ack Cat typified Poes life. His life was a total destruction. While Poe was an adult, he said that the fire that destroyed the Richmond Theater and killed seventy-two people also took the lives of his parents (Anderson 11-12). However, this is not true as his mother died of tuberculosis and his father abandoned his family and his death is unknown. Poe is thought to have said this primarily because this elucidation brings forth a dramatic light (Anderson 12) on his younger years (Anderson 12). The fire also symbolizes complete moral disintegration (Gargano 91). The only thing left after the fire was the wall with the portraiture (Gargano 91) of Pluto. The only thing that survived the conflagration would bedevil him by his ineradicable sin against his own nature (Gargano 91). In Edgar Allan Poes life everything that made him happy would be destroyed mostly from death.As an adult Poe is thought to have been impotent. The hanging of the cat in The Black Cat is used to symbolize the impotence of Poe (Hoffman 86).The hanging of the black cat comes next. Princess Bonaparte considers the hung cat to be not in fact the victim of the impenitent narrator, but the penis of the impotent author. The cat is so emphatically a wife-substitute, though , that I find it difficult to think it at the same time a penis-substitute. I prefer to think that hanging can represent female impotence as well as male, and that Poes mad narrator is displacing onto the surrogate for his wife, whose passion, whose clutching bites and embraces menace him, the impotence which he himself cannot escape (Hoffman 86).From Poes childhood we can determine the effect of his foster fathers inability to produce a baby on his sex life (Canby 144). If Mr. Krutchs theory of sexual impotence with a consequent singularity in his relations with women, still awaits more knowledge of Poes youth, it is sufficiently substantiated in his later life and work to serve as a handle fo...
