28 pages • 56 minutes read
Berenice
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Character Analysis
Egæus
Egæus is the protagonist of the story and one of Poe’s only named narrators. His name is taken from Greek mythology, referencing the Athenian King Aegeus, who was the father of the hero Theseus. Notably, Aegeus died of grief due to a misunderstanding. He instructed his son Theseus to raise a white sail on his ship when he returned to Athens as a sign that he survived his battle with the minotaur, but Theseus forgot these instructions. As a result, Aegeus threw himself into the sea because of his grief. Like the classical hero, Poe’s Egæus also rashly assumes someone to be dead when they are not, to his own destruction.
Egæus claims that he is from an important and ancient family that seems to have some connection to the European aristocracy. His family mansion has frescoes, tapestries, and an armory with buttresses, all of which suggest that they were aristocrats during the medieval era, when Gothic architecture was prominent. He also claims that “our line has been called a race of visionaries” (333), associating his ancestors with the mystical and the divine but also potentially implying some form of hereditary disordered thinking.
Scholarship and mental pursuits seem to consume Egæus more than emotions. He describes himself as living mainly within his own internal world of thoughts, rather than experiencing the physical world. In another Gothic evocation of the medieval era, Egæus identifies himself as pursuing “the studies of the cloister” and the “wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition” (333), two attributes that affiliate him with medieval monks. Egæus demonstrates that he is well-read through his frequent allusions to Greek mythology and ancient literature. He demonstrates breadth of cultural knowledge, referencing late antique Christian writers such as Saint Augustine (St. Austin) and Tertullian alongside the Italian humanist Caelius Secundus Curio and the Arab poet Ebn Zaiat (Ibn al-Zaiyat). This intellectual tendency makes Egæus disinterested in forming emotional connections. He relates that when Berenice was healthy and beautiful, he saw her “not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation” (335). In an inversion of the typical courtship pattern, Egæus proposes marriage to her only after he becomes fascinated by the loss of her beauty, suggesting that his connection to her is caused by “monomania” rather than by genuine feelings of love.
Berenice
Berenice is mainly a symbolic character for Egæus, and she never speaks or reveals anything about her inner life over the course of the story. Her physical attributes are described much more than her personality. She has a disease that causes her to fall into trances in which she appears to be dead, eventually leading to her premature burial.
Berenice’s name is also taken from ancient mythology. Berenice was a Queen of Egypt and wife to Ptolemy III. The most famous myth about her is that she cut off a lock of her hair and left it as an offering at the temple of Aphrodite when she went to pray for her husband’s safe return from war. The hair vanished and then appeared in the sky as a constellation, commemorating the sacrifice of beauty for the sake of love. In Poe’s story, Berenice also sacrifices her beauty for her fiancé, although she does not offer her teeth willingly, but rather has them violently removed. Her name is, therefore, an ironic reference, comparing the macabre sacrifice of her beauty to a much more romantic, voluntary gesture.
Berenice is Egæus’s cousin, and they grew up together in their family’s manor. Thus, she is also a member of his ancient aristocratic family, implying that her disease might also have an inherited origin. Initially, she appears to be in very good health and enjoys outdoor exercise. Unlike Egæus, who remains in the library, she likes to “ramble on the hill side” (333). She is compared to a Sylph and a Naiad, beautiful and magical women from mythology.
However, when she falls ill with a form of epilepsy, her physical condition rapidly deteriorates. Her skin becomes pale, her temples appear hollow, and her golden hair turns “black as the raven’s wing” (334). Her eyes become “lifeless,” “lusterless,” and “glassy” (334), suggesting that she appears corpselike even while she is alive. Despite the loss of most of her physical beauty, her teeth remain perfect. Egæus observes that there is “not a speck upon their surface—not a shade on their enamel—not a line in their configuration—not an indenture in their edges” (334-35).
Berenice never speaks, and smiling at the narrator is her only action within the relationship. Her early days were filled with “light-heartedness and joy” (333), in contrast to the gloom and melancholy of Egæus’s family estate. He admits when he proposes marriage, “I knew that she had loved me long” (334). Her love for him seems apparent when she appears before him in the library and smiles at him, unknowingly inducing his obsession with her teeth. Even after her supposed death, Berenice appears to be smiling. When Egæus views her body in the coffin, he notices that the band around her jaw is broken, and her “livid lips were wreathed into a species of smile” (335). The contrast between the pleasant idea of a loving smile and the bared teeth of a corpse indicates how Berenice’s character represents one of the story’s central themes: Beauty can give rise to horror. While Berenice does not do anything meant to frighten or harm Egæus, her physical illness transforms her loving actions into “disgusting” and “disturbing” moments for him.
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By Edgar Allan Poe
