Can someone give me some great examples of guilt in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe?
The Black Cat. Theme “The Black Cat” is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt (the first being “The Tell-Tale Heart”); however, this story does not deal with premeditated murder. The reader is told that the narrator appears to be a happily married man, who has always been exceedingly kind and gentle. He attributes his downfall to the “Fiend Intemperance” and “the spirit of perverseness.” Perverseness, he believes, is “…one of the primitive impulses of the human heart.” “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?” Perverseness provides the rationale for otherwise unjustifiable acts, such as killing the first cat or rapping with his cane upon the plastered-up wall behind which stood his wife’s corpse “…already greatly decayed and clotted with gore.” We might argue that what the narrator calls “perverseness” is actually conscience. Guilt about his alcoholism seems t
