Pooja Kohli
ENG102.0821
6 June 2010
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston. Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, an actor from Baltimore. His mother died in Richmond on December 8, 1811, and Edgar was taken into the family of John Allan, a member of the firm of Ellis and Allan, tobacco-merchants. He died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was an American writer, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. He was best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre.
One of his stories that I choose is Berenice, it is a short horror story and was published in 1835. The approach I used is Psychoanalytic Criticism. The psychoanalytic criticism argues that that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author and that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche. Psychoanalytic criticism can focus on the author, the characters, the audience and the text. In the story Berenice, the focus is more on the characters as the theory is used to analyze Berenice and Egaeus and the psychological theory became a tool to explain their behavior and motivations. The theory helps to make the story more realistic as the characters are analyzed so closely.
The theme of the story is horror and the beginning of the story helps set the tone. The story begins with the narrator’s complaint that “Misery is manifold.” He wallows in his self-pity, extrapolating that man’s fate is to always find what is to be an agony and to find pleasure in what might have been. In the story he tells his first name is Egaeus and declines to tell what his family name is. He suggests that his family is a prominent family and describes the richness of their family home, in particular the library. He lives in a mansion hung with tapestries and paintings. Egaeus was born in the library of the mansion and his mother died there. He grew up with his cousin Berenice in the mansion. She was agile, beautiful, graceful and overflowing with energy. Egaeus describes that how Berenice carefree existence was overtaken by a fatal disease which disturbed her own identity as a person and the recovery was abrupt and the disease left her to a form of epilepsy, which usually concluded with a deep trance that mimicked death. Meanwhile, in the story Egaeus experiences a rapid progression in his own illness, which takes the form of obsessive monomania. This monomania allowed him to have excessive concentration on one small object or detail for vast amount of time. This illness made him a day dreamer. He tells that he never loved his wife when she was young and beautiful as he used to see her as an object to analyze and not to love. He never loved her but blames on that moment when he decided to marry her and the only reason he marries her was that he knew that she had loved him from a long time. Egaeus after sometime started obsessing and dreaming about Berenice teeth which were long and narrow and incredibly white. The teeth were the only thing which used to stand out after her illness as now she had become pale and her hair became yellow. He realizes that the only way he can gain peace is to possess the teeth and this obsession blocked all the other thoughts in his mind and soon teeth became the essence of his life. He becomes so obsessed with the teeth that he sat in the library for two days and not knowing what is happening outside.
The story takes a turn when Egaeus hears moaning of sorrow and pain and gets to know that his wife has died because of an epileptic fit early in the morning and in the evening the preparations for the burial were completed. After sometime he went back to his library but now he was terrified as he heard the shriek of a female voice and recalls that he has completed something but could not remember what it was. He notices a small box on the table which resembles the one doctors carry. A servant arrives and tries to explain the situation to Egaeus. He tells Egaeus of wild cries during the night that roused the household. The members of the household discover the violated grave of Berenice and Berenice herself alive but disfigured. The servant indicates Egaeus to examine the state of his own clothes, which were covered with blood and dirt and points out to Egaeus the dirt covered spade leaning against the wall. Seeing this Egaeus screams and grabs the box and tries to open it but it falls to the floor and breaks open. When it falls open, dental tools and thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances scattered all around the floor.
The story has many symbols in it and one of the symbols is the shadow. According to dictionary of symbolism, shadows are identified with a person’s soul and are considered dark entities with a nature all of their own .They are the unconscious layers of the personality that are integrated into the structures of the experienced world. In the story shadow is used many times and in the paragraph 3 shadow is said to be vague, variable, indefinite and unsteady. In the story narrator again in paragraph 5 uses the word shadow but now relates it to Berenice character that she is so happy, careless and energetic that she does not even care of the shadows in her path.
