Yunhong Li
FIQWS 10001 &10100
Prof. Alyssa & Prof. Elizbeth
11/15/2019
A Draft & Outline of Critical Researched Essay
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites”, the two unnamed narrators can represent anyone. The authors don’t use a name in order to avoid limiting the audience’s imagination. The two unnamed narrators imply that a person is often influenced by those people around him or her in society. The narrators unconsciously care about what other people think and do about them, and this is reflected and proved in their actions, words, and thoughts. The two unnamed narrators both experienced some traumas in their lives from their family members and social groups. Their experiences are similar to most people in today’s society. In “The Black Cat” and “Eight Bites”, the Freudian concepts of displacement and condensation center on the two anonymous narrators’ individual desires to belong in society and highlight their perceptions of the traumas and pressures they experience from the people around them as their societies shape their sense of self.
One example of a character reacting to pressure and trauma from is when, in “The Black Cat”, the narrator displaces the negative emotions he has experienced in life on the cat and his wife. Poe uses the first-person point of view, telling the story from the perspective of the unnamed narrator. In the story, the unnamed narrator is gentle and kind. He loves animals. But when he was a child, other kids made fun of him, thinking he is a coward (Poe 3). [you need a sentence here to note that this is about the social pressure to be a certain kind of boy] The kids’ ridicule causes the narrator to unconsciously begin to care about others’ opinions. That may be why he wants to kill the cat to prove he is not afraid of killing any living thing. Gradually, he realizes that his long association with animals keeps him away from people. But the narrator represses the feeling of dissatisfaction.
Until the narrator becomes an adult, it’s increasingly clear to him how vulnerable is the relationship between people. As the narrator says in the story, “There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man” (Poe 4). These words reveal the narrator experienced weak and terrible friendship with others who hurt him. In the article “ ‘I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity’: Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ ”, Kelly argues “the narrator describes his early experiences of intense emotional pleasure with his domesticated animals within the context of social alienation from his peers… presents the narrator’s emotional life as one of the solitary pleasures, raising questions about his gender identity, his moral sensibility, and his mental sanity” (Kelly 87). Kelly claims the childhood experiences caused the narrator to transfer his anger toward his pets. The narrator’s “social alienation from his peers” is the trauma he suffers. Afterward, the alcohol awakens those bad feelings and experiences in the narrator’s unconscious mind and leads him to kill his cat and wife.
For “Eight Bites”, the narrator is lack of security that makes her try to pander to the masses. She represses her true self, imposes the aesthetic standards of others on herself. In the story, the unnamed narrator wants to be thinner. She has a strict diet, follows her mother’s idea of eight bites. This idea symbolizes the unnamed narrator’s belief. She believes her mother is right. Eating less is self-restraint.
Society influence: how society defines women’s beauty, women get pressure from society because people think slim is beauty. Women who are fat will be treated differently, be discriminated against. (thinking about how many women want to do cosmetic surgery to improve their appearance)
