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 was reincarnated. Berenice, his fiancée, develops a “species of epilepsy” that frequently causes her to fall into a catatonic state strongly resembling death. When Egaeus develops a mental illness with a “monomaniac character,” he suffers a different form of death: the loss of his reason. One evening, Egaeus becomes convinced that he can resurrect his reason by the possession of Berenice’s teeth. Through this story, Poe challenges his audience’s beliefs about death by portraying it as fluid and impermanent.
In the opening paragraphs of the story, Egaeus describes being born in the family library—this is the same room his mother died in, further highlighting his belief that death, rather than being a fixed end, is the first step towards new life—and his early childhood. He also reveals that he believes he had a past life, and his birth was actually a rebirth. Egaeus specifically says that “it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous existence.” His statement reveals that he doesn’t just consider concepts like resurrection or reincarnation possibilities, but realities of which he is proof. Furthermore, he does not limit his opinion on reincarnation to just himself, but specifically says “the soul” rather than using the possessive and saying “my soul.” This implies that all souls can come back, and death is therefore impermanent. Egaeus’s mental illness, however, takes a huge toll on his soul. His obsessive thoughts over “frivolous” objects eat away at him, leaving him desperate for a remedy so he can live up to his potential.
Poe further complicates conventional views of death as a permanent state with Berenice, who suffers from “some species of epilepsy.” Berenice’s epilepsy often sends her into what Egaeus calls a “trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution.” It can be assumed that there have been numerous times when Berenice was truly believed to be dead when she entered these “trances,” and her “startlingly abrupt” return to consciousness from them would have been equally alarming. Egaeus believes that the soul lives on after the body dies because he has a “memory like a shadow” of a past life, but Berenice’s situation involves her body seeming to die and then be resurrected. Over time, this diminishes her soul. As Egaeus notes, Berenice’s disease effects a “revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral […] being of my cousin” and she loses her formerly cheerful and energetic disposition. However, despite physical and mental changes, Berenice’s teeth remain immaculate.
Egaeus suffers from a sort of mental death due to his mental illness, while Berenice suffers catatonic episodes that equate to numerous small deaths due to her epilepsy. When it seems like Berenice has truly died, Egaeus believes that he has a chance to resurrect his former mental equilibrium by possessing her teeth. One night, Berenice flashes Egaeus a toothy “smile of peculiar meaning,” and Egaeus quickly becomes obsessed with the idea that her teeth “could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.” Just as he believes the soul can be reincarnated in a new body, Egaeus believes he can resurrect his lost reason by possessing the one thing about Berenice that has not been corrupted by disease. Berenice once again falls into a catatonic sleep, but this time Egaeus, possibly subconsciously guided by his mental illness, actually has her buried. The obsessive thought that her teeth can resurrect his mental balance overcomes his reason and, in a dissociative episode, he exhumes her body and cuts out her teeth. However, after he becomes lucid again, his servant tells him that Berenice is alive but mutilated, and he discovers what he’s done. Once again, death defies conventional expectations in Berenice’s abrupt and tragic return to consciousness. On the other hand, death has also defied Egaeus’s expectations because he was unable to resurrect his mental stability as shown by his ultimate inability to identify her teeth by name—one of the symptoms of his mental illness is that, during an episode, he will repeat a word until it loses meaning—and instead calls them “small, white, ivory-looking substances.”
In “Berenice,” death is not always a permanent state, with Berenice frequently appearing dead and then coming back to life and Egaeus’s adamant belief that when the body dies the soul is reborn in another. Ultimately, Poe suggests that death will always defy expectation, shown by Berenice’s return to consciousness after being horribly mutilated and Egaeus’s failure to successfully resurrect his sanity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Death and Resurrection Quotes in Berenice
Here died my mother. Herein I was born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous existence.
I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. […] I felt that their possession alone could ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.
With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.
