"Berenice" is a short horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the

Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. The story follows a man named Egaeus
who is preparing to marry his cousin Berenice. He has a tendency to fall into
periods of intense focus during which he seems to separate himself from the
outside world. Berenice begins to deteriorate from an unnamed disease until the
only part of her remaining healthy is her teeth, which become the object of
Egaeus' obsession. Berenice is buried, and Egaeus continues to contemplate
her teeth. One day Egaeus wakes up from a period of focus with an uneasy
feeling, and the sound of screams in his ears. A servant startles him by telling
him Berenice's grave has been disturbed, and she is still alive; but beside
Egaeus is a shovel, a poem about "visiting the grave of my beloved" and a box
containing 32 blood-stained teeth.

Contemporary readers were horrified by the story's violence and complained to

the editor of the Messenger. Though Poe later published a self-censored
version of the work he believed he should be judged solely by how many copies
were sold.

Plot summary

The narrator, Egaeus, is a studious young man who grows up in a large gloomy
mansion with his cousin Berenice. He suffers from a type of obsessive disorder,
a monomania that makes him fixate on objects. She, originally beautiful, suffers
from some unspecified degenerative illness, with periods of catalepsy a
particular symptom, which he refers to as a trance. Nevertheless, they are due
to be married.

One afternoon, Egaeus sees Berenice as he sits in the library. When she
smiles, he focuses on her teeth. His obsession grips him, and for days he drifts
in and out of awareness, constantly thinking about the teeth. He imagines
himself holding the teeth and turning them over to examine them from all
angles. At one point a servant tells him that Berenice has died and shall be
buried. When he next becomes aware, with an inexplicable terror, he finds a
lamp and a small box in front of him. Another servant enters, reporting that a
grave has been violated, and a shrouded disfigured body found, still alive.
Egaeus finds his clothes are covered in mud and blood, and opens the box to
find it contains dental instruments and "thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking
substances" – Berenice's teeth.

The Latin epigraph, "Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,

curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas," at the head of the text may be translated
as: "My companions said to me, if I would visit the grave of my friend, I might
somewhat alleviate my worries."[1] This quote is also seen by Egaeus in an
open book towards the end of the story.

Analysis

In "Berenice", Poe was following the popular traditions of Gothic fiction, a genre
well-followed by American and British readers for several decades.[2] Poe,
however, made his Gothic stories more sophisticated, dramatizing terror by
using more realistic images.[3] This story is one of Poe's most violent. As the
narrator looks at the box which he may subconsciously know contains his
cousin's teeth, he asks himself, "Why... did the hairs of my head erect
themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my
veins?" Poe does not actually include the scene where the teeth are pulled out.
The reader also knows that Egaeus was in a trance-like state at the time,
incapable of responding to evidence that his cousin was still alive as he
committed the gruesome act. Additionally, the story emphasizes that all 32 of
her teeth were removed.

The main theme lies in the question that Egaeus asks himself: "How is it that
from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?" [4] Poe also uses a character
afflicted with monomania for the first time, a device he uses many times again. [3]

Teeth are used symbolically in many of Poe's stories to symbolize mortality.

Other uses include the "sepulchral and disgusting" horse's teeth in
"Metzengerstein", lips writhing about the teeth of the mesmerized man in "The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", and the sound of grating teeth in "Hop-
Frog".[5]
Egaeus and Berenice are both representative characters. Egaeus, literally born
in the library, represents intellectualism. He is a quiet, lonely man whose
obsession only emphasizes his interest on thought and study. Berenice is a
more physical character, described as "roaming carelessly through life" and
"agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy." She is, however, an oppressed
woman, having "spoke no word" throughout the story. Her only purpose, as with
many of Poe's female characters, is to be beautiful and to die.[6] Egaeus loses
his interest in the full person of Berenice as she gets sick; she becomes an
object to analyze, not to admire. He dehumanizes her by describing "the"
forehead of Berenice, rather than "her" forehead.[7]

