Berenice

The beginning of the story establishes the question of whether good can become the cause for evil, which Poe develops by depicting the narrator’s decline into obsessive behavior. Both the affection that Egæus feels for his fiancée and the beauty of her perfect teeth would typically be depicted as positive aspects of the text. However, both elements provoke horror and grief due to the features of Berenice’s physical disease and Egæus’s mental health condition. Egæus defines his obsession as debilitating, demonstrating that his ability to focus on a single object for a long period of time is not beneficial to him as a scholar, nor is it an enjoyable daydream. Too much attention on any single feature of the world, this suggests, can turn even beauty into something revolting.

The narrator’s fixated attention to Berenice objectifies her body, revealing that Egæus’s attraction to her is an unhealthy fascination, not a genuine romance. When Berenice falls ill, her epileptic trances transform her into an inanimate object; she becomes so indistinguishable from a corpse that she is accidentally buried alive. This inanimate quality seems to particularly interest Egæus, who never loved her when she was an active and beautiful woman. He sees her “not as a thing to admire, but to analyze” (334). The prose often personifies Berenice’s body parts, rather than showing how she is acting or feeling. For example, when she smiles at Egæus, he notes that “the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view,” ascribing agency to the teeth rather than to his fiancée (334). After Egæus starts to obsess over Berenice’s teeth, he claims, “I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power” (335), ascribing more human qualities to the teeth than he ever did to the full woman.

Poe juxtaposes the disease that infects Berenice with Egæus’s mental illness, portraying both as depersonalizing experiences. When Berenice first experiences her epileptic trance, the narrator remarks that it seems to change everything about her, “disturbing even the very identity of her person” (333). Egæus’s own disease begins to grow at the same time, although he admits that it is “aggravated in its symptoms by the immoderate use of opium” (333). Opium is a drug known to induce trancelike effects similar to those Berenice experiences. It can cause a person to appear still or even lifeless and distort their sense of time. During Egæus’s meditations, he “lose[s] all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in” (333). His lack of bodily motion and awareness mirrors Berenice’s trances and the condition of the body during death. This dehumanizing loss of animacy and identity during both physical and mental illness foreshadows Berenice’s being buried alive. These descriptions of trances imply that illness puts the body into a state so close to that of a corpse that it is nearly impossible to discern whether the person truly died.

The most prominent setting in this story is the library of Egæus’s family estate. Egæus was born there, thus establishing that he will always be drawn to the world of imagination, rather than of reality. He claims that it is not particularly unique to have “loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie” but argues “it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers—it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life” (333). This stagnation is the cause of his inversion of reality and fantasy, and, thus, is the implied root of his disease. As in many works of Gothic literature, the ancient aristocracy appears to be so shackled to the past that it enters a state of disordered thinking and decay.

Egæus’s intellectual pursuits in the library are also shown to be stagnant and lacking meaningful progress. He relates that during his fixated periods of study, he obsessed over a line from the third-century text De Carne Christi by the theologian Tertullian: “Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est” (334). This line can be translated as follows: “The Son of God died; it is credible because it is unfitting: and he was buried and rose again; it is certain, because it is impossible.” Egæus describes these lines as “unintelligible” and claims that decoding and interpreting them “occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation” (334). For Poe, who was raised in a Christian society, this quote from Tertullian represents an effort to convey the miracle of Christ’s resurrection. Egæus, however, ironically fails to recognize this as a miracle or grasp the context, instead viewing the words as paradoxical and confusing. The resurrection of Christ foreshadows Egæus’s creation of a sacrilegious literal reenactment of this biblical moment later when he unburies Berenice. The text condemns Egæus’s intellectual work as a failure that reflects his fixation on physical and literal details while failing to understand broader meanings.

This notion is brought to full conclusion in the story’s final scene when the narrator fails to recognize the obvious physical signs that he was the one who disinterred Berenice and that he extracted her teeth to satisfy his unhealthy obsession. After his lapse in memory, Egæus notices the box and the book of poetry on his table, but he cannot make the connection between the evidence and the action. He asks several rhetorical questions, wondering “How came it there upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for” (335). These final paragraphs rely upon ambiguity and dramatic irony, a literary device in which information is clear to the reader but not to the characters. Although the narration makes Egæus’s actions obvious, the narrator never understands or acknowledges them. When the teeth finally fall to the floor, Egæus calls them “white and glistening substances” (336), rather than recognizing them as teeth. He is observant and able to perceive the correct details, but he is unable to turn that sensory input into a meaningful interpretation of events.