Wishful Impulse in the Acts of the Absurd: The Rising Evil Seen Within Ourselves in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat and Sigmund Freud’s Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
At first glance, influential American writer Edgar Allan Poe, in his short story, “The Black Cat”, elucidates the deterioration of the human mind into its destruction, and even if the transition is recognizable, the effects presented itself irreversible. The short story is fully aware of its causations of this form of mental deterioration: able to describe the narrator’s alcoholism as a plot device to justify his mood swings and violence, even admitting to his mistakes just to find himself in a worsening situation. Yet there is always a deeper meaning in Poe’s literary work involving psychological complexities; one can’t simply use alcohol as a plot device to uphold the narrator’s decaying behavior in a literary platform. In actuality, the narrator’s mind has always been suffering since the beginning of his childhood because of his compliant attribute. Consequently, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” addresses that, although innate character traits are considered to be socially acceptable, the narrator has a hidden and malevolent peculiarity, such as disobedience and violence, that would emerge superficial; this can be reinforced by the Freudian concept of wishful impulse.
Poe demonstrates a transcending claim through his use of diction and characterization by introducing a narrator that constitutes humility, and he used this to foreshadow the narrator’s mental decay. In the early stages of the narrator’s life, the author characterizes him as a people’s pleaser, “noted for the docility and humanity of [his] disposition” (Poe, 2). He was obsessed with caring for a variety of pets, and this loving attribute reflects his sympathy for other people around his presence. But this innate character trait is the reason that leads to his befalling. The narrator states, “there is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has frequent occasions to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man” (2). Poe used diction to relate the narrator’s altruism with a “self-sacrificing love of a brute”, which means that the narrator is constantly examining his actions towards his peers, as he continuously doubts his set of judgment, thinking that it will hinder his friendships if he abstains from conforming. Ultimately, this illustrates the foreshadowing of the narrator’s mental deterioration from Poe’s use of diction and characterization, since psychological distress can be seen during childhood to early adulthood.
To further elucidate, the author proclaims the most viable change in the narrator’s undergoing madness by the use of a black cat as symbolism and the interpretation of his inner turmoil emerging. After the narrator’s marriage, he and his wife quickly decided to owe a variety of pets, and one of them was a black cat named Pluto. For several years, Pluto has been the narrator’s favorite animal, however, their relationship gradually diminished when the narrator started to intoxicate himself with alcohol, growing more abusive every day. The changes to the narrator’s behavior cause the cat to become fearful of the man until one day when the narrator yearned for the cat’s attention, Pluto refused. As mentioned, Poe reveals the narrator’s beloved cat as an indicator of the resurfacing of the vile shadow that he has been repressing for a long time. In the text, it states, “…the spirit of PERVERSENESS […] I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man” (9). The narrator admits to the belief of “perverseness”, the philosophy of the absurd, of those who resist obedience and rationality for your fulfillment. Here we observe the narrator’s internal conflict and monstrous-self resurfacing as “primitive impulses of the human heart”, signifying how society holds authority in coordinating conservatism by suppressing our innate urges, thus emanating as a form of hysteria.
Undoubtedly, Poe argues about the human nature of hiding a malevolent agenda until it reinforces itself as an oddity that causes psychological violence, and this is further supported by the widely known Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his theory of wishful impulse. Freud was one of the few people who studied hysteria, a topic widely neglected by physicians at that time. Hysteria is caused by suppressed emotional trauma, leading to a series of physical applications in the consciousness, including “altered personality accompanied by confusion” (2202). To put it more directly, Freud perceives a notion of how hysterical patients were driven into a series of physical attributes because of the repression of their satisfaction into the unconsciousness state, often to avoid social stigma. According to Freud, we humans tend to repress our deep desires because of our “defensive ego” and social stigma into our unconsciousness; although the repression helps cope with the feelings of unpleasantness, resisting the impulse will transform into the symptoms (2215). Just as the narrator of “The Black Cat” experienced, he repressed his primitive desires for disobedience, always reflecting on his relationships with his family and peers because of his well-known sympathy, until he couldn’t resist his impulsion any longer. Here Poe demonstrated Freud’s theory of wishful impulse to address his argument that every individual has an immoral agenda hidden through their unconsciousness, which will bring itself apparent as hysteria.
While the narrator was perceived to be innately obedient to societal conduct, one can discern that the narrator has concealed wishful impulse that will unexpectedly materialize as psychologically evil in the notion of perverseness. While admittedly, some might argue that Poe used alcohol to allude to how every person is capable of undergoing a massive change in their personality at any given moment; this is not enough to grasp the full intricacy of Poe’s psychological argument that we need to be aware of as a collective. Theoretically, how can we establish an equilibrium with ourselves to consolidate our deepest immorality with social stigma? As people, we define our own life based on our social circle, as we constantly yearn for a symbol that will bring us eternal happiness and fill the deep void inside ourselves. Just like what Edgar Allan Poe and Sigmund Freud had insisted, we should all look deeply within ourselves before the idle rancor emerges superficially.
Work Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. W. W. Norton & Company, 1952.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” PoeStories.Com, 1845, poestories.com/read/blackcat.
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