If you have ever read “The Eyes of the Panther,” you know that there is little that I can say about it without giving away Bierce’s hallmark twist ending, but I can – without much fear of spoiling the plot – note that it is yet another story which involves familicide, distrust between partners, and mankind’s barely repressed animal nature. One of Bierce’s best and most frequently anthologized supernatural tales, it may have been influenced by earlier tales of a similar nature such as Coleridge’s “Christabel,” Frederick Marryat’s “The White Wolf,” E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Vampire,” "The Empty House," "Councillor Krespel," "The Lost Reflection," and “Mlle. de Scuderi,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia,” “Metzengerstein,” “The Black Cat,” and “Morella,” Le Fanu’s “Carmilla,” Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan," and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “John Barrington Cowles,” among many others. It would go on to profoundly influence the Edwardian generation’s supernatural writers and continues to be cited as an influence in modern horror fiction. At its root is the theme of innate nature: is it possible for an early influence to predestine the course of a person’s life? Is it possible for our will to be dominated by our inclinations – our nurturing destroyed by our nature? And if this is so, what hope have we as a species of overcoming our baser instincts?
SUMMARY
The story opens with two melancholy lovers sitting on a bench in the woods. They are both striking: the man has “the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate—a man at whom one would look again” and while the woman – lithe and attractive – is beautiful, it is her engrossing, grey, feline eyes that dominate her appearance, “den[ying] attention to all else.” The man is an up-and-coming rural attorney named Jenner Brading, and the woman is Irene Marlowe, the daughter of a prematurely-aged widower who had helped settle the area decades earlier when it was raw woodland.
Their melancholy is due to Brading’s proposal, which Irene has just rejected. Barding responds with sorrow, then anger, but settles down when Irene explains that she doesn’t want to marry because of her own suspected insanity. Since she is graceful and sensible, Brading is confused, but Irene explains that the trouble is rooted in the trauma surrounding her mother’s death and her tragic birth.
Many years ago – when the territory between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains was still mostly wild woodland prowled by savage animals – her parents lived in a log cabin far from any town or neighbors, deep in the wilderness. Her father was a practical, unimaginative woodsman and her mother was an impressionable romantic. One day he announced that he would be going hunting for game, and she begged him to stay home because she had suffered from a troubling dream and was overwhelmed with forebodings. The father laughed off her worries and left the woman and his baby girl home alone.
His wife waited up for him, long into the night, and supper went cold before she fell asleep with a candle burning in the single window. As she slept, she had a terrible dream that her daughter was dead and her husband gone, that she was in a room with bars on the windows and a heavy door that never opened.
Shocked from her sleep, she is horrified to see that there are now two small flames guttering in the window, but that the candle has burned itself out: they are the watchful eyes of a panther (a North American cougar) with its paws on the sill and its gaze fixed on the mother and child. Shivering in terror, she imagines the agony of the coming attack – the weight of its paws and the pain of its teeth on her throat, the mangling of the baby. She clutches the child to her chest and waits for death…
Meanwhile, Marlowe returns with a deer carcass but finds no one to meet him and the window ominously open with no lights on. He climbs in, through the window, and stumbles upon his wife, whose menacing laughter – that of a lunatic – reminds him of asylum chains. He reaches out to her in concern, and she hands him the body of their daughter – smothered in her mother’s protective clutches.
Irene ends her narrative here, although Bierce significantly warns us: "That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her..."
Her story confuses Brading, especially as he had assumed that she was the baby who (he now realizes) died that night, but Irene explains that her mother was six months pregnant at the time: the baby was her older sister, and she – Irene – was born three months later (presumably in a madhouse). Her insane mother died in childbirth and she has been raised by her heartbroken, prematurely-aged father. Although she shows no signs of insanity, she is sure that it was passed onto her in the trauma of her mother’s fear and sorrow, and doesn’t want to pass it on to a third generation. How, she asks, could someone born under such conditions possibly avoid being blemished by mental illness?
He tries to argue this point – convinced that her mother’s fertile imagination was overstimulated by popular legends about panthers’ eyes being seen glowing through windows at night – but Irene suddenly rises and runs off into the woods. As he watches her, he sees what appears to be a pair of glowing eyes watching him from the darkness, and runs after Irene to warn her that a panther must be in the vicinity – he even thinks he sees its lithe body loping between the trees – but when he arrives at her father’s house, she is there in one piece with no sign of a mountain lion to be found.
Several nights later, he is sleeping in his own rustic cabin. He is eccentric in several ways: although he is a lawyer and rents a fashionable apartment in town, he often sleeps in this remote shack because the land belongs to him and he views it as a symbol of his independence. Not only this, but – in spite of the threat of wild animals and burglars – he prefers to sleep in a room on the ground floor with the window open. To fend off these possible threats, he always keeps a loaded revolver by his side.
On this dark night, Brading wakes up to the horrifying sight that drove Mrs. Marlowe to madness: two glowing red eyes peering at him from the other side of his open, ground-floor window. In the darkness he is vaguely aware that they seem to be moving forward, then up – over the sill – and into his room with him. Brave and stoic, he refuses to cry out for help, but instead smoothly reaches for his pistol and fires into the eyes.
Three passing travelers rush to the cabin, alerted by the sound of the shot and by “the wild, high scream of the panther, so human in sound, so devilish in suggestion.” They find Brading dressing himself, and in eager pursuit of the animal which fled the room in spite of its wounds. Using a lantern, they track it through the wet grass into the dark woods, where one of the men slips in what proves to be a horrifying quantity of blood, which they trace through the underbrush into a small clearing where they find the attacker’s body.
