: “Berenice”: Edgar Allan Poe: story and analysis

“Berenice”: Edgar Allan Poe; story and analysis.

Berenice (Berenice) is a horror story by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), published in 1835 in the magazine Southern Literary Messenger.

Berenice continues the tradition of the Gothic genre, making it one of the few Gothic stories related to vampirism from that notable period of North American literature.

The violence that Edgar Allan Poe unleashes on Berenice deeply scandalized the readers of the newspaper in which it was published, to such an extent that many of them wrote to the editor requesting that EA Poe be fired as a contributor to the publication.

The controversy was so harsh that Edgar Allan Poe himself, cornered, had to publish a “softer” version of Berenice, which is the one normally known.

If the original version of Berenice caused such rejection in the bourgeois readers of Richmond, the parallels of the story with the life of Edgar Allan Poe They would surely have encouraged them to lynch the poet.

The story of Berenice introduces us to Egaeus, a man about to marry his cousin, named Berenice. Here we witness the first link with the life of Edgar Allan Poewho also married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, when she was just thirteen years old.

Egaeus experiences periods of profound intellectual isolation, like Edgar Allan Poe, during which he appears to separate himself from the sensory world and, at the same time, fix his attention obsessively on certain objects.

Berenice, like Virginia Clemm, suffers from a strange, unnamed illness that little by little consumes her body, with the exception of her teeth, which take on a hypnotic shape and shine.

Berenice dies and is buried. One day, Egaeus wakes up from one of his periods of introspection. He warns that the tomb of Berenice has been desecrated and that she, incredibly, still lives.

Up to this point, no reader could really be scandalized. However, Edgar Allan Poe executes one of the most terrifying turns of his. He barely finds out about the return of BereniceEgaeus, who has also awakened from a kind of intellectual lethargy, discovers in his study a collection of thirty-two bloody teeth accompanied by an arcane sentence in Latin:

Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitaem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.

In Spanish means:

Friends told me that I would find some relief from my pain by visiting the grave of my beloved.

Although Edgar Allan Poe does not openly state it, it is Egaeus who knocked out the teeth of Berenicestill alive, leading the reader to imagine her trance state after executing the macabre operation.

The devastating effect of those 32 teeth, the teeth of Bereniceand the atrocious act of tearing them off one by one when the victim was still alive, make up one of the most terrifying atmospheres in the entire work of Edgar Allan Poe.

The truth is that Edgar Allan Poe was always obsessed with teeth. They appear again and again in his stories as symbols of death, for example, in the teeth of Metzengerstein’s horse, in the fetid teeth of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ) and in the unbearable crunching of Hop-Frog’s fangs (Hop-Frog).

Berenice’s psychological analysis reveals that the meaning of the extraction of teeth symbolizes castration. Alternatively, in a less Freudian view of the matter, teeth may symbolize a kind of defense against possession of the female body. This is the path that Marie Bonaparte chooses in her book The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Moving on to a more poetic reading, Egaeus, serene, austere, calm, who literally lives in his library surrounded by forbidden books, represents intellectualism. Berenice, on the other hand, is a sensual, beautiful, elegant woman, full of “overflowing energy.”

However, that is what Egaeus states, since throughout the story we do not hear a single word from Berenice, which leads us to think that she is an idealized and oppressed woman, like all of Edgar Allan Poe’s female characters. , whose function, in all cases, is to be beautiful and die horribly.

Berenice’s transition occurs during her illness. When that happens Egaeus loses all interest in her as a person and turns her into an object of analysis, never of admiration. To complete her atrocious act of removing her teeth, Egaeus must dehumanize her.

Perhaps the best summary of Berenice comes from Robert Louis Stevenson, who declared that the story travels through “that slippery terrain between sanity and insanity”, touching in the reader’s chest “a rope that perhaps it would be better not to touch.”

Berenice.
Bernice, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Misfortune is diverse. Misfortune multiforme rife on earth. Spread over the wide horizon like the rainbow, its colors are as varied as its own and also as different and so intimately united. Overreaching on the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of ugliness; of alliance and peace, a simile of pain? But just as in ethics evil is a consequence of good, so, in reality, sorrow is born from joy. Either the memory of past beatitude is the anguish of today, or the agonies that are originate in the ecstasies that could have been.

