Mental Illness and Physical Disease
Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are well-known for their explorations of mental illness, disease, and death. In “Berenice,” both mental illness and physical disease take over the lives of the characters, destroying their past identities and propelling them forward toward the story’s horrifying conclusion. Egaeus, the story’s unreliable narrator, develops a “monomaniac” mental illness that causes him to obsess over seemingly mundane objects. Berenice, Egaeus’s cousin and fiancée, develops epilepsy which causes her to…
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Death and Resurrection
Edgar Allan Poe’s notorious preoccupation with death and the way his poetry and short stories reflect it usually involves the untimely demise of a young, loved, and impossibly beautiful woman. In “Berenice,” however, no characters actually die, and the real tragedy is that Berenice doesn’t die. From the outset, Poe establishes that in this story, death is not always the end. Egaeus, the narrator, believes that he lived another life in the past and…
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Repressed Sexuality
In “Berenice,” Poe creates two characters who could not be more different, even though they grew up together as cousins and become engaged as adults. While Berenice is guided by her heart and drawn to light and happiness, Egaeus prefers the gloom of his library and the comfort of books. Egaeus’s studies are religious in nature and, possibly because he was always “ill of health,” he seems to be drawn towards misery, turns inwards, and…
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