Depravity is defined as an action or series of actions that are morally corrupt or even wicked. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” the narrator, who is never named, describes several actions which he himself identifies as “depraved.” The development of his depravity is both interesting and frightful; readers do see a true descent into depravity as the narrator, sentenced to be executed the next day, describes the events that brought him into his present state.
A brief summary of the overall plot can help to illustrate how depravity plays into the story and its overall development. The story is told in flashbacks as the narrator is awaiting his execution. “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul.” He narrates not only the events that led to his conviction; he also explains his childhood and the early years of his marriage. He describes himself as gentle to a fault. So gentle, in fact, that he was mocked for his kindness as a child. “My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions.”
He marries, and he and his wife share a deep love of animals. His wife buys him a black cat named Pluto, whom he describes as an animal “of the most agreeable kind.” In spite of his affection for the cat, the narrator commits two acts of violence against it: he carves out its eye, and then he hangs it from a tree by a noose. A fire soon after destroys their house and the narrator’s attention is called to witnesses seeing a soot mark that resembles a cat with a noose around its neck right above where his bed had been. The narrator explains the mark away, and, calm once again, he seeks the company of another cat. Soon, a cat that looks strikingly like Pluto, except for a large patch of white fur on its chest, seems to offer the narrator an opportunity for redemption. The cat loves him and follows him diligently, but this loyalty only activates deep rage within the narrator. One day, while he and his wife are walking to the basement, the cat runs down the stairs and almost trips the narrator, inciting him into a rage. He tries to kill the cat with an axe, but his wife stops him. Instead, then, he turns the axe on her and kills her.
He hides her body behind a wall in the basement and believes that he has successfully concealed his crime. As an added bonus, the cat seems to have been so frightened by the murder that it runs off, leaving the narrator free of its constant attention. Four days later, though, the police come to the door and ask to investigate. The narrator, overly-confident in a manner similar to the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” invites them in and raps on the wall with his cane to show the solid construction of the house. It is at this point that a sound is heard from behind the wall. The police tear it down and reveal the corpse of his wife—with the black cat sitting on the top of her head.
Throughout his retelling of the events that led him to his prison cell, the narrator cites several examples of his depravity, and a clear development of the depravity is visible to readers. First, he describes how his drinking, to which he refers as “the Fiend Intemperance,” changes his personality slowly but surely. “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them.”
His depravity continues when, in spite of acknowledging specific feelings of affection still remaining for Pluto, he commits an act of violence against the cat after it nips his hand.
I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!
The narrator knows that he has acted in a morally corrupt, depraved way. The next day he is remorseful, but, as time passes, he slips deeper into his alcoholic stupor and he forgets how upset he was by his own actions. Rather than use the violence against Pluto as an impetus to change his behaviors, his depravity grows. He describes his depravity in detail this time, which shows its development and escalation.
And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than 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. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?.... It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself — to offer violence to its own nature — to do wrong for the wrong's sake only — that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.
He hangs Pluto from a tree with a noose, and the cat dies. The narrator isn’t acting in a drunken rage, and the cat has done nothing to trigger an angry reaction; the narrator kills him for no reason other than, as he says, because he knows he should not.
Readers might think that, following the murder of his cat, the narrator might have been horrified enough by his actions to stop drinking and possibly reevaluate his life. The addition of a house fire that destroys everything only supports this notion, as well as the narrator’s desire to adopt another cat in order to make up for his actions against Pluto. He wants this opportunity for redemption so badly that the fact that his new cat resembles Pluto down to the same missing eye (except for the one difference of the white patch of fur on the new cat’s chest) doesn’t bother him, though he does notice quite specifically when the white patch seems to morph into the shape of a hanged cat.
A descent into depravity, though, is hard to stop once it starts, and it’s not long before the narrator feels the same stirrings of rage and violence toward the new cat.
For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but — I know not how or why it was — its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred.
The fact that his hatred is directly proportional to the cat’s increasing love for him only serves to push the narrator into deeper depravity. Conscious all the while of his thoughts and actions, the narrator knowingly gives in to his impulses and surrenders any remaining hope of his goodness.
...the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates — the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
The full extent of his depravity can be seen in the final incident with his wife as he murders her. He flies into a rage at the cat for nearly tripping him and tries to kill it, but his wife stills his hand. Readers see his depravity in his intention: he doesn’t kill his wife out of a lack of impulse control or because he is in a blind rage; he kills her because she tried to stop him from killing the cat.
Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.
A story that begins with a character on death row will almost always have clear examples of moral corruptness, of depravity, throughout, and “The Black Cat” is no exception. Readers see the tragic descent into depravity of a character who was supposedly born docile and kind, but, for a variety of reasons—though he names alcohol, this is certainly not the only cause—loses this part of himself in an ocean of rage and evil. His first act of violence, cutting out Pluto’s eye as a retaliatory action for Pluto biting him, leads the narrator deeper and deeper into the world of moral corruption and depravity, the end result of which is the murder of his loving wife and, ultimately, his own scheduled death.
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