Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat and The Tell Tale Heart are the first of his stories that are psychological studies of domestic violence and guilt (Silverman 205). Both written in first person narrative, they are stories of mad men.. who say they aren't.. and then proceed to do things that prove them totally mad
             Poe's characters often represent one degree or another of movement towards archetypal condition; the survival of the soul in a dead body (Tate 185). This is especially seen in the old man in The Tell Tale Heart. In The Black Cat metempsychosis is a key feature; the transmigration of the soul from one body to another. In this case it is the soul from Pluto's dead body that is transferred into the body of the new cat.
             The return of the dead is a supernatural belief, often it is not the case that the dead actually returns rather it is the mind of the person playing with their emotions and thoughts. This is seen quite clearly in The Tell Tale Heart which I will discuss later, the return of the repressed is seen in The Black Cat.
             Poe always had a leading visual symbol within his works, the evil eye in The Tell Tale Heart and the black cat image and gallows in The Black Cat ( Tate 185). These visual symbols are often the key to the story. If Poe's stories were ever to be made into visual texts these symbols would help to create the images of the story, as he often went into quite a lot of detail concerning them.
             Before we can look at the return of the dead within these tales it is necessary to examine the events that led up to the deaths, as well as the circumstances in which the dead were discovered.
             We begin with the narrator insisting that he is not mad, "True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"(1572) By beginning with this statement he draws attention to his madness, whereas if he had said n...