An 1853 illustration of daguerreotype equipment depicts wooden boxes in the left and right foreground, each containing a porcelain basin with an airtight glass cover, which were used to coat the polished plate with iodine (and later bromine as well) before depositing it in the camera (Fig. 2).34 In “The Black Cat,” the narrator’s bedroom wall received similar treatment when it was spread with lime plaster. The primary ingredient of lime plaster is crushed limestone, which is heated to produce quicklime, or calcium oxide—a soluble, highly alkaline substance—and then combined with water to form slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide. (Poe was familiar with this chemical reaction, which he mentions in “The Balloon-Hoax.”)35 Slaked lime is mixed with sand, horsehair, and other materials to create plaster, which, after being applied to a wall, grad- ually sets, drying and hardening into limestone again over a month’s time.36 Poe’s story describes using both limestone and sand to prime the surface that will receive the image, approximating the very process he described in his first article on “The Daguerreotype.”

To establish the third link in this supposed chain of facts, the narrator spec- ulates that the cat’s corpse was pressed into the fresh plaster by the house’s col-

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fig. 2 Apparatus for processing daguerreotypes from Robert Hunt’s Manual of Photography, 1853. The equipment depicted includes the following: (a) camera obscura; (b) silver plate; (c) bromine and iodine boxes; (d) mercury box; (e) plate holders; (f) box for holding plates; (g) levelling stand, used in fixing the image; (h) dish for washing plates; and (i) hand buff.

lapsing walls, just as an image being daguerreotyped is cast onto the prepared plate after the daguerreotypist inserts it into the camera. Here, the cat’s solid corporeality takes the place of the fleeting apparition captured by a daguerreo- type. Indeed, the corpse’s physical position offers a grotesquely literal version of what happens to an image inside a camera.37

Finally, the narrator suggests that the cat’s image has been preserved through a complex chemical reaction. This last link in the narrator’s chain corresponds to the most important step in the daguerreotype process. Poe concludes his detailed account of the procedure in his initial article on “The Daguerreotype” by stating, “The action of the light does the rest.”38 He says little about Daguerre’s pioneering technique for bringing out latent images recorded on a photosensitive surface, simply remarking that “the plate does not at first appear to have received a definite impression—some short processes, however, develope [sic] it in the most miraculous beauty.”39 In actuality, the daguerreo- typist uses mercury fumes, produced by heating mercury with a spirit lamp, to make the previously exposed image visible.40 The illustration of daguerreotype equipment (Fig. 2) depicts a mercury box—furnished with an iron cistern, a thermometer, and a glass window for checking the progress of the image—in which exposed plates would be developed. “The Black Cat” alludes to this cru- cial step by implying that ammonia fumes, heated by the fire, similarly devel- oped “the impression” of Pluto’s body on the wall (M 3:853).

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All in all, this series of incidents—a cat’s body being flung through a win- dow, pressed into fresh plaster by falling walls, and subjected to lime, heat, and the ammonia emanating from the corpse itself—offers a macabre parody of Daguerre’s process. If the elaborate scenario “sounds like bad science,”41 that is because Poe was caricaturing a celebrated scientific discovery. Supposedly, Pluto’s portrait resulted from catastrophes and coincidences, rather than from a carefully timed, precisely calibrated, deliberately executed sequence like the protocol Daguerre established. In emphasizing the role of chance, the narrator makes it clear that the cat’s likeness was produced by natural phenomena, not human craft or engineering. Indeed, many early accounts of the daguerreotype warned that because of Daguerre’s invention, human beings would henceforth be unable to depict nature as well as nature could depict herself. One anony- mous journalist admonished the visual artists of his day, “Ye animal painters, go no more to the Zoologicals to stare the lions out of countenance—they do not want your countenance any more. The day is come for every beast to be his own portrait painter.”42 Poe’s narrator suggests that under the right circumstances, even the animal’s corpse could paint its portrait.

