The Black-Cat Analogy

“The Black Cat” by Aubrey Beardsley, 1894-1895. Illustrations of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

A distinction between figurative and literal analogies is sometimes made by teachers of rhetoric, but we are better served to think of analogy as an intersection of the figurative and literal from which a healing insight might emerge.  The telling of a fanciful story can help to refigure a perilous reality to which we have become inured.  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is just such a story when it is read as a figurative analogy to a troubled actuality.