@article{ref1,
title=""A problem in detection": the rhetoric of murder in Poe's "The black cat"",
journal="Edgar Allan Poe Review",
year="2017",
author="Dern, John A.",
volume="18",
number="2",
pages="163-182",
abstract="The narrator of Poe's &quot;The Black Cat&quot; is a murderer penning a confession on the eve of his execution. This much he admits. He also believes he is the victim of a malevolent, supernatural being, a witching cat--the doppelgänger of a cat the narrator hanged. In the end, this second cat, the narrator claims, fiendishly worked his undoing by tormenting him mercilessly, using its &quot;craft&quot; to seduce him into murder. T. O. Mabbott, in fact, calls this narrative &quot;a story of 'orthodox' witchcraft.&quot; Still, the narrator's word choices and paragraphing offer evidence of another hypothesis. The being who tormented the narrator, his &quot;incarnate Night-Mare,&quot; was not the second cat, as such, but the narrator's wife. In his story, the narrator unwittingly reveals his psychological motivation, which, in part, involves his perception of a confederacy between the wife and the second cat--which is not to say that a coherent case for this motivation can disregard the narrator's otherworldly dread. Nevertheless, from his initial discussion of domestic life to his characterization of the murder as an <i>assassination</i>, the narrator rhetorically reveals enough about his inner thoughts, including his sexual discontent, for a reader to hypothesize that the narrator's crime against his wife was <i>personal</i>.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="2150-0428",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}