The “singular,” one-of-a-kind image produced by this process also refers ironically to the daguerreotype. The image seems etched into the plaster, “as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface” (M 3:853).43 In other words, the cat’s figure appears to be slightly raised above the background, a technique used in friezes and coins to create a three-dimensional effect even when the actual depth is shallow. Poe implicitly compares it to man-made sculpture, just as three years earlier he remarked that a daguerreotype is more accurate than “any painting by human hands.”44 The analogy hints that the cat’s body was pressed against the wall, molding its shape into the plaster. However, the fact that the image depicts a “gigantic” cat (M 3:853)—presumably larger than Pluto’s “remarkably large” size (M 3:851)—suggests that it could have also resulted from a magnified shadow cast by the bright light of the fire. In any case, although Pluto’s likeness may be as exact and indelible as a daguerreotype, it is not a miniature reflection, etched onto a polished metal plate “of the most delicate texture conceivable,”45 but the massive imprint of a dead animal’s body on a relatively coarse surface. “The Black Cat” suggests, in fact, that death, destruction, and decay are neces- sary to produce such a picture.

Postmortem

What the impression on the narrator’s wall reveals—the likeness of a cat killed by its owner—also satirizes the typical daguerreotype portrait. Daguerre’s

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interest in the camera obscura evolved from his background as the inventor of the diorama, a popular entertainment that used paintings, optical illusions, mechanical devices, and light effects to create semblances of faraway places. His initial daguerreotypes depicted landscapes, architecture, and street scenes rather than human subjects; the first person ever photographed was a man get- ting his shoes shined, who sat still long enough to appear in Daguerre’s 1838 picture of the Boulevard du Temple.46 As other individuals perfected Daguerre’s process, however, portraits grew more practicable and more popular, especially in America. Poe followed these developments closely. In his second article on “Improvements in the Daguerreotype,” he announced:

Mr. A. S. Wolcott, of New York, has nearly revolutionized the whole pro- cess of Daguerre and brought the photogenic art to high perfection. The inventor, it is well know[n], could not succeed in taking likenesses from the life, and, in fact, but few objects were perfectly represented by him, unless positively white, and in broad sunlight. By means of a concave mirror, in place of the ordinary lens, Mr. W. has succeeded in taking miniatures from the living subject, with absolute exactness, and in a very short space of time.47

By 1843, when Poe wrote “The Black Cat,” an entire industry of daguerreo- type portraiture flourished in the United States, especially in New York and Philadelphia, including wholesale suppliers, manufacturers, “daguerrean salons,” and independent practitioners.

Poe understood the aesthetic and psychological impact of daguerreotype portraits, as well as the technology behind them. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne (who later depicted Daguerre’s invention in The House of the Seven Gables), he recognized how his visual representation as an author might affect his work’s reception.48 He may have even sported a mustache,49 or combed his hair back from his high, broad, “poetic forehead,”50 to improve his appearance in daguerre- otypes. Indeed, Poe’s brooding demeanor in later miniatures—especially the “Thompson” daguerreotype, taken shortly before his death—has profoundly influenced readers’ responses to his writing.51 Given his awareness of the power of such images, it is telling that in “The Black Cat” Poe explicitly calls Pluto’s likeness an instance of “portraiture” (M 3:853).

Describing this portrait as having been “graven . . . upon the white sur- face” (M 3:853), moreover, recalls how daguerreotypes were then reproduced on the page. Because each daguerreotype was a unique positive image—rather than a negative, which is easily duplicated—it had to be copied by hand before

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being engraved on another surface for inking and printing onto white paper. As an editor, especially one with a keen aesthetic sensibility and an interest in visual media,52 Poe was familiar with techniques for printing illustrations. He knew the difficulty of reproducing daguerreotypes, in particular. In his second article on “The Daguerreotype,” he remarks that although the new images could not yet compete with printed engravings, “the production of the Daguerreotype effects on paper is likely to be soon accomplished. In France some very successful attempts have been made in this way.”53 When Poe wrote “The Black Cat,” however, daguerreotypes were still being copied by hand and engraved in wood. In the winter of 1843, his own portrait had been duplicated, using these techniques, to accompany his profile in the Saturday Museum. Afterward, Poe decided to include other authors’ daguerreotypes in his proposed journal, The Stylus, whose new title even referred to a tool used for such engraving.54

