The Black Cat Transcendentalism Essay

Everyone is naturally good. No one is born evil, the society corrupts them. To be one with God, you must be one with nature. These are some of the beliefs of a philosophy called “Transcendentalism”. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t buy these beliefs. As he is the father of horror writing, and the most famous anti-transcendentalist, some of his opinions of the movement came out in his writing. The events of The Black Cat represents, in many ways, how people can be naturally evil. Thus, going against Transcendentalism. In this story, the narrator cuts out his beloved cat’s eye, and hangs it by the neck from a tree outside his home. As many could argue, especially transcendentalists, he was an alcoholic, and that was the blame for his behavior. He had been abusing his pets and wife for numerous nights as he was drunk, and his favorite cat, Pluto, led him to murder. But when the hanging happened, the narrator was in fact sober, proving that this heinous act was done all in his right state of mind. He wrote “ ...hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin—a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it, if such a thing were possible, even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and …show more content…
The act of hanging a cat and cutting its eye out very much contradicts the Transcendentalist philosophy that everyone is born naturally good. The narrator was aware of what he was doing, nothing was corrupting him completely do it against his will. The narrator’s murder of his wife with no remorse contradicts the Transcendentalist philosophy that everyone should be one with God, as he growing very far away from God with these acts. It is clear in this short story Edgar Allan Poe’s views on Transcendentalism were negative. There are always going to be rebels in society, it just depends on how they choose to rebel. It could be behind a pen and

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