Blog 13

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 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 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. 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 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. Egoeus 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 subject to a form of epilepsy, which usually concluded with a deep trance that mimicked death. Meanwhile, Egoeus 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 amounts of time. This illness made him a day dreamer. Egoeus 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 because he knew that she had loved him from a long time. Egoeus 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 she had now 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 blocks 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 Egoeus hears moanings 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 goes back to his library but now he is terrified as he hears the shriek of a female voice and recalls that he has completed something but does not remember what it was. He notices a small box on the table which resembles the one doctors carried. A servant arrives and tries to explain the situation to Egoeus. He tells Egoeus 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. He indicates Egoeus to examine the state of his own clothes, which were covered with blood and dirt and points out to Egoeus the dirt covered spade leaning against the wall. Then Egoeus 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 narrator tells that Berenice is so happy, careless and energetic that she does not even care of the shadows in her path.
Egoeus after developing an illness started fixating objects obsessively and one of the objects he fixated was door. It is a symbol which according to dictionary of symbolism signifies a passage from one place to another. Another thing which 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 teeth are considered as an object of admiration and Egoeus is obsessed by the teeth of his wife as they are the only thing left that is still adorable after her illness. According to dictionary of symbolism teeth can be linked to age and help determine the age.

Works Cited
Berenice.Wikipedia.Web.24May2010.
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.24May2010.
http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/
http://poestories.com/read/berenice
http://www2.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/psychcrit.html