Daguerreotype portraits of family members and celebrities may have become immensely popular by then, but images of pets were virtually nonexis- tent. Heidi Hanrahan cautions that readers of “The Black Cat” should consider Pluto as an actual pet, not simply a symbol of social issues or psychological factors.55 In the same spirit, readers should consider Pluto’s likeness in terms of how actual pets were represented—or not represented—in the prevailing form of portraiture at the time. Although a few stuffed wildlife specimens appear in early daguerreotypes, images of domestic pets and other living animals were not recorded until the 1850s, when shorter exposures became possible.56

At any rate, the portrait in Poe’s story depicts not a living creature but a dead one, “memorialized in plaster.”57 The first postmortem daguerreotypes of human subjects appeared as early as 1841, and by 1843 they had become a famil- iar way to commemorate the dead.58 Dead pets were not photographed until much later. Katherine Grier explains that a “mourning ritual in which some Victorian pet owners indulged was having a posthumous portrait made of the deceased”; however, this practice emerged only toward the end of the century, and even then “cats do not seem to have been so honored very often, as the examples located to date have all been of dogs.”59

Black cats, no doubt, would have received even less favor, given the super- stitious prejudice toward them that Poe acknowledges in this tale and in the short 1840 article, “Instinct vs Reason—a Black Cat,” which preceded it.60 He later cites such felines ironically in “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” joking that the first tale told by the doomed queen concerned “a black cat and a rat” (M 3:1152). Besides, the killing of cats—whether black or not—tended to inspire sardonic humor rather than tender sentiment. Poe and his wife, Virginia, may have cherished their tortoiseshell, Caterina, but his

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comic tales refer to cats being teased, amputated, cooked, or skinned.61 An arti- cle in the Philadelphia Public Ledger attributed to Poe, “Desultory Notes on Cats” (M 3:1095–97), even jokes that despite the animals’ discordant shrieks and bloodcurdling howls, their deaths produce beautiful music due to the catgut in stringed instruments. The article adds that although young children adore kit- tens, boys develop an antipathy toward cats after studying “the humanities” at school and subsequently kill the animals “whenever sport prompts them to do so” (M 3:1096). In 1843, the portrait of a dead cat—let alone a black cat hanged by its owner—would have made sense only as the grotesque caricature of a popular sentimental tradition.

Proof and Presentiment

Nevertheless, Pluto’s depiction in “The Black Cat” serves as a visual reminder, a glimpse of the past, and a receptacle for powerful emotions, just like those cherished daguerreotypes of dead or distant loved ones that had become so common. The cat’s portrait makes a “deep impression”—a phrase that ironi- cally recalls how it was produced—on the narrator (M 3:853). Significantly, it appears on the bedroom wall directly above where his head lay, as if illustrating something in his memory or his unconscious. By depicting not only the cat’s corpse but also how it was killed, this image visually represents the narrator’s guilt. By appearing on an interior wall that remains standing after the house is destroyed, moreover, the image makes his private action public. One article on the daguerreotype speculated that by producing such effects, the new tech- nology could document crimes in domestic settings that had been previously invisible: “What will become of the poor thieves, when they shall see handed in as evidence against them their own portraits, taken by the room in which they stole, and in the very act of stealing!”62 We might add, what will become of Poe’s poor narrator when he sees his cruelty toward his pet emblazoned on the wall of his own home, and that wall exposed to any passerby!

