The Conflicting Mind Reflected in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”and D. H. Law

Abstract. Character and point of view are probably the most important elements of the short stories. Therefore, the description of the psychological state of the protagonist(s) plays an important part in the short story. It is one of the essential writing methods and techniques most writers employ. So this paper is aimed to give an examination of the inner conflicts of three protagonists in edgar allan poe’s “The black cat” and d. h. lawrence “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”.

Key words:conflicting mind; Short Stories; Edgar Allan Poe; D.H. Lawrence

1.Introduction

Psychological description is mining figures inside the subconscious and characterizing people's inner feelings and mental activity. It can make the character’s image more distinct and accurate to reproduce. Psychological characterizations, as an essential writing technique, occupy an increasingly important place in the fiction writing.

Although the writing styles of American romanticist writer Edgar Allen Poe and English modernist writer D. H. Lawrence are different, although they were separated by several decades with different backgrounds in different countries, they all explored into human being’s inner world and the mental conflicts in their short stories. By sophisticated psychoanalysis, and emotional intrusion, the plots of their stories were developed and themes were revealed more effectively. To have a better examination of the inner conflicts of two protagonists in the above mentioned stories, I would like to analyze and make comments on them one by one.

2.Psychological Cultivation in The Black Cat

First of all, let us go into the world of “The Black Cat” and delve into the inner workings of the dark side of the human mind. 'The Black Cat' is a story that leaves the reader perplexed to some extent. It certainly contains all the ingredients necessary to satisfy the appetite of any Poe enthusiast - an enigmatic narrator, alcohol , mutilation, strangulation, murder, and, last but not least, one of Poe's slight obsessions, perversity.

This short story is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. The protagonist is the nameless narrator “I”. By nature the narrator has an affectionate, kindly temperament. His addiction to liquor, however, develops in him a tendency to schizophrenia. As the narrator begins to tell his story (flashback), the reader discovers that the man’s personality had undergone a drastic transformation which he attributes to his abuse of alcohol and the perverse side of his nature, which the alcohol seemed to evoke. We also discover that the narrator is superstitious, as he recounts that his wife made “…frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, 〔that〕all black cats 〔are〕witches in disguise.” (Poe 1389) Even though the narrator denies this, we becomes increasingly aware of his superstitious belief as the story progresses from the fact that he calls his cat, Pluto, who in Greek and Roman mythology was the god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. One moment he will be in a perfect frenzy of violence, with nothing but curses and vituperation even for those he loves. Very quickly, however, he is overcome with remorse and is sorry for all that he has said and done. We can prove this by reading the following sentences:

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? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. 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.(1930).

And we can also sight the narrator’s mental reflection and entanglement in dealing with the black cat in the following paragraph:

…… in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;―hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;―hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;―hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin―a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it―if such a thing were possible―even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. (1390)

The narrator calls the source of the spiritual torment “the spirit of Perverseness.” (1390) The perverseness, we are told, “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.” (1390)It is this spirit that leads a man to committing a vile act simply because he knows he should not. The narrator further defines this spirit as the “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself.” (1390)The impulse, that the psychologists call a radical imbalance of personality and the theologians original sin, has seldom been better described. It is something inherent in the psyche of man. The two cats remind him of what he was in better days, and he cannot endure their presence. What particularly goads him are those things for which he formerly had great affection. He becomes solitary and keeps away from both animals and men. He appears powerless to alter his condition, and yet he does have moments of extreme remorse and guilt. In the narrator we see a man driven by sullen hatred of himself, which, of course, leads to hatred of everything. He cannot stand anyone else because they require him to come out of himself, but in a sullen, introverted fury he refuses to do so. He will not be sane or happy. He is afraid of the second cat, and fear is added to a mental state already confused and dangerous. He becomes excessively nervous and has difficulty controlling himself. It is this tendency that proves his undoing. Once an idea or impulse comes to him he cannot prevent it from running its course. He cannot resist the temptation to lead the police to the very spot in the wall behind which the corpse is interred. His quixotic imagination cannot be controlled, and aware of the irony of the situation, he cannot help rapping on the very spot with his cane. So the conflicting mind of the protagonist himself was exhibited in front of us. He is a picture of a character in total disintegration.

By depicting mental conflict, Poe reveals the theme that the human mind would be healthy and alive if it were incapable of thought, but since it is a mind and does possess the power of introspection and self-knowledge, then that very power and knowledge spell its death. From this protagonist with conflicting thought, we may experience more or less Poe’s inner world of himself in which his mind is half mad and full of horror like the narrator of “The Black Cat”. Poe was afraid of the fits of temper that came over him while he was drinking. When sober he was a gentleman, courteous in any situation, and the very soul of gentility. When he was affected by alcohol, however, the suppressed rage that he felt for what he considered the injustices of a gross and unfeeling would expressed itself in vituperation and violence. In creating the narrator of “The Black Cat”, Poe distorted and exaggerated all the faults of his personality while drunk. The narrator is not Poe, but Poe used details of his own experience in the character of the narrator. Erich Heller saw Poe’s psychological fiction as a vast and original contribution to the discovery and colonization of the mind. D.H. Lawrence saw Poe’s stories as the disintegrating process of the soul. Indeed, Poe places the subconscious condition of the mind under investigation and probes beneath the surface of normal existence. What interests him most is the deep abyss of the unconscious and subconscious mental activity of the people, the subterranean recesses of the mind at work.

