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PARTISAN REVIEW
immediately follows: "What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the
beast," says the narrator-though, more truthfully, he might have
said, "what
caused
my hatred"-"was the discovery, on the morning
after I brought it home, that like Pluto, it also had been deprived
of one of its eyes." Thus, the chronology of events is respected, for
the son is first aware of the mother's milk (the white mark on the
cat's chest) and only later of the fact that it is castrated (has a miss–
ing eye). Similarly, and again in accord with Poe's life Pluto, for
"several years," was on friendly terms with its master before it, too,
suffered the loss of an eye. It is this missing eye which determines
both cats' fates, and it is in vain that the second proffers its milk–
stained breast in extenuation! The plea of the milk is powerless
against the castration indictment; the white stain cannot prevail
over the put-out eye. Nor is it wholly without reason that the cat's
owner flies from its odious presence "as from the breath of a pestil–
ence." In effect, castration, in the unconscious, may seem a sort of
contamination by the woman which would infect the man with her
"odiousness" as a castrated being.
The wife of our murderer, however, has no more reason to share
her husband's dread of the cat, than one syphilitic to fear contagion
by another. Both have the plague, and the cat's empty eye-socket, pos–
sibly because of their mutual misfortune, renders the cat yet dearer
to the wife.
"Nevertheless," continues the narrator, "with my aversion to
this cat ... its partiality for myself seemed to increase";
i.e.
J
the
mother who, once, nursed him at her bosom will go on loving him,
however he resist, and continue to plead in her defense. It followed
his footsteps, he says:
"with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader
comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or
spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses.
If
I
arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw
me down, or fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber,
in this manner, to my breast."
Thus the mother's tenderness for her child is once more inverted in the
manner familiar in dreams; it is the cat which treats its owner as the
infant does its mother, establishing itself under her chair, her feet, on
