ABSTRACT
This chapter of American Literature and American Identity considers Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat” as an allegory for misogyny and male violence. A focus on Poe’s story is probably unexpected in this context. But its unexpectedness itself suggests that concerns about the social implications of gender hierarchies may be more widespread in American literature than we may initially anticipate. It is of course clear that a number of authors take up the debilitating consequences of patriarchy. Of the authors covered in this book, the point holds not only for Hawthorne, but for Sedgwick, Stowe, and Jacobs as well. But the suggestion of “The Black Cat” is that gender hierarchies—and the injustices of those hierarchies—may be more pervasive sources of discontent with and division within American identity than we often imagine.
