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Biographical Criticism:
This approach begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by real people, and that understanding the author's life helps readers better understand the work. It often provides a convenient way for the reader to better understand the text. However, biographical critics must be careful not to introduce too much biographical facts about the writer's life when criticizing the author's work.[2]
Biographical critics focus their descriptions of literary works using the insights provided by their knowledge of the author's life. Biographical data should reinforce the meaning of the text and not drown it out with irrelevant material.[3]
Historical Criticism:
This approach seeks to understand literary works by examining the social, cultural and intellectual contexts that gave rise to them. This context necessarily includes the artist's biography and the original reader's environment.
According to the Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature:
The 4th edition historical-biographical approach is defined as an approach that views literary works as primarily, if not exclusively, reflections of the life and times of their authors or the lives and times of their characters. Yes (Guerin, 22). An understanding of the social structure and way of life of a particular era allows readers to draw conclusions and gain a larger knowledge base for a better understanding of history. Discovering details about the author's life and times provides similar opportunities to advance ideas about the story.[4]
Literary Review
“The Black Cat” bears close similarities with the story of the “The Tell-Tale Heart” in that it begins with an unnamed narrator who has been apprehended for murder and who insists that he cannot be insane before he begins an account of a murder that he committed. Unlike “The Tell-Tale Heart,” however, we have a man who is aware of the transformation in himself that has led him to become a murderer, although he cannot totally explain it, and we even have a potential cause for his insanity in the form of alcohol. Whereas the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart” explains his case for murder as if his logic were obvious and inevitable, the narrator of “The Black Cat” is on some level aware of his unreasonableness, although he chooses to ignore it and succumb to the baser human emotions of perversity and hatred.[5]
One aspect of the narrator's personality that he shares with several of Poe's characters is that despite his overall lack of normal ethics and good judgment, he uses some reason and logic to avoid admissions of his mental abnormality. In particular, when he sees the image of his cat on the one remaining wall of his house after it burns down, he tries to ignore superstition and offer a reasonable, scientific explanation for its existence. Ironically, the only superstitious member of his family is his wife, who has always shown steadfast moral character despite her husband's abuse and debauchery. Since in "The Telling Heart" the primary evidence of the narrator's sanity is his reason, the contrast between husband and wife in "Black Cat" suggests that the difference between a a normal mind and an unhealthy mind is an unhealthy mind. uses logic to explain what a normal mind would intuitively understand. Instead of allowing himself to use his wits to figure out the possible meaning of the cat painting on the wall, he convinces himself of a scientific explanation to avoid thinking about his guilt. [6]
The narrator specifically speaks of a perverted psyche combined with his alcoholism to provide the impetus for his transformation into a killer. He is particularly enthusiastic about why he hanged his cat, Pluto, when he realizes his guilt and even feels a little guilty. It comes from the lack of guilt in killing his wife and the actual act of burying the ax in her skull. His claim that perversion is "one of the primal impulses of the human mind" has been questioned as to its madness, but at the same time the story leaves us questioning the truth of his claim. On the one hand, he claims to have been his former innocent personality, but perversion may seem natural to the narrator simply because he was already into it. On the other hand, he may be right in saying that perversion exists in everyone but only amplifies it within him.[7]
In many ways, Black Cat is a moral tale, exploring the tension between love and hate and warning of the dangers of alcohol. It seems, but by the end of the story his affection turned to disregard, malice and even hatred, especially for Pluto and his successors. Although unable to provide an explanation, suggesting that perhaps anyone could go insane at any moment, the narrator acknowledges the role of alcohol in his behavior. It is closely related to his alcoholism, as he first found the cat in a seedy drinking establishment. The second cat ultimately acts as a mediator of justice when she reveals the corpse's hiding place at the end of the story, and her first appearance over a barrel of gin or rum makes her Moral purpose is emphasized.[8]
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