The narrator apparently kills Pluto because seeing the cat reminds him of his past brutality, but the animal’s image seems to illustrate his guilty thoughts even after its death. Pluto’s portrait is only the first instance of the phenome- non. Months later, the cat’s “phantasm” still haunts his imagination—although he claims to suffer no “remorse” for having killed it but only a “half-sentiment,” perhaps “regret,” due to its absence from his sight (M 3:853; my emphasis). This emotion echoes the “sentiment half of horror, half of remorse” that he felt after cutting out Pluto’s eye (M 3:851; my emphasis), reinforcing how the narrator’s ambivalent perceptions of the animal divide and repeat throughout the story.

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Perversely, he now seeks “another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance” (M 3:853–54), as if still craving a visible embodiment of his guilt.

Throughout the rest of the tale, the cat’s image continues to document his wrongdoing. Just as the second half of Poe’s earlier horror story, “The Tell- Tale Heart,” inverts the first half63—with the narrator seeking to hide some- thing, rather than expose it—so the second half of “The Black Cat” practically duplicates the first. After noticing “some black object” in his field of vision at a tavern (M 3:854), the narrator adopts a large, handsome black feline which looks almost exactly like Pluto, even down to the missing eye. The single dif- ference between them? The second cat’s chest bears a shapeless white splotch that progressively becomes the “representation of an object . . . the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the gallows!” (M 3:855). The narrator’s perception of this even more “fanciful” likeness indicates his increasing unre- liability (M 3:855). The figure of a gallows, in particular—foreshadowing the narrator’s death by hanging for having murdered his wife—recalls how the first cat’s portrait included the rope around its neck, thus depicting its own hanging at his hands. Rather than illustrating a past event, however, as the first cat’s like- ness did, this emblem predicts the future.

The way the figure becomes recognizable clearly alludes to Daguerre’s procedure. Poe was familiar with eyeglasses, telescopes, and other devices for enhancing vision,64 but a mysterious process that makes vague shapes conspic- uous and legible “by slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible” (M 3:855) could refer only to Daguerre’s technique for developing latent images on exposed plates. A British daguerreotypist explains:

The plate, when taken from the camera, has certainly on it the impression of the subject to which it has been exposed, but it is invisible. . . . It is to bring out the impression that the plate is exposed to the fumes of distilled mercury. As I said, if you look after a few minutes through the glass [that is, through the window of the mercury box] . . . you will see the faint trac- ery of objects beginning to appear. A slight cloud, the evaporation of the mercury, is seen turning over the plate, and, like the pencil of the artist, tracing most skil[l]fully the outlines of the objects; every second marking new beauties, revealing new wonders.65

As Poe remarks in his initial article on the daguerreotype, the plate “does not at first appear to have received a definite impression,” but eventually reveals “the distinctness of an object reflected in a positively perfect mirror.”66 In similar

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language, “The Black Cat” describes how an “originally very indefinite” figure gradually assumes “a rigorous distinction of outline” as the representation of a gallows on the cat’s chest becomes recognizable (M 3:855; my emphasis).

Poe’s elaborate allusion to Daguerre’s procedure, in this instance, reinforces the tale’s themes of repetition, recognition, foreshadowing, and suspense. Throughout the story, two black cats offer visual evidence of the narrator’s crimes: a missing eye, the replica of a noose, a white patch resembling the gallows. Similarly, his perception of each cat—as an “apparition,” “phantasm” (M 3:853), or “black object” (M 3:854)—characterizes it as an optical phenome- non, not a living thing. The narrator himself notes the second cat’s duplication of the first cat and insists on its accuracy. These proliferating forms, figures, and facsimiles—including how the story’s second half recapitulates the first—recall the daguerreotype. At the same time, Poe’s story explores how such repeated images elicit emotions of guilt, remorse, and horror.

