The Use Of Allegory In Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat

In Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Black Cat,” an unnamed narrator condemned to the death-row recounts the story of his downfall. His narrative begins several years ago as a young boy who was surrounded by pets and treated them with adoration. Marrying at a young age, the narrator introduces his wife to the joy of possessing pets, and they obtain several of them, including a black cat. As years pass by, his alcoholic tendencies incite violent physical abuse towards both his wife and his pets, but not the cat. However, during one of his uncontrollable rages, the narrator perceives the cat to be avoiding him; thus, as punishment, the cat, too, suffers from his abuse and is eventually murdered. The passage describing the black cat’s death shows the cat’s allegorical function in which it is representative of the slave population. Through this allegory, Poe shows the degrading effects of slavery upon society’s morality. …show more content…
He is honored for his “tenderness of heart” and the “humanity of [his] disposition,” illustrating his empathetic nature (Poe 695). The narrator comments that his parents had “a great variety of pets” that he spent most of his time with (695). As seen in literature during the Antebellum Era, both pro-slavery and anti-slavery authors compared slaves to animals to emphasize their stance on slavery. Anti-abolitionists, specifically, used this comparison to demonstrate that slaves were viewed as pets to slave-owning families. Poe manipulates this perspective to symbolize the narrator’s family-owned slaves as pets. Yet, unlike most slave-owners, the narrator is “fond of animals” and delighted when “feeding and caressing them,” thus, showing his benevolent morality towards those socially inferior to him, or his “pets” (Poe