My given name is Egaeus; I won’t mention my last name. However, there are no more venerable towers in my country than my melancholy and gray estate. Our lineage has been called a race of visionaries, and in many surprising details, in the character of the family mansion in the frescoes of the main hall, in the hangings of the bedrooms, in the reliefs of some pillars of the armory, but especially In the gallery of old pictures, in the style of the library and, finally, in the peculiar nature of its books, there are more than enough elements to justify this belief.

The memories of my early years are related to this room and its volumes, of which I will not speak again. My mother died there. I was born there. But it is simply idle to say that it had not lived before, that the soul has no previous existence. Do you deny it? We will not argue the point. I am convinced, but do not try to convince. There is, however, a memory of aerial forms, of spiritual and expressive eyes, of musical sounds, although sad, a memory that will not be excluded, a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, insecure, and like a shadow too. in the impossibility of getting rid of it while the sun of my reason shines.

In that room I was born. Waking suddenly from the long night of what seemed, but was not, non-existence, to fairy regions, to a palace of imagination, to the strange domains of monastic thought and scholarship, it is not strange that I looked at my around with astonished and ardent eyes, that I wasted my childhood among books and dissipated my youth in daydreams; But it is strange that the years passed and the zenith of virility still found me in my parents’ mansion; yes, it is amazing the paralysis that subjugated the sources of my life, amazing the total reversal that occurred in the character of my most common thoughts. Earthly realities affected me as visions, and only as visions, while the strange ideas of the world of dreams became, however, not the fodder of my daily existence, but really my sole and entire existence.

Berenice and I were cousins ​​and grew up together on our father’s estate. But we grew up in a different way: I, sickly, wrapped in melancholy; she, agile, graceful, overflowing with strength; His were the walks on the hill; mine, the cloister studies; me, living locked in myself and devoted body and soul to intense and painful meditation; she, wandering carelessly through life, without thinking about the shadows of the road or the silent flight of the black-winged hours. Berenice! I invoke her name… Bernice! And from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous memories are moved by this sound. Ah, vivid now does the image of her come before me, as in the first days of her joy and her happiness! Ah, splendid and yet fantastic beauty! O sylph among the bushes of Arnheim! Oh naiad among her sources! And then, then it’s all mystery and terror, and a story that must not be told. The disease (a fatal disease) fell upon her while I watched her, the spirit of the transformation swept over her, penetrating her mind, her habits and her character, and in the most subtle and terrible way came to disturb the identity of her. Oh! The destroyer came and went, and the victim, where was she? I didn’t know her or, at least, I no longer recognized her as Berenice.

Among the numerous series of illnesses caused by the first and fatal one, which occasioned such a horrible revolution in the moral and physical being of my cousin, there must be mentioned as the most afflicted and obstinate a species of epilepsy which not infrequently ended in catalepsy, a state very similar to the effective dissolution and from which its way of recovering was, in many cases, abrupt and sudden. Meanwhile, my own illness – for I have been told that I should not give it another name – my own illness, I say, grew rapidly, assuming, at last, a monomaniacal character of a new and extraordinary kind, which gained more and more vigor and, Finally, he gained an incomprehensible influence over me. This monomania, if I must call it that, consisted of a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind which psychological science designates by the word attention. It is more than likely that I am not understood; but I fear, in truth, that there is no possible way of giving the intelligence of the ordinary reader an adequate idea of ​​that nervous intensity of interest with which in my case the meditative faculties (not to use technical terms) acted and were immersed in the contemplation of the objects of the universe, even the most common ones.

Reflect for long hours, tirelessly, with attention riveted on some trivial note, on the margin of a book or on its typography; spending the greater part of a summer day absorbed in a strange shadow that fell obliquely on the tapestry or on the door; getting lost for a whole night in the observation of the quiet flame of a lamp or the embers of the fire; dream whole days with the perfume of a flower; monotonously repeating some common word until the sound, through frequent repetition, ceased to evoke any idea in the mind; losing all sense of movement or physical existence thanks to absolute and obstinate stillness, long prolonged; Such were some of the most common and least pernicious extravagances caused by a state of the mental faculties, not unique, to be sure, but capable of defying all analysis or explanation.

But don’t misunderstand me. The excessive, intense, and morbid attention thus excited by trivial objects in themselves is not to be confused with…