by Poe · Cluster: Terror and Horror · Madness
Abstract
A gothic horror tale in which the monomaniac Egaeus, obsessed with his dying cousin Berenice’s teeth, violates her premature grave to extract them; explores madness, obsession, decay, and the horror of the body.
Testo / Text
Parti / Parts
Readability (prose)52.5 Flesch ease12 FK grade15.5 Fog14% complex24.5 words/sent
Connections
Topoi: Memento Mori Archetypes: Outsider Motifs: Madness (2), Grave, Decay, Death, Memory, Book Reading, Eyes and Sight Themes & Concepts: Madness, Terror and Horror, Grief and Loss, Identity, Uncanny, Mortality Forms & Genres: Short Story, Gothic Novel Settings: Castle
Testo integrale / Full text
Dicebant mihi sodales, si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquar tulum fore levatas.—Ebn Zaiat.
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.
Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as
various as the hues of that arch—as distinct too, yet as
intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow!
How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of
unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But
as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of
joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the
anguish of to-day, or the agonies which _are_, have their origin
in the ecstasies which _might have been_.
My baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not
mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored
than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called
a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars—in the
character of the family mansion—in the frescos of the chief
saloon—in the tapestries of the dormitories—in the chiselling of
some buttresses in the armory—but more especially in the gallery
of antique paintings—in the fashion of the library chamber—and,
lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library’s
contents—there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the
belief.
The recollections of my earliest years are connected with that
chamber, and with its volumes—of which latter I will say no more.
Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness
to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous
existence. You deny it?—let us not argue the matter. Convinced
myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance
of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning eyes—of sounds, musical
yet sad—a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory 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.
In that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of
what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very
regions of fairy land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild
dominions of monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular
that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye—that I
loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in
reverie; but it _is_ singular that as years rolled away, and the
noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers—it
_is_ wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my
life—wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character
of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me
as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land
of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day
existence, but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in
itself.
Berenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my
paternal halls. Yet differently we grew—I, ill of health, and
buried in gloom—she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with
energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the
cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and
soul, to the most intense and painful meditation—she, roaming
carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her
path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice!—I
call upon her name—Berenice!—and from the gray ruins of memory a
thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah,
vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her
light-heartedness and joy! Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh,
sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its
fountains! And then—then all is mystery and terror, and a tale
which should not be told. Disease—a fatal disease, fell like the
simoon upon her frame; and, even while I gazed upon her, the
spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits,
and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible,
disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer
came and went!—and the victim—where is she? I knew her not—or
knew her no longer as Berenice.
Among the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal
and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind
in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as
the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of
epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in _trance_ itself—trance
very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her
manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In
the mean time my own disease—for I have been told that I should
call it by no other appellation—my own disease, then, grew
rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a
novel and extraordinary form—hourly and momently gaining
vigor—and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible
ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a
morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in
metaphysical science termed the _attentive_. It is more than
probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is
in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general
reader, an adequate idea of that nervous _intensity of interest_
with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak
technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation
of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.
To muse for long unwearied hours, with my attention riveted to
some frivolous device on the margin, or in the typography of a
book; to become absorbed, for the better part of a summer’s day,
in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry or upon the
floor; to lose myself, for an entire night, in watching the
steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away
whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat, monotonously,
some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent
repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to
lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of
absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in:
such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries
induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed,
altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to
anything like analysis or explanation.
Yet let me not be misapprehended. The undue, earnest, and morbid
attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous,
must not be confounded in character with that ruminating
propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in
by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at
first supposed, an extreme condition, or exaggeration of such
propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different.
In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested
by an object usually _not_ frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight
of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions
issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day-dream _often
replete with luxury_, he finds the _incitamentum_, or first cause
of his musings, entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case, the
primary object was _invariably frivolous_, although assuming,
through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and
unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those
few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a
centre. The meditations were _never_ pleasurable; and, at the
termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being
out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated
interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a
word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with
me, as I have said before, the _attentive_, and are, with the
day-dreamer, the _speculative_.
My books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to
irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in
their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the
characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember,
among others, the treatise of the noble Italian, Coelius Secundus
Curio, “_De Amplitudine Beati Regni Dei;_” St. Austin’s great
work, the “City of God;” and Tertullian’s “_De Carