Review of “Berenice” by Edgar Allan Poe: Halloween Countdown

It’s that time of year again. Happy Halloween.

1) “Berenice” by Edgar Allan Poe

Plot:

Egaeus and his cousin Berenice have grown up together and live in an old family house. They are polar opposites. Egaeus tells the reader that Berenice is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy.” While he stays home and reads—or whatever—Berenice “ramble[s] on the hill-side.”

…until she gets sick. Egaeus describes her illness as a type of “epilepsy” that eats away at her. She becomes more withdrawn.

Egaeus’s illness takes a different turn. He finds himself concentrating on common objects almost to the point of obsession and trance. His passions are “of the mind” rather than of the heart, so that even when Berenice was her most beautiful, he never loved her. Yet he spoke to her of marriage (first cousins did such things back in the day).

Yeah, this is not going to end well.

Thoughts:

This horror story has no supernatural elements. One of the oddest things is that the reader never hears Berenice speak, either when she’s a happy young thing running over the hills, or a sickly young woman. She remains silent—no laughter and no tears. The reader has no idea what she thinks of her bookish cousin.

The bookish cousin, however, is quite frank about the lovely Berenice. He thinks of her “not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream—not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being—not as an object of love, but the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.”

That’s cold.

The story starts slowly, but the end is a surprise and a bit gory. I did not see it coming. At about twenty minutes in length, it would make a good dramatic reading on a dark and stormy night. According to lore, the present edition is a toned-down version of the original, which ruffled some feathers when it was first published.

This story can be read here:

This story can be listened to here: (21:41)

Bio: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was the son of two actors. After his father deserted the family and his mother died of tuberculosis, two-year-old Edgar was taken in by the wealthy Allan family. He briefly studied at the University of Virginia and West Point. His most well-known works include “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The last is sometimes cited as the first detective story. The work that made him a household name in his day was the poem “The Raven.”

The circumstances of his death are still unclear. He was found in a tavern, appearing drunk, wearing someone else’s clothes, and died some days later in Washington University Hospital. According to the Poe Museum, twenty-six different theories regarding the cause of his demise have been published. Poe was a known tippler and, while alcohol poisoning is a perennial favorite cause of death, other plausible causes as disparate as rabies and cooping, a 19^th-century form of voter fraud, are often cited.

Title: “Berenice”
Author: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
First published: March 1835, Southern Literary Messenger
Length: short story