چکیده (انگلیسی):

The present essay focuses on the grotesque elements in Edgar Allan Poe’s the “Black Cat” and Horace Scudder’s “The
White Cat”. Poe’s story is highly embedded with a lot of grotesque elements from the beginning to the end. These
elements were presented through strange characters, mysterious happenings, and degradation through death. Poe
represents the struggle between the supernatural and the natural which he reinforces through the narrator who struggles
to commit wrongdoings. Even in the mist of trying to restrict himself, the narrator still does not know what he did. In
“The White Cat,” Scudder employs grotesque elements as well but his application is subtly done unlike Poe whose
application is more pronounced. The underlying meaning of this short story is on the spell of enchantment. However,
Scudder, like Poe, displays the supernatural events through the characters of the “fairies” who has magical power to
change the once a beautiful princess to a white cat. Grotesque includes absurd and bizarre elements and pierces the
conventional version of reality. However, in its ability to shock or offend, grotesque helps to expose the vulnerability in
human depicted via these absurd elements which will be explained in details in the present study.