3.Psychological Cultivation in The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

The second protagonist for us to deal with is Fergusson, a young doctor, created in “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D.H. Lawrence. D.H Lawrence is the master of the psychological language. In this short story, the writer depicted one moving love story psychologically: The horse dealer’s daughter Mabel could not extricate herself from deep sorrow and pain, because she had cherished the memory of her deceased mother, and she finally attempted to commit suicide by drowning herself in the river. But she was fortunately sighted and rescued by a young doctor, Fergusson who had favorite impression of her. After the doctor’s endeavor, she regained her consciousness. Out of the sexual impulse and true feeling, the sparks of life and love burst from their deep heart. Here Lawrence is looking into a man’s primitive emotions, and trying to tell the elemental truth about human life. In the story, there exist quite a few conflicts such as social rules and personal will, convention and desire, moral and immoral, principles and active sub-consciousness, reason and passion, etc. Especially, when Mabel was conscious with his help and was affectionate to him, the doctor is in a turbulent conflicting state of mind. We may quote this paragraph frond the story to have a look:

“He looked down at the tangled wet hair, the wild, bare, animal shoulders. He was amazed, bewildered, and afraid. He had never thought of loving her. He had never wanted to love her. When he rescued her and restored her, he was a doctor, and she was a patient. He had had no single personal thought of her. Nay, this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honor. It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet―and yet―he had not the power to break away.” (Lawrence 774)

The paragraph shows the doctor’s struggling and complex feeling. On one hand, he was powerless “in view of the delicate flame while seemed to come from her face like a light”, (774) on the other hand, he was aware of his social role and was bound by the social conventions. His whole will was against his yielding and an idea flashed into his mind repeatedly “And yet he had never intended to love he. He had never intended.” (774) However, “wonderful was the touch of her shoulder, beautiful the shining of her face. … He had a horror of yielding to her. Yet something in him ached also.” (774) Lawrence spends several pages on the detailed description of the subtle ebb and flow of doctor’s thought and ups and downs of his feeling. At the near end of story, we still can experience the doctor’s conflicting mind through the sentence “from the pain of his breast, he knew how he loved her. He went and bent to kiss her, gently, passionately, with his heart’s painful kiss.”(777)In this way, Lawrence has made a vivid presentation of the psychological development of the doctor for readers to trace and understand.

In presenting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence is concerned with the most intimate feeling. He believed that any kind of conscious or self-conscious repression of the life impulse would cause neurotics or splitting personality in one’s natural psychological development. That explained why Lawrence would stretch the theme of his story psychologically into the irrational recesses of the self where the divine life impulse stirred with unpredictable motions. In his story, the protagonist’s psychological development is traced with great subtlety, especially his emotional conflicts. Although his short story embodied Freud’s remarkable psycho-sexual theory, according to Lawrence’s own ideas of individual psyche, the disease of modern life and civilization does not only bring an organic disturbance against the life force in the relationship of man and woman, but also causes damages to the healthy development of the individual psyche. Through his profound and shrewd insight into the characters, he revealed the evils of society which caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passion of man. To revive the natural instincts of man and women and to establish an ideal human community, Lawrence encouraged a return to nature, because nature is spontaneous, primitive and unbound by artificial constraint. Nature knows no sin. Everybody would enjoy true love and freedom, unhampered by social classes, by ideas of racial and social superiority. The psychic conflict in human relationships is the central theme of most of works. So in order to highlight the theme of the story, Lawrence adapted the psychography to a new and a high degree.

4. Summary

On the whole, the inner conflicts of the two aforesaid protagonists all involve personal feelings and the societies in which they lived. In the former short storie, the protagonist could not extricate themselves from the contradictory mind and resulted in their wrongdoings. In the last story, the doctor freed himself from the mental conflict and settled the problems in his feeling. He gained the true love and a happy future.

To sum up, from the above examination, we can know that the psychography of protagonists’ inner conflicts is one of the important writing techniques the writers employ. On one hand, the writer gives readers different interpretations with more personal involvement while reading, on the other hand, this technique serves better for their hidden themes. The higher the conflict reaches, the more the theme revealed, no matter what kind of theme centers on, society or human being, love or life. Furthermore, psychological depiction will help the author in cultivating human nature and human life in a more comprehensive way.

5. References

[1]Lawrence, D. H.“The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.Ed. Cassill, R.V.New York:W.W. Norton & Company Inc,1978.763-777.

[2]Poe, Edgar Allan.“The Black Cat.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature.2nd ed.New York:W. W. Norton & Company.1985.1388-1396.

[3]Piacentino, Ed. "Poe's "'The Black Cat' as psychobiography: some reflections on the narratological dynamics - Edgar Allan Poe - Critical Essay." Studies in Short Fiction. 1998.

[4]Chang Yaoxin. Selected History of American Literature. Tianjin: Nankai University Press. 1990.

[5]Zhang Boxiang. A Course Book of English Literature. Wuhan: Wuhan University Press. 1997.