Preservation or Decay

The second half of “The Black Cat” also repeats, in slightly different form, the bizarre process involving an interior wall, lime plaster, and a corpse that the nar- rator described earlier in the story. Once again, his account of this process evokes the daguerreotype. While Daguerre’s procedure preserves the transient images in a camera obscura, however, Poe’s narrator tries to obliterate such traces of the past. As in the story’s first half, his own process arises from cruelty toward a pet animal. He becomes enraged by the second cat, too, but when he tries to kill it (this time with an axe, not a rope), he ends up killing his wife instead. The rest of the story recounts his attempt to hide the murder. After considering at length how best to dispose of his wife’s body—a conundrum recalling his earlier efforts to determine how Pluto’s portrait appeared on the wall—the narrator decides “to wall it up in the cellar” (M 3:857). With this ending, “The Black Cat” returns to the technical matter of treating images inside a camera obscura, even though Poe’s narrator seeks to eliminate such visions, not preserve them.

In the story’s first half, only one wall of the narrator’s house remained standing: the interior panel above his bed, bearing the likeness of Pluto’s dead body. Now, in the second half, he builds a wall in the basement of another house, a wall that conceals—rather than reveals—another corpse. It turns out that the walls of this architectural space, too, were recently coated “with rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from harden- ing” (M 3:857). Even better, the cellar contains a false chimney, allowing him to construct a small room—a camera obscura, in several senses—to hide his

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wife’s body. During the story’s first half, the narrator speculates about a series of random incidents that produced the image on his wall. Now, in the second half, he describes a corresponding sequence of deliberate actions on his part: opening the chimney; inserting the corpse; replacing the brickwork; pro- curing “mortar, sand, and hair”; preparing a new lime plaster “which could not be distinguished from the old”; and spreading it over the surface. This time, after the process is complete, “the wall d[oes] not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed” (M 3:857). Even the black cat has dis- appeared, suggesting that the narrator has managed to erase all traces of his wrongdoing.

This detailed description of the narrator’s work indicates Poe’s knowledge of masonry, perhaps from brief employment as a bricklayer (M 3:859n10). His later articles about New York streets also reveal familiarity with construction techniques; his 1845 essay on “Street-Paving” (P 2:94–96), for example, explains how the Romans used limestone to make cement. Poe was especially interested in chemical applications that might help structures to resist decay. In this article, he recommends applying bichloride of mercury to prevent wooden roads from rotting, asserting that it withstands “all the known decomposing agents which can ever naturally be brought to act against a wooden pavement” (P 3:96).

Poe understood that lime—one of those decomposing agents—not only aids in construction but also accelerates the decay of animal or vegetable mat- ter. His stories often demonstrate special concern with the condition of bod- ies after burial. In “The Premature Burial,” for example, the narrator imagines graves illuminated by “the faint phosphoric radiance of decay,” and implores family members not to bury him unless “the process of decomposition has so materially advanced as to render further preservation impossible” (M 3:964). Given Poe’s evident interest in preservation techniques and funerary practices, he must have known that crushed limestone reduces the odor of decompos- ing bodies. In Elements of Agricultural Chemistry, Humphry Davy observes that “by covering dead animals with five or six times their bulk of soil, mixed with one part of lime, and suffering them to remain for a few months[,] their decomposition would impregnate the soil with soluble matters, so as to render it an excellent manure; and by mixing a little quicklime with it at the time of its removal, the disagreeable effluvia would be in great measure destroyed.”67 Scholars have noted that Poe was familiar with Davy’s work, as evident in both “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” and “Hans Pfaall.”68

In Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, Justus Liebig observes that adding quicklime to soil changes the “putrefaction of its organic constituents into a pure process of . . . oxidation or decay” and