“But it was no panther.” Without further elaboration, Bierce grimly states that the rest is told “upon a weather-worn headstone in the village churchyard, and for many years was attested daily at the graveside by the bent figure and sorrow-seamed face of Old Man Marlowe.” He concludes his story by wishing “peace and reparation” upon the souls of the miserable old man “his strange, unhappy child.”
ANALYSIS
Probably America’s earliest, most influential werewolf story, “The Eyes of the Panther” promotes Bierce’s own deeply held convictions about the hopelessness of human aspirations and the unflinching dominance of the animal over the spiritual. Despite Irene’s noblest intentions, she is ruled by her nature, and her will – determined as it might be – is overwhelmed by her beastly essence. Unlike many werewolves in literature, Irene is werewolf by birth, not by choice or even by accident, (further highlighting Bierce’s philosophy on humanity’s inborn depravity), and this adds a deeper metaphysical dimension to the story’s moral. Earlier female werewolves and vampires (cf. Hoffmann’s “The Vampire” and Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”) also seemed to be less evil and more genetically doomed, which is the track Bierce takes in his story.
Naturally, a certain level of misogyny – whether actual or inferred – plagues the story about a woman being irrevocably shackled to her mother’s experiences, but this treatment isn’t singular to females in Bierce’s deeply misanthropic works: his men are equally damned by their natures. Nonetheless, there is certainly room in this story for a feminist analysis, and its narrative seems to be unquestionably interested in the experiences of women. For one thing, while Irene believes that her “insanity” was caused by the wild emotion felt by her mother in the lead-up to her birth, the other, obvious interpretation of her unrestrainable nature is that her mother was raped by the "panther" (who would then be interpreted as a were-panther, himself, not just a ravenous mountain cat), and that Irene was sired by the shapeshifter. This is alluded to in Irene’s appearance, dress, and behavior, which is notably feline in nature, even down to the cat-like color of her gown and her mysterious, intuitive personality.
II.
A natural and very sensible rejection of this admittedly sensational claim is that Irene was born three months after the death of her sister, but this is what she tells her lover, and – as Bierce informs us in an easy-to-miss but critical aside – she herself doesn’t know all the pertinent details of that horrible night: “That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her” [emphasis mine]. The solution to this chronological conundrum lies in the identity of Mrs. Marlowe’s abuser: Marlowe himself. Arguably, Bierce even attempts to prime our suspicions by having Marlowe climb into his cabin through the window, as if to betray himself through the ease with which he follows the panther’s habits and inclinations. While hardly definitive, the following speculations should be treated seriously:
1. That Mrs. Marlowe was physically and/or sexually assaulted by her husband who had snuck back, incognito, under the cover of dark in order to give vent to his repressed animalism.
2. That Irene was either the product of that traumatic assault (and the chronology of her conception hidden from her) or conceived normally enough but traumatized in utero by her mother’s agony notwithstanding.
3. That her father made up the story of the panther to muddy the truth of their shared, violent nature – a truth that forced itself into consciousness as her predatory tendencies began expressing themselves in her own budding, aggressive sexuality.
4. And that her violent death is a coded, divine punishment visited upon the daughter of her mother’s rapist (cf. “the sins of the father will be visited upon the children”).
This plays into Brading’s own suspicions that the story about the panther is fishy – too perfect, too literary, too folkloric. He even refers to it as a “yarn” – a tall-tale told to entertain. His intuition may be correct, although he never suspects the father of being the fabricator, blaming, instead, the “fanciful” mother.
III.
The supernatural nature of Irene’s affliction is therefore very much left open to debate (the only real evidence that any panther or shapeshifter (rather than, say, a creepy peeping tom) are the two instances of glowing eyes (eyes which might be gleaming with reflected moonlight) and Irene’s (possibly coincidental) feline characteristics. Whether supernatural or psychopathic, Mrs. Marlowe’s attacker has infused her daughter’s life with anxiety and fear which ultimately sublimate and express themselves in violence. Finally, it should be noted that there are myriad parallels between father and daughter which suggest that the unknown person could even arguably be Marlowe himself, hiding a deviant personality (just like Irene) which directs its rage at his own partner (just like Irene) shortly after he has disappeared into the Freudian forest (just like Irene) – significantly the same direction from which the were-panther emerges.
It may be that Irene’s curse – be it paranormal or psychiatric – has been inherited from the man she calls “father.” Read thus, Irene – who lives alone with her predatory father in their remote, woodland cabin – may be easily interpreted as both a student of her father’s psychopathy and another potential victim. And, indeed, this is the strongest evidence of all that Marlowe is a guilty party: it is perfectly consistent with Bierce’s all-time favorite trope – the doomed, dysfunctional family characterized by simmering abuse that culminates in explosive violence.
IV.
If there is a feminist message to be gleaned this story, it actually might be that violence towards women begets violent women: that monstrosities breed monsters, and that the cycle of sexual violence doesn’t end with rape – it brings new, vicious life into the world. The idea of females’ innate animalism (long-repressed by society, but lurking beneath the surface, waiting to express itself in sexual revenge) worked itself into many stories of the time. Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” written just before “Eyes,” is about a woman raped by a supernatural monster, who gives birth to a strange girl with a penchant for traumatizing men with her sexual libertinism, spawning a rash of suicides. Machen would revisit the theme of supernatural sex breeding hybrid bastards in stories like “The White People” and “The Black Seal.” Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries” told of a race of were-cats living in France, and H. P. Lovecraft’s Machen-inspired “Dunwich Horror” involves the grotesque hybrid of a human-monster rape and his plan to dominate humanity by summoning his alien father forth. All of these stories, along with Bierce’s, explore the timeless battle between self-civilization and humanity’s vulgar nature – between our spiritual aspirations to better ourselves and our animalistic drive to feel pleasure and freedom.