As Berenice deteriorates due to the progression of her disease, Egaeus fixates on her devolving appearance:
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips.
The imagery in this passage creates a disturbing visual, depicting a woman seemingly at the brink of death. In fact, she appears nearly skeletal—“very pale,” with “hollow temples” and “lifeless,” “glassy” eyes. Berenice’s sickly pallor stands in stark contrast to her previous healthy state during “the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty.” Where once she was lively and free of sorrows, now she is but a ghost of her former loveliness.
The weighty impact of Berenice’s disease is mirrored in Poe’s syntax, as he lists the evidence of her physical decay in rote fashion (using nine clauses in the first sentence alone!). Each tiresome addition evokes a sense of fatigue within both the reader and Berenice. With every symptom, it becomes clear that Berenice occupies a state of living death. By toeing this line between the living and the dead, Poe subtly challenges the idea of death as a singular state of being, a potent theme throughout the story.
When Egaeus sees Berenice smile for the first time, he begins to develop an unhealthy fixation on her teeth. While the rest of her body—her hair, her eyes, her very skin—rapidly succumbs to her illness, Berenice’s teeth remain the same: strong, white, and healthy. The story highlights the importance of this first glimpse and its effect on Egaeus through the use of vivid imagery:
The teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.
Egaeus is so enraptured by the sight of Berenice’s teeth that he begins to hallucinate that they are surrounding him “here, and there, and everywhere.” The frantic intensity of his delusion is reinforced by the story’s explicit detail, which appeals to the reader’s sense of sight. Berenice’s teeth are not just white but "excessively white," “long” and “narrow,” and palpable in their unreal reality. The gruesome visual invoked when Egaeus refers to the movement of Berenice’s lips as “writhing” heightens the singular impact of this moment upon his psyche, further demonstrating the depth of his internal conflict between revulsion and desire.
