SOURCE: "Fear and Trembling in Literature of the Fantastic: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat,'" in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 487-

In the following essay, Badenhausen focuses on "The Black Cat" to illustrate Poe's skill in eliciting a fearful, emotional response from the reader.

In an important article published in PMLA two decades ago, William Spanos discussed T. S. Eliot's incomplete verse drama Sweeney Agonistes in terms of existentialist theories about apprehending truth through a final encounter with death. Spanos pointed out that the events of Sweeney suggest "an action remarkably analogous to the movement from self-deception to authenticity that most existentialist philosophers describe as the archetypal life-journey of modern man" (8).¹ According to Heidegger's version of that experience, most individuals live "unauthentic" lives in which evasions of anxiety about death become the controlling action; only when confronted by extreme situations separating them from...