No Room To Swing A Cat: The Black Cat

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Gothic storytelling is a fiction genre with a combination of horror, sex, and romance. Gothic fiction has been around for centuries, because it learned to adapt to current social, political and economic events. Since the birth of gothic storytelling, authors have always wrote about current events and related them in their stories for everyone to read and relate. We have stories from colonial, and post-colonial times. These stories reflect on issues that were occurring in their current societies. Stories related to wars, the aftermath of wars, racial and sexual tensions. Centuries later, gothic story tellers have not changed much at all. Their method of exploiting the latest issues through gothic story telling has kept the genera alive. Although …show more content…

He does not clearly state if it was a slave, or even if he was for, or against slavery. However, the cat being black and later hung from a tree, clearly illustrates it was a slave. Poe was inspired to write this story because of the Nat Turner Rebellion that occurred on August 23, 1831. In the article “No Room to Swing a Cat: Edgar Allan Poe’s Antislavery Satire.” Tychy States, “Without wishing to unnecessarily speculate on the best way to kill a cat, one suggests that hanging is not the easiest method of dispatching such a creature, and that a noose, a black victim, and a histrionic master were ultimately cited to remind Poe’s readers of the Turner rising and its appalling aftermath” (Tychy). Tychy informs us on why Poe wrote this story was to issue not a warning, but address what might occur if slaves were to rebel once again. Poe was great at deviously inputting current political and social events in his writing, and one person inspired by him was Oscar …show more content…

For example, Oscar Wilde was a gay man but kept it a secret his entire life. However, in his writing he implied a lot of homosexuality was taking place. This subject was off limits at the time, so he used writing to exploit it. Just as Poe, Wilde also sneakily inserted a lot of gay romance and passion between the different male characters in the novel. He used his Gothic fiction writing to address homosexuality existence. He never once openly said how the characters were infatuated by Dorian Gray, but he certainly implied it. In the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Wilde States, “I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal- to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.[...] Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the

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