Vincent Buranelli says, "even though Poe is often looked upon as a gifted psychopath who is describing with consummate artistry his personal instabilities and abnormalities, the fact remains that his superiority is more than a matter of art. There is a violent realism in his macabre writings unequaled by the Americans who worked in the same genre." It is in four of these macabre writings that the human perversion is defined as a driving force, and symbolically if not directly exposed to our senses. An evil act is just that, evil. To do evil unto others just for the sake of evil however, is perverse, as can be observed in Poe's stories.
"The Black Cat" is a psychological study of domestic violence and guilt, however this story does not deal with calculated murder. The reader is told that the narrator appears to be a happily married man, who has always been exceedingly kind and gentle. The disturbed speaker attributes his downfall to the "Fiend Intemperance" (p.12) and "the spirit of perverseness." (p.13) Perversion, he believes, is ".one of the primitive impulses of the human heart." (p.13) "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action for no other reason than because he knows he should not?" (p.13) Perversion provides the rationale for otherwise unjustifiable acts, such as killing the first cat or rapping with his cane upon the plastered-up wall behind which stood his wife's corpse ".already greatly decayed and clotted with gore." (p.20).
One might argue that what the narrator calls perversion is actually conscience. Guilt about his alcoholism seems to the narrator the perversion, which causes him to maim and kill the first cat. Guilt about those actions indirectly leads to the murder of his wife who had shown him the gallows on the second cat's breast. The disclosure of the crime is caused by a warped sense of triumph and the conscience of the murderer.