The Eyes of the Panther

Plot summary

Jenner Brenning, a young rural attorney, finds himself dumbfounded when proposing to a woman, Irene Marlowe, who has clear affections for him yet she refuses based upon her belief that she is insane. When asked further about this, the woman explains. Long ago when Irene was in her mother's womb, her parents lived in cabin in a more rustic area with their first born. The father was a typical woodsman and regularly went out into the wild to hunt for food.

One day, when the father goes to head out, his wife beseeches him to stay for she portends something horrible will happen. The father assures her that he will be alright. Then, late at night a panther appears at the window scaring the mother. She clings her infant to her chest as she waits in terror. Eventually, the woodsman comes home to find his wife. While the panther did not do any harm, the baby was accidentally smothered to death. Irene was born several months after this but her mother died in the process of giving birth.

Jenner proceeds to elicit how this story constitutes Irene's being insane. She simply says that a person born under such circumstances must be clearly insane. The woman leaves at this point and the man believes he sees a panther. He runs after Irene but as she arrives at her house, Jenner can see no panther. Some night later, he finds a panther has crept into his room. He shoots it and it flees. When he and others pursue it by following the blood, they find not the dead beast, as might be expected, but Irene's body.

Analysis

"The Eyes of the Panther" is an early example of werewolf fiction featuring an innocent (rather than criminal) werewolf. Irene's condition is blamed on a kind of prenatal curse. The idea may be traced to Cardillac's prenatal curse in Mademoiselle de Scuderi, by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1819).

Bierce anticipates the surprise ending by highlighting Irene's "feline beauty" which made her so desirable to the attorney. She is described as "lithe", her eyes as "gray-green, long and narrow". She even wears "a gray gown with odd brown markings", reminiscent of a panther's skin.

S.T. Joshi suggests that Irene was killed by the protagonist out of revenge: "when Jenner sees the shining eyes at his window, he may be playing out some subconscious desire to kill" the woman who spurned his proposal. In other words, Jenner is insane and the werewolf motif is just a red herring.

Film adaptations

"The Eyes of the Panther" was adapted for the screen twice. One version was developed for Shelley Duvall's Nightmare Classics series and was released in 1989. It runs about 60 minutes. A shorter version was released in 2006 by director Michael Barton and runs about 23 minutes.

In 1930, Val Lewton was inspired by reading Bierce to write his own story about a Ukrainian panther woman, "The Bagheeta". It was published in Weird Tales the same year and was the germ for his 1942 film Cat People.