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that Chinese farmers “construct large cisterns or pits, lined with lime plaster,” to hasten the decomposition of vegetable matter.69 (Again, lime plaster is made from slaked lime, which is formed by adding water to quicklime, or heated crushed limestone.) Poe was also familiar with Liebig, whose “recent discover- ies” he cites when describing scientist John W. Francis in “The Literati of New York City” (H 15:25). In Lectures to Farmers About Agricultural Chemistry, a volume that Poe described as “famous,”70 Alexander Petzholdt explains lime’s effect on human corpses in particular: “Carcasses covered with lime are rapidly decomposed without exhaling those noxious vapors which accompany their putrefaction under other circumstances. It is on this account that quick-lime is placed in the coffin of those who have died of contagious diseases.”71 Poe might have been intrigued by this last observation, given his awareness of the ravages of tuberculosis and his pursuit of an “aesthetics of contamination.”72 Petzholdt adds, “Slaked lime does not produce these effects to the same extent as quick- lime; . . . nevertheless, it has sufficient power to accelerate the decomposition of organic substances.”73 From reading the work of these chemists, Poe would have assumed that a corpse might decay more rapidly inside a small chamber coated with lime plaster.74

Although the chemical process described by Poe’s narrator in “The Black Cat” evokes the daguerreotype, then, its results are quite different. Whereas Daguerre’s procedure offered a way to preserve images—including those of family members who have died—the narrator of “The Black Cat” attempts to destroy such evidence. Poe’s stories often explore concepts, characters, struc- tures, and objects that are doubled, reversed, or even turned inside out, yet remain mysteriously connected to one another. In this sense, “The Black Cat” addresses the abiding tension between preservation and decay.

Impressions of Death

Just as the story’s first half concludes by displaying visual proof of Pluto’s killing, so the second half reveals the narrator’s murder of his wife, despite his effort to conceal the crime. Earlier, a group of onlookers discovered a pictorial repre- sentation of the hanged cat on the narrator’s bedroom wall. Now, in the second half, “a party of the police” arrives at the narrator’s second home to search for his wife’s body, leaving “no nook or corner unexplored” (M 3:858). As the police leave the cellar, apparently satisfied that there is no evidence of murder, Poe’s narrator perversely boasts that his house is “excellently well constructed” and its walls “solidly put together,” while rapping against the very wall where the body is hidden.

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In response to his knock, a “wailing shriek” rises behind the partition, like “an answering voice from within the tomb” (M 3:859). Similarly, when the castaways in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe’s 1838 novel, call out to a plague-ridden ship, they hear an answering call “so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived” (P 1:124). In “The Black Cat,” this cry sounds at first like “the sobbing of a child” before “quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman.” Indeed, it conveys the kind of contradictory emotions—here, “half of horror and half of triumph”—that the narrator himself repeatedly expresses with regard to the cat (M 3:859; my emphasis). The cry also recalls Poe’s description of howling felines in “Some Desultory Notes on Cats”75 and anticipates the “long, wild, and continuous shriek,” like the “‘yowl- ing’” of “a cattymount,” that the narrator of “The Premature Burial” utters when he believes he is buried alive (M 3:968). In “The Black Cat,” such keening seems especially horrifying because it emanates from behind the smooth, blank sur- face of a wall.

After a moment of stunned silence, the police tear down that wall to reveal, “before the eyes of the spectators” (M 3:859), a vision of the dead wife and the living cat. The narrator’s account emphasizes not only the vision but also the act of looking at it, suggesting the kind of theatrical spectacle—with viewers in a darkened chamber gazing at an illuminated display—that H. Meyer evokes in his illustration of the tale (Fig. 3).76 As Poe himself remarked in a review of the 1845 Tales attributed to him, the ending of “The Black Cat” thus presents “a perfect printed tableau.”77 At the same time, various circumstances related to this spectacle—a “compartment wall” (M 3:853), a corpse, a cat, the presence of slaked lime and perhaps ammonia fumes, and even the animal’s “solitary eye of fire” (M 3:859)—recall the series of incidents that produced Pluto’s portrait earlier in the story. Just as the first cat seemed to rematerialize upon the nar- rator’s freshly plastered bedroom wall, above the place where his head lay, so the second cat now reappears behind another freshly plastered panel, literally sitting on his wife’s skull. In this climactic moment, as the story shifts back from auditory to visual modes, Pluto’s successor provides a final representation of the narrator’s crimes. Artists often select this scene when illustrating “The Black Cat.” They usually depict the titular animal perched atop the dead wom- an’s head, framed by the remnants of a wall that is enclosed, in turn, by a line, a border of white space, or a page’s edge, so that the cat seems to stare malevo- lently from deep inside the book the reader is reading, as in Aubrey Beardsley’s striking ink drawing (Fig. 4).78 Poe’s text, however, already presents this scene as a phantasmagoric image manifesting within an enclosed space, again recalling

