Berenice And The Black Cat Analysis

Works of literature in the same genre occasionally share common attributes, especially when they are written by the same author! Edgar Allen Poe was a famous gothic author who wrote many pieces of literature which were all very different, but also seemed quite the same. In his works, “Ligeia”, “Berenice”, and “The Black Cat” there are many distinct themes and analytical elements shown throughout the works. However, many of these are shared within all three of these pieces of literature. In these Edgar Allen Poe short stories, two recognizable themes and one analytical element are shown to be similar. In “Ligeia”, “Berenice”, and “The Black Cat”, a common theme is a mental grotesque, a common theme is transformations, and an analytical element …show more content…
In all three of these short stories, there are characters which transform or change throughout the story. These transformations are considered to be a theme of each story because they are portrayed in such a way which is crucial for the meaning of the story. For example, in “Ligeia,” the narrator’s first wife, Legeia, was a beautiful woman with long black hair and wild black eyes. Eventually, she became ill and passed on. After her passing, her widowed husband married again, but this time, he married a woman with light hair and blue eyes. His second wife also becomes ill and passes away. However, this passing was different. It were as if she would die and minutes later, would be alive again. Finally, his light haired and blue eyed wife began to turn into the black haired and black eyed love of his life, Legeia (1-26). This element of the story shows the transformation of the immortal Legeia, which is a very crucial and main point of the story. Another example is in the story “The Black Cat.” In this story, the narrator has a beloved pet cat named Pluto. However, as the story progresses, the narrator begins to deeply hate Pluto, so much that he hangs his cat. A short time after this cruel act, the narrator feels the need to obtain a new cat, one that looks similar to Pluto. Soon after, he finds a black cat who has a missing eye, just like Pluto. The only difference is the white fur on this cat, which Pluto did not have. This new cat becomes the sole reason in which the narrator murders her wife, and also the sole cause of why the narrator did not get away with this crime. However, near the end of the story, it states, “My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed… it had, at length, assumed a rigorous