Egaeus after developing an illness, started fixating objects obsessively and paragraph 7 shows how his illness made him observe things obsessively and one of the things he fixated was door. Door according to dictionary of symbolism signifies a passage from one place to another. Paragraph 7 shows how he started fixating objects for whole day and another thing that he started fixating was the perfumes of the flower as he used to dream about the flowers the whole day. A flower according to dictionary of symbolism signifies beauty and symbols of young life. In the story the perfumes of the flower captured all his attention as he was attracted to it.
In the story teeth are considered as an object of admiration. According to dictionary of symbolism teeth can be linked to age and help determine the age. Paragraph 15 and 16 shows how Egaeus was obsessed by the teeth of his wife as they were the only thing left that was still adorable after her illness.
Berenice is a story written in first person point of view in the persona of an unreliable narrator. The narrator in the story is Egaeus who is mentally unstable and lives in a mansion of his ancestors as their heir. He is considered unreliable because of his mental debility. The story is not the record of what actually happened but the record of what Egaeus believes happened and in the story he acknowledges his mental debility. Egaeus marries his cousin Berenice who grew up with him in the mansion. He says that she possesses extraordinary beauty and grace. Unfortunately her carefree existence ruins her identity and health after the epilepsy. The main theme attached with the story is horror, mental illness and Berenice as a mere object. The Latin quotation preceding the story helps set the tone, advising that visiting a grave relieves suffering. "Berenice" begins in a gloomy mansion in which the narrator says, "Misery is manifold." He then observes that evil comes from goodness and that sorrow comes from joy. From paragraph 3 we know that narrator believes he is reincarnated, becomes fascinated with a beautiful young woman who suffers bouts of epilepsy that end in prolonged illness. When her health starts deteriorating, he becomes obsessed with her perfectly white teeth. Unable to rid his mind of their image, he ultimately removes all thirty-two of them from her mouth—apparently when one of her trances mimics death and she is buried alive.
The narrator Egaeus, is obsessed with thoughts. In the story he himself admits that he is mentally ill. As a child, he was “buried in gloom” and “addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation.” From paragraph 7 we know that as his illness progressed, it gained “the most incomprehensible ascendancy” over him, fixing his mind for hours on a single thought or on insignificant thing around him: door, the smell of a flower, the print in a book. His most incapacitating obsession in particular is the teeth; he becomes fixated on her gleaming, brilliantly white, untarnished teeth. The image of them occupies his mind constantly. The narrator says, “They were here, and there, and everywhere . . . I had no thoughts but for the teeth . . . . All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They—they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life.” Egaeus appears to suffer from what modern psychology calls obsessive-compulsive disorder, a chief symptom of which is the inability to banish a thought that repeatedly invades the mind. Some victims of this illness develop obsessions only; others develop obsessions and compulsions. Typically, the compulsion rids the mind of an obsession temporarily or until another one takes its place. To expel his thoughts of Berenice’s teeth, Egaeus removes them when she is still alive–perhaps when she is in a catatonic state and appears dead.
In the story Egaeus regards Berenice as a curiosity to study and not a woman to love. She is like a captured butterfly, beautiful to look at and interesting to analyze. When Egaeus speaks of her, he sometimes refers to her as an object. For example, in paragraph 14, he describes the gauntness of Berenice as she stands before him in the library, he says, "I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face." In the paragraph the words her person, its emaciation, the former being and the face are all impersonal. It is possible that the narrator's derogation of Berenice is due to envy of her as she was beautiful, graceful, light-hearted, and energetic and everything that he was not.
The story tells us that people who have mental illness create a world of their own and where the ideas of the dream become their everyday existence solely and utterly in itself. They think that what they are doing, thinking and believing is the reality but actually it is not as they are lost in their own thoughts and do not know what is happening outside in the real world as they are only concerned with their created world.
Works Cited
Berenice.Wikipedia.Web.6June2010.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_(short_story)
Biederman,Hans. Dictionary of Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them. New York: Meridian, 1994.Web.6June2010.
http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/
http://poestories.com/read/berenice
http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/psychcrit.html
