Blog 12

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,Jr.,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 will use 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 Egoeus 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 story has many symbols in it and one of the symbols is the teeth in the story the teeth are considered as an object of admiration and Egoeus is obsessed by the teeth of his wife. 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.’ He tells us that his first name is Egoeus and declines to tell us 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 the mansion of his ancestors, apparently as their heir. He marries his cousin, Berenice, who grew up with him in the mansion. 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 who was agile, graceful and overflowing with energy.