Life Exposed In Edgar Allan Poe's Black Cat

Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his ominous tone and attraction to gloomy themes in his works. Many of his works surround the circumstances of the death of a beautiful woman, such as “Ligeia,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Black Cat.” This was a very personal topic for Poe, as he lost most all the women he loved including both his biological and adoptive mothers and his wife. This gave him inspiration for many of his works and fueled his fascination with human mortality. Poe’s mother died at the young age of 24, when Poe was only three years old. He spent the rest of his life desperately trying to find someone to fill the void left by the death of his mother. He found the mother figure he was looking for in many different women.

Just as the narrator of “Ligeia,” he is severely suffering mentally after his loss. He is overwhelmed by her death and desperately searching for answers as was Poe after the loss of the women in his life. He needs consolation so badly it drives him mad searching for it, finding meaning in this seemingly senseless word that the raven is repeating. In typical Poe form, the story is told in an ominous tone that gives an eerie feel to the word as if it could possibly have a deeper meaning. Freedman states that “Poe was profoundly interested in and disturbed by… the possibility of knowledge and certainty. The fact that a blind utterance – more hollow sound than a meaningful word- is constructed as an answer problemizes the question and the possibility of knowledge…” (Freedman, PTR) The narrator strongly compares to Poe himself; he states, “other friends have flown before-on the morrow he will leave as my hopes have before” (Poe, 58-59). Just as Ligeia was so deeply engraved into the narrator, so is Lenore in this story. The narrator is convinced he smells Lenore in the room although she is dead. This was the level of impact that women had on