Mental Illness and Physical Disease Theme Analysis

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 fall into a deep catatonic episode that resembles death, causing her to be mistakenly buried alive. When Egaeus’s “monomania” leads to an obsession with Berenice’s teeth, he commits the horrifying crime of exhuming her body and removing her teeth, only to later find out that she was not really dead. The true horror of this story, however, is not Egaeus’s crime, but Poe’s illustration of human beings’ capacity for inhumanity, particularly when illness strips them of their identity and their capacity for reason.

Egaeus is still a young man when he begins displaying symptoms of the serious mental illness that leads him to mutilate Berenice in an extremely uncharacteristic act of violence. Egaeus was born in his family’s library, and he believes that this is why he was always an introspective child, but he was a young adult when a “stagnation” halted his development. While Egaeus thinks his childhood was normal, his description of being “addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation” suggests that he was already showing signs of a developing mood disorder. Egaeus says his “disease” ultimately developed a “monomaniac character,” causing him to spend hours studying “frivolous” things. What is most alarming, however, is that he says he sometimes loses “all sense of motion or physical existence,” meaning there are periods when he not only loses control of his thoughts, but his actions and ability to account for them. Although Egaeus has his peculiarities, there is no indication that he is naturally violent. However, in his uncontrollable obsession with Berenice’s teeth, Egaeus loses the morality that belongs to his lucid self, enabling him to pull out Berenice’s teeth to appease his obsessive thoughts.

Berenice falls victim to what Egaeus describes as “a species of epilepsy” that frequently results in catatonia. According to Egaeus, Berenice’s disease reduces her from a human being to an object. Egaeus describes Berenice before her illness as “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy.” Her disease, “the destroyer,” strips her of these qualities. Aside from the physical changes, Berenice’s disease impacts “her mind, her habits, and her character” so much that Egaeus “knew her no longer as Berenice.” Already Egaeus has turned Berenice into someone else, someone he has no emotional connection with. However, she is lowered still further to the rank of object when Egaeus describes her not as a person, but as an “it.” Not only has Berenice lost her own personal sense of identity to her illness, but now Egaeus no longer recognizes her as truly human.

The combination of Berenice’s loss of what made her human through physical disease and Egaeus’s loss of reason through mental illness becomes the perfect storm as Poe explores the extent of mental illness’s power over human reason. Shortly before falling into a catatonic state, Berenice stands in the doorway of Egaeus’s library and smiles at him, revealing her perfect teeth. Her appearance is entirely altered—her black hair has turned yellow, she appears taller, and she’s emaciated—and this perhaps explains why Egaeus initially believed her smile was “peculiar,” but the “disordered chamber” of his mind goes further and believes it was actually “a smile of peculiar meaning.” As he obsesses over Berenice’s teeth, a French phrase—“que tous ses dents étaient des idées,” which in English means “all her teeth were ideas”—runs through his mind. The “peculiar meaning” of her smile, then, is that her teeth are full of immaculate ideas, and the possession of them could restore his unbalanced mind to sanity. What’s left of Egaeus’s humanity fights against this obsession, but the burial of Berenice triggers a dissociative episode, during which he goes to her body and cuts her teeth out. In this way, Egaeus’s mental illness becomes the antagonist of the story, making a victim of both Egaeus and Berenice and condemning them both to a life that is almost certain worse than death.

Having suffered severe depressive episodes himself and watched several family members die of lingering physical diseases, Poe had intimate knowledge of the power these things had to take away an individual’s humanity and sense of personhood. In “Berenice,” Poe explores the ways people are transformed by their illnesses—both physically and mentally—and, in the cause of Egaeus, how easily one can lose themselves and their humanity completely.