“Berenice” opens with the narrator, Egaeus, discussing misery and its ability to manifest in a number of different forms. Egaeus paves the way for the tragedy that will follow by asserting that “evil is a consequence of good.” Although Egaeus shares his “baptismal name” with the reader, he does not share his family name, but states that their ancestral home—in which he was born and presumably continues to live—is ancient and “gloomy.” His family, Egaeus continues, was considered “a race of visionaries” and this is reflected in the “peculiar nature” of the family’s collection of books, frescos, tapestries, and old paintings.
The library is particularly meaningful to Egaeus, who was born in it and whose mother died in it. Egaeus introduces the reader to his belief in reincarnation, saying: “It is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before.” Egaeus believes his soul had inhabited another body and had another life, and the proof of this is in his dim memories of “sounds, musical yet sad” and “spiritual and meaningful eyes.” Egaeus goes on to describe how he spent his earliest years in the library studying its books and meditating. He believes that being born in the library is the reason he “loitered away” his childhood in study and contemplation rather than in activity. However, when he was still in “the noon of manhood,” a “stagnation” settled over his life and significantly hindered his intellectual development.
Egaeus then introduces his cousin, Berenice. They grew up together in Egaeus’s family home, but they were polar opposites: Egaeus was quiet, gloomy, and studious while Berenice was active, happy, and cheerful. As he describes Berenice as a child, Egaeus says that simply saying her name brings back a clear vision of her in her “gorgeous yet fantastic beauty” before “the destroyer” came in the form of a fatal disease that warped her beauty, happiness, and character. Berenice’s disease had a number of symptoms, but the most alarming was that it would send her in to a “trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution,” from which she would abruptly wake up.
Coincidentally, as Berenice suffers more and more from her physical disease, Egaeus’s mental illness also intensifies. It takes a “monomaniac character” that causes him to spend hours and hours on “frivolous” objects such as “the typography of a book” or “a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry.” Egaeus emphasizes the fact that his hyper-fixation on these objects is nothing at all like what a typically imaginative person would experience, but rather has a truly negative impact on every aspect of his life. Among the other symptoms he experiences as a result of his mental illness is that he occasionally loses “all sense of motion or physical existence.”
While Egaeus’s books provide him with ample details and ideas to fixate on, he tells the reader that he never did spend much time contemplating the changes Berenice’s disease created in her character. Instead, as was typical of his illness, Egaeus found himself focusing on the “less important” changes in Berenice: the changes in her “physical frame.” Egaeus asserts that not even in “the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty” had he been in love with her, but as her disease wastes away her beauty, he finds himself unaccountably drawn to her. In “an evil moment,” Egaeus proposes to Berenice and she agrees to marry him.
Shortly before their marriage, Egaeus is sitting alone in his library when Berenice appears before him. She is emaciated, her black hair has turned yellow, and she seems taller than she used to be; Egaeus studies her and notice all “its” changes. When he turns his attention to Berenice’s lips, she smiles at him and he notices her teeth. Without warning and unable to stop himself, Egaeus begins to obsess over Berenice’s teeth: she is fundamentally changed, but her teeth remain as white, untarnished, and orderly as they had been before disease had deteriorated the rest of her beauty. Egaeus imagines studying them in minute detail in “every light.” He begins to believe that possession of the teeth will restore balance to the “disordered chamber” of his mind.
Egaeus sits in the library thinking about Berenice’s teeth for the rest of the night and the next day. The next night, however, a maid screams in the distance and causes him to get up and go find out what is wrong. She tells him that Berenice has had a fit and is now dead. Berenice is almost immediately buried, but Egaeus has very little memory of the event. In fact, he struggles to understand the “horror” he feels about the period after she was buried. As he tries to understand his feelings, he feels he can hear “the spirit of a departed sound” of a “shrill and piercing shriek” that he believes came from a woman. Egaeus senses that he “had done a deed,” but fails to remember what it was. Beside him on a table is a small box belonging to the family physician, a lamp, and a book open to a passage about returning to a loved one’s grave. This line makes Egaeus’s hair stand on end, but he is unsure why.
As he thinks, a servant comes into the room and, obviously terrified, tells Egaeus that the household servants had been disturbed by “a wild cry” in the night. Following the sound of it, they had arrived at Berenice’s “violated grave” and discovered that she was still alive, although “enshrouded.” The servant then points out to Egaeus that his clothes are bloody and covered in mud, there are human nail marks on his hand, and there is a spade inexplicably sitting in the corner of the room. Egaeus suddenly jumps at the box sitting on the table next to him and drops it. It “burst[s] into pieces” and they see that it is full of “thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances.”
