Revisiting Domestic Violence in Poe's “The Black Cat”: The Narrator Between Psychological Struggle and Egoistic Masculinity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1202.18Keywords:
gothic literature, domestic violence, Poe, unnamed narrator, egoistic masculinityAbstract
The present paper aims at demonstrating Poe’s depiction of domestic violence as a technique to demonstrate his chaotic loss in between his Psychological Struggle and his Egoistic Masculinity. It shows how readers sometimes get lost in search of a judicious cause for the extensive use of violence amongst the chaotic sociopolitical conditions that prevailed that period then. A psychoanalytical perspective was provided to unveil some of the hidden and unsaid facts within some of the gothic literary scenes that were analyzed and examined in light of the narrator’s internal struggle between his traumatic psychology and egoistic masculinity. Among others, the present researchers have found that there are intrinsic and extrinsic factors that genuinely contributed to the increasing scenes of persistent violence committed by the unnamed narrator, but not limited for alcoholism and the unbalanced psychological disorder as the narrator wished to display.
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