摘 要

埃德加·艾伦·坡是美国短篇小说之父，其作品涉及多种类型，包括诗歌，小说，文学评论等。同时，他也是现代侦探小说和科幻小说的先驱人物，以恐怖惊悚题材为代表的哥特式小说独树一帜，深受广大读者喜爱，其独特的写作手法也吸引了许多来自世界各地拥有不同文化背景的学者从不同角度进行评析。爱伦坡的《黑猫》是一本恐怖短篇小说，也是他的代表作之一，主要描写男主人公一步一步走向自我毁灭的心理过程。本文将以象征主义的角度切入坡的经典恐怖小说《黑猫》，分析爱伦坡如何利用象征主义，通过对《黑猫》中的男主人公和他养的两只黑猫的深入分析来探讨爱伦坡的写作技巧以及爱伦坡创造《黑猫》的主题意象，使读者能更好的理解爱伦坡的写作方式以及想表达的思想。本文分为五个部分，第一部分大体介绍爱伦坡，国内对爱伦坡的研究现状以及写作目的；第二部分写爱伦坡生平，写作方式和其运用的象征主义的特点；第三部分描述了《黑猫》的创作背景以及关于人性扭曲的主题；第四部分具体阐述《黑猫》中象征主义的运用，各个意象所具有的含义；最后一部分是总结。

关键词：爱伦坡；恐怖小说；《黑猫》；象征主义

Abstract

Allan Poe is the father of short story in America, whose works include a variety of types. Meanwhile, he is also a pioneer of the modern detective novel and the modern science fiction, especially famous for gothic novel, which is representative for horror themes and accepted by more and more readers around the world. His particular writing skill has drawn much attention from many scholars coming from different countries to further analysis and research. Black Cat is not only a short horror fiction but also it is one of his famous representatives. This essay will discuss Poe’s classic story—Black Cat, analyzing how he makes the best use of symbolism and the images he creates, like two black cats, the white splotch of the second cat and their missing eyes. Through analyzing these images, it can help readers better understand his great writing techniques via the study of the main characters in the fiction and his thesis, which is about abnormal psychology and the importance of humanity. The first part mainly introduces Allan Poe, his research’s situation in China and the task of this thesis; the second part writes about his life experience, writing style and features of symbolism; the third part discusses the background of Black Cat and its theme of humanity; the next part specifically elaborates the symbolism in Black Cat and the deep meaning that every image has; the last part is conclusion.

Key Words: Edgar Allen Poe; Horror fiction; Black Cat; Symbolism

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literary theory of Edgar Allan Poe 3

2.1 Life experience and writing style 3

2.2 Features of symbolism 4

3. Black Cat 5

3.1 Background 5

3.2 Theme of the story 6

4. Symbolism in Black Cat 8

4.1 Images—black cats 8

4.1.1 The first black cat—a lure to crime 8

4.1.2 The second black cat—repentance and guilt 9

4.2 Other images. 10

4.2.1 The splotch of white hairs—external restriction 10

4.2.2 The cat’s eyes—mirror of humanity 11

5. Conclusion 13

References 14

Acknowledgements 15

Symbolism in Black Cat

1 Introduction

Allan Poe is a pioneer of American Horror Tales and American Detective Tales. Although his literary theory and technique made him unique at that time, his works didn’t get attention from others until 20th century and he was not popular with readers in American literature at that time. Allen Poe’s works, no matter his novels or his poems, are full of the death’s atmosphere, which implies his love for death to an extreme extent. In fact, his unique view of death provide people a deeper understanding and awareness, he exhausted his whole life to seek the beauty of death. From his aspect, death is just an aesthetic form, in his works, death sometimes sounds melancholy, sometimes turns mysterious, sometimes even feels hopeless but sometimes sounds extremely romantic. All of these forms show readers different experiences and different aesthetic feeling of death.

In China, there exists some academic papers about Allen Poe’s poems, novels and his critics. From the aspect of poems, people mainly discuss his famous poem like Raven and they intend to emphasize its theme of death. There are also many researches about his novels, some searches for his novel’s theme and some put the research in a particular tradition or background to further analyze social influence. On the whole, because the spread of Allen Poe’s interpretations are late in China, Chinese researchers don’t follow Poe’s tradition and pay much attention to the value of his works. They start from the second stage, following with foreign researchers, and begin to use psychoanalysis to further analyze Allan Poe’s works. We can see that he expresses his dissatisfaction to the world through his works by mainly depicting the darkness and death. In the meantime, Poe reveals the dark side of human’s subconsciousness and tries to catch the beauty in odious thing. Appreciating death has gradually become his unique way to pursue aesthetic goal in order to wake up the people’s desire for brightness and beauty in this filthy and realistic world.

The task of this thesis is supposed to further probe the symbolism in one of his representative works—Black Cat. Poe uses many symbols to achieve the effect of horror and these symbols reflect the culture and social background of his times and his values, recording his own tragic life, all of which helped him stir the soul of his readers. According to his own literary theory, Poe tried every means to use the least words to achieve the best horrible effect. So further analyzing the symbolism is a necessary and important step to have a comprehensive understanding of Black Cat.

