28 pages • 56 minutes read
Berenice
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Symbols & Motifs
Teeth
In this story, teeth symbolize an obsession that transforms beauty into horror. Berenice’s teeth are the only part of her body unaffected by her disease. Therefore, they remain flawlessly beautiful while the rest of her body decays. They are also consistently described as white, a color often associated with purity and female beauty. However, the story subverts this association by portraying their color as disturbing. The narrator describes the teeth as “long, narrow, and excessively white” (335), suggesting that their whiteness is too much, rather than ideal. The teeth are often framed as shining out from the darkness, using the contrast of light and dark imagery to portray them as frightening and ghostly, rather than beautiful. When Egæus goes to see Berenice’s corpse, the teeth frighten him: “Through the enveloping gloom, once again there glared upon me in too palpable reality, the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice” (335). The final image of the teeth scattering across the floor indicates that while they remain “white and glistening” (336), the situation and their context as objects stolen from a woman believed to be dead make it impossible for them to be beautiful. Their removal from a human mouth makes them horrific.
The Library
The library symbolizes Egæus’s elevation of intellectual study above the emotional and natural world. Almost every scene in the story occurs in the library, which Egæus claims is evidence of his family’s visionary status. He mentions “the very peculiar nature of the library’s contents” (333) but does not elaborate further, implying that the collection may contain strange or scandalous material. The library is described consistently as dark and gloomy, indicating that it obscures the truth, rather than revealing it. His mental health condition overwhelms Egæus when Berenice enters the inner chamber of the library, suggesting that her body has now become a worthy topic for his intellectual obsession. While Berenice previously seemed dreamlike to Egæus, who admits that “the realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only” (333), she becomes the source of his obsession only after crossing the threshold into the space of the library. The ending of the story implies that a quote from a poem in the library inspired Egæus to dig up Berenice’s body, suggesting his reliance on the intellectual world for guidance, at the expense of perceiving reality.
Darkness
The motif of darkness and obscurity reveals horror’s incompatibility with human reason. The house where Egæus and Berenice live is described as gloomy, grey, and dark, and most of the scenes take place in dark rooms or in the middle of the night. The darkness symbolizes Egæus’s lack of understanding. He awakens in the library in the middle of the night, knowing that he did something but finding it impossible to remember what it was. He claims that his only memory features “horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity” (335). The dimness of this lapse echoes Egæus’s earlier description of the memories he believes that he possesses of the time before his birth. He describes these recollections as being “like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady—and like a shadow too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it, while the sunlight of my reason shall exist” (333). This equation of reason with sunlight suggests that Egæus’s dark house and gloomy library promote irrational behavior. This motif of darkness and obscured truth plays into the Gothic horror genre, demonstrating that what is hidden can be more frightening than that which exists in plain sight.
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By Edgar Allan Poe
