Essay Comparing The Black Cat And The Masque Of The Red Death

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality” (Poe). Edgar Allan Poe harnesses the power of gothic horror literature in his disturbing“The Black Cat” and his famous “The Masque of the Red Death.” Both of these stories weave increasingly horrific tales of tragic consequences and altered states of mind. “The Black Cat” tells the tale of a frequent drunk who ends up killing both his cat and his wife in one such example of momentary insanity. “The Masque of the Red Death” follows a prince’s desperate attempt to spare his family and friends from a disease which killed everyone in his village, only to be slaughtered by a mysterious masked figure personifying the disease. These classic Poe stories are two examples of gothic horror literature because they combine …show more content…
The narrator describes how alcohol changes him. He comes home drunk a lot and he acts very differently; the slightest things set him off. His pet cat bites him and he does the unthinkable. “I knew myself no longer… grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!” (5). As his marriage starts to collapse under the weight of his alcoholism, he tortures and then hangs the cat. A new cat just appears one day who seems to mock the narrator for his past crimes. Unable to deal with this mysterious reminder of his transgressions, he lashes out again. His wife tries to stop him from harming the second cat but instead becomes the focus of his rage. Poe writes, “I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot.” (19). An axe to the head isn't a pleasant way to go. The narrator’s descent into madness, the mysterious appearance of a figure, and the gruesome deaths described in “The Black Cat” are three reasons it falls into the gothic literature