2 Literary theory of Edgar Allan Poe

Allen Poe’s theory and creation exert great influence to French Symbolism, his work Poetry Creation Principle maintains to oppose the sermon and address the aesthetics, it can be regarded as the theoretical origin of symbolism. Poe’s short stories are also called as “the drama of symbolism”. By using typical description of the atmosphere and the plot and by applying special symbols, Poe created a striking artistic effect of honor. As is universally acknowledged by the western critics, like realism, symbolism can be understood only after the true meaning of the symbols revealed. To interpret and evaluate the symbolism in Poe’s Black Cat, we should not be restricted to the plot of the story: instead we need to take every single image into consideration.

2.1 Life experience and writing style

George Bernard Shaw has ever said:” there are two great writers in America—Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain.” What he says confirms that Allen Poe is an influential litterateur in America in the 19th century. In his life, he has contributed himself into writing novels as well as poems which play important role in propelling American Romanticism. Allen Poe(1809-1849) is a famous American writer, literary critic and poet, and he is considered one of the most distinguished writers in the 19th century.

Poe once had a tough life, his father ran away from home in 1810 and his mother died one year later so he was brought up by his foster father – John Allen, who sometimes made a fuss of Poe and sometimes disciplined him. For the reason of debt, Allen Poe gradually distanced himself from his foster father as he grew up, as a result, he couldn’t afford tuition and dropped out of school, then, he became a soldier. Allen Poe’s career as a professional author began after his finish of military life and brother’s death. He tried his best to pursue success but the time he began to write is not the appropriate time, it’s a time when publishers always pirated British writers’ works and didn’t pay well for American writers or delayed submission fee. For instance, Raven, which is one of his famous works, only earned him 9 dollars. After Poe’s early enthusiasm to poems, he gradually turned his center to novels, his representative works include The Tell-tale Heart, Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold Bug, and so on.

2.2 Features of symbolism

Symbolism is an art movement of French in the 19^th century, its context is full of mysticism and it is always used to describe the unseen delusion. What the author who uses this skill wants to elaborate is not the objective world but the inner world of protagonist. As a specific school of literary trend, symbolism is originated in the 1880s at first and mainly in the creative realm of poetry and drama. From the 1890s, symbolism was spreaded to Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain and many other countries. In the 1920s, it became one of the most influential schools of literary and artistic trend in the world. The French poet Paul Verlaine and the American post Edger Allen Poe are the pioneers of symbolism. It can be distinguished into early and late symbolism. The representatives of early symbolism are Stephan Mallarme, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. William Butler Yeats, T.S Eliot are representatives of late symbolists. There are differences between early symbolism and late symbolism. On the one hand, the early symbolism always implies something that is simple and sole, the connection between image and its implication is clear, and the late symbolism is full of much more imagination and connation, symbolic images are complex. On the other hand, the early symbolism concentrates on emotion, readers can see the development of author’s abundant emotional world by corresponding and insinuation, and the late symbolism is inclined to reason, aiming at the reasonable exploration to art, life and philosophy.

The symbolists think that symbolism is based on the implication and association, it is different from romanticism, which contends direct expression of feeling, besides, it is not the same as realism that portrays the object vividly and concretely. Symbolism attracts people’s attention from the external material world to the inner spiritual world. The way it portrays the mental world is using the method of implication, that is implying the theme, the object, the feeling by just saying the tip of the iceberg, and the rest is to be left for readers to reckon and images if they are not only reading but also creating the world that the author tries to establish. The author uses symbolism to make an utmost effort to evade preaching and general description, on the contrary, he tries his best to create specific images to make readers better understand his ideas.

3. Black Cat

Black Cat is Allen Poe’s famous novel, which mainly discusses man’s fear toward a black cat. It tells a story about a man, who gradually gets into bad habits-intemperance, pokes out his cat’s eyes and then hangs it to death. With the feeling of repent, he adopts another cat that just has one eye for self-confession. But, as time goes by, he has gradually lost his patience and love towards cat, at the time when he is stumbled by that stupid cat, he picks up ax to kill the cat. What beyond his expectation is that his wife tries to protect this poor cat and dies under his ax. The man uses pise to cover his wife’s body by building a new layer of wall in his cellar without attention that the black cat is also piled into the wall. When the police check in the cellar, they can’t find his wife’s body, it is black cat’s whine that makes the truth come out in the wash.

3.1 Background

Black Cat is one of the most famous novels written by Allen Poe, not only for the reason that it brings readers strong visual impact, but also the theme that contains deep thought for humanity and destiny. In the process of creating the short novel, Allen Poe is succeed in using symbolism to enhance theme incisively and vividly.

The protagonist who is addicted to whine has already been swallowed by capitalist society and the black cat, as a judge, has been watching the protagonist’s change for the whole process. Actually, the protagonist indeed distastes his change of temper, every time when he sees black cat, as if it is a reflection of himself who intends to be more vicious and wicked step by step. So, he bears an attitude of aversion and dread toward that cat, just like a disfigured woman start to be sick of mirror, when she can not get rid of mirror, she will smash it even if her action might hurt herself. The protagonist is as same as that woman, he digs out the black cat’s eye because he doesn’t want to look himself through the cat’s eyes and he hangs it for the reason that he can no longer bear the repent of hurting that cat.