Poe may have used the names of the two characters to call to mind the
conventions of ancient Greek tragedy. Berenice's name (which means "bringer
of victory") comes from a poem by Callimachus. In the poem, Berenice
promises her hair to Aphrodite if her husband returns from war safely. Egaeus
may come from Aegeus, a legendary king of Athens who had committed suicide
when he thought his son Theseus had died attempting to kill the Minotaur.[3]

The final lines of the story are purposely protracted using a series of
conjunctions connecting multiple clauses. The rhythm as well as the heavy
accented consonant and long vowels sounds helps unify the effect.[8]

Incidentally, this is one of the few Poe stories whose narrator is named.

Berenice – Allan Poe (Summary)

by Tattoo

Egaeus grew up in a mansion with gloomy, solitary temperament and poor

health. His favorite place is the library, place in which he was born and his
mother died. There, he waste his time absorbed in books and in misty
memories and meditations. Among his memories was Berenice, his cousin. She
grew up with him but she was cheerful, graceful and lively girl until a strange
nervous disease affected her, what terribly changed her temperament and look.
She became, a pale, gloomy, melancholy girl, with a morbid and awful aspect.
Her disease, sometimes, caused in Berenice a false impression of death
(catalepsy), which she suddenly woke up. Attracted to this Berenice (not for
love, but for interest in his new aspect), Egaeus decided to marry with her.
At the same time, Egaeus developed his own illness. He suffered from a
type of monomania, or an impulsive and fruitless observation of trivial things
what he called the attentive. He explained his monomania isn´t the same
common reflection from the dreamers or the speculative, in which the attention
in the object is replaced by deductions and meditations about world, life, etc.
One day, Egaeus saw his frightening bride on the library for a brief moment and
she smiled for him. But he was influenced by his ill (or his insanity), therefore,
the contents of smile´s Berenice immediately became his obsession: her white
shiny teeth. Now, they are ideas that he desperately wanted to possess to calm
his mind.
In the next night, he received the news that Berenice was dead and
everything was ready for the burial. In the funeral, Egaeus had the feeling that a
finger of the dead would have moved. When he looks for her face, the teeth
were there. It were been showed by her half-open mouth in a discreet smile (or
looks like one). He went out disturbed with that scene and, in the library; he lost
in thought about the teeth´s image.
At midnight he came around, Egaeus was confused, he didn´t remember
very well what happened after the funeral, but he knew that something had
happened. He noticed a little box on the table. A servant entered in the library,
he was frightened and says something that Egaeus just understand in pieces: a
female cry, a violated grave, a disfigured body that was still alive. In that
moment, Egaeus realized his dirty clothes, the marks of nails in his hands, a
spade in the wall. The little box slipped off from his hands and showed
instruments of dental surgery and thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking
substances scattered on the ground.
_______________________________________________________________
_______
Main points:
1. The opposite in the same.
´´How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? From the
covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of
good, so in fact out of joy is sorrow born.´´
1.1 Life and Death can be related in Egaeus born and mothers ‘dead (giving
birth?) and in sick Berenice: alive, but cataleptic.
1.2 Teeth: health in illness: Not a speck on their surface – not a shade on their
enamel – not an indenture in their edges – but what a brief period of her smile
had sufficed to brand in upon my memory.
1.3 Sane and Insanity: Egaeus isn´t totally insane. ´´In the lucid intervals of my
infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and taking deeply to heart that
total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fail to ponder frequently and
bitterly upon the wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had
been so suddenly brought to pass.
2. Healthy Berenice: the opposite of Egaeus. The cheerful and the melancholy.
3. Sick Berenice reminds the dead Egaeus´s mother: morbid female figure and
her presence in the library.
4. The Egaeus’s attraction for morbid things: marriage with Berenice.
5. Teeth: a symbol of youth, health, energy