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fig. 3 H. Meyer, heliogravure illustration of “Le Chat noir” in Nouvelles Histoires extraordinaires by Edgar Allan Poe, translated by Charles Baudelaire (Paris: A. Quantin, 1884).

the camera obscura. Poe even emphasizes the horror of glimpsing something from outside that has somehow entered an ostensibly sealed interior—which is exactly what happens in a camera—when the narrator cries out, in the story’s last sentence, that he “had walled the monster up within the tomb!” (M 3:859).

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fig. 4 Aubrey Beardsley, ink drawing of “The Black Cat” in Tales of Mystery and Wonder by Edgar Allan Poe (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1895).

In the story’s final paragraphs, Poe establishes suggestive connections between this climactic vision and the image in a camera as the product of optics, engineer- ing, chemistry, and art. However, the vision of the narrator’s dead wife forms a shocking contrast to the tasteful, sentimental, carefully composed postmortem daguerreotype portraits that Poe’s initial readers would have known.79 Rather than depicting a recently deceased individual lying in a bed or coffin, appear- ing to be peacefully sleeping with eyes closed and hands crossed, Poe presents

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a corpse standing horribly “erect” but “already greatly decayed and clotted with gore” (M 3:859). Although the body’s swift decomposition—presumably accel- erated by the lime plaster—might seem surprising,80 such decay is essential to Poe’s story. His postmortem portrait includes as well a cat with a “red extended mouth,” sitting atop the corpse (M 3:859), which suggests that the body is not only decaying from oxidation but also being consumed by bacteria and, probably, the cat. Indeed, forensic scientists report that “in domestic surroundings, pets may inflict drastic post-mortem injuries if they are locked in with a dead person.”81 Poe frequently alludes to such postmortem predation. Consider the “crawling,” “writh[ing],” “blood-red thing” that imbues “human gore” (M 1:326) in his 1843 poem “The Conqueror Worm,” published only a few months before “The Black Cat,” or the seagull perching on a dead captain’s back in Pym, “busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spat- tered all over with blood” (P 1:125). The gull’s movements even make the captain’s head seem to nod affirmatively in answer to the castaways’ cries for help, offering a visual parallel to that voice responding from inside the tomb in “The Black Cat.”

Unlike a daguerreotype—which can preserve visions of life in the moment, to be remembered after that moment passes—“The Black Cat” offers represen- tations of the causes and effects of death. In “The Oval Portrait,” a tale that was titled “Life in Death” in Poe’s initial 1842 version, an artist exclaims that his marvelously accurate depiction of his wife “is indeed Life itself,” only to discover, too late, that the process of painting her portrait was coterminous with and inseparable from her dying (M 2:666). “The Black Cat” establishes a similar contrast between the processes of composition and decomposition. Poe’s horror story describes several sequences—the random events leading to Pluto’s likeness on the wall, the progressive appearance of the gallows on the second cat’s chest, the deliberate actions that conceal the wife’s body behind another wall—that not only involve the production of images but also allude to Daguerre’s revolutionary procedure for preserving optical reflections in a camera obscura. In “The Black Cat,” however, these sequences generate impres- sions of death: a hanged cat, a gallows, a murdered woman. The final image, in particular, with its visceral evidence of a body’s deterioration and consumption, emphasizes yet another chemical reaction, the very opposite of Daguerre’s dis- covery: the inexorable progression of decay.

susan elizabeth sweeney is the Murray Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross. She coedited Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism and has published essays on Poe’s tales of ratiocination, their relationship to visual culture, and their influence