What led the narrator to kill his wife in "The Black Cat"?
The narrator of seems to blame the root of all his problems in "The Black Cat" on alcohol despite the fact that alcohol doesn't make most people suddenly abuse their loved ones. This inconsistency aside, it's drunkenness that the narrator says makes him abuse his animals until one day the abuse goes so far that he gouges out his cat's eye and kills it.
Soon after, another black cat appears who also, strangely, is missing an eye, and he adopts it to replace the one that he murdered. It's this cat who the narrator is too afraid to abuse (and who torments him) that he blames for his increasingly abusive behavior toward his wife. One day he tries to kill the cat (again?), but his wife defends it, and he kills her instead.
Your original question unfortunately contained more than one question, and so according to enotes regulations I have...
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had to edit it down to one question, focussing on why the narrator killed his wife.
Crucial to understanding this story is understanding the influence of the black cat on the narrator and how what he does to it and then the continual haunting of the black cat drives him ever madder and madder. The guilt he feels at having killed the first black cat, and then the arrival of the second cat that always haunts him drives him over the edge into insanity:
Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.
It is in the immediate paragraph following this that the narrator and his wife go down to the cellar. So angered by the presence of the black cat ever following him, the narrator tried to "aim a blow" at the cat with an axe. His wife stops him, and, in a moment of sheer madness and anger, he brains her.
Thus the narrator kills his wife because of the madness into which he has been driven thanks to the black cat and its continual, haunting presence around him, never giving him a moments peace.
In "The Black Cat," what earlier violence foreshadows the narrator's actions towards his wife?
I am assuming that you are referring Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat." The narrator explains that before his drinking problem, he had been a very nice man, amiable, with a fond love for animals. However, his drinking effected a pretty drastic change upon him; he became irritable and violent, lashing out at his pets, and even beating his wife. Any one of those acts might be a foreshadowing to the brutal murder that he later commits. One particular incident is when his black cat, Pluto, bites him as he grabs him violently. The narrator becomes incensed with rage, and without thinking,
"I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!"
Fortunately, the cat recovers from this incident, but the narrator showed his tendency to inflict severe harm in fits of rage. This foreshadows the later, much more dramatic fit of rage that later ends with his wife murdered. He laters hangs the cat, but this incident was done calmly, with "tears streaming" from his eyes, and not in a violent fit of anger, like with the original brutality--the original harm to the cat mimics more closely his state of mind when he kills his wife. Later, he takes an axe to the other cat that had followed him home one day--this raising of the axe could foreshadow what happened next:
"Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished."
Instead of killing the cat, however, as his wife tries to stop him, he turns on her and kills her instead. On the whole, given the narrator's tendency to have violent fits of anger and rage, and to beat his wife and torture his animals, the end result should not be as surprising as it could have been. I hope that helped; good luck!
In "The Black Cat," how does the husband kill his wife?
I had to edit your question down to one question according to enotes regulations. The brief answer to your question is that I would encourage you to read this excellent story - it is not long at all and is an excellent example of the craft and art of Poe in all of his gothic and psychological terror. However, to respond to your first question, the narrator's murder of his wife is clearly linked to the presence of the black cat, that drives the narrator into a murderous rage:
One day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I had wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.
So, in trying to kill and dispose of the continual haunting presence of the black cat, the narrator is stopped by his wife. Instinctively he is driven into a murderous anger and without thinking turns the axe on her, burying it deep into her head, and thus killing her.
Now, read the rest of the story to find the answer to your second question which I was unable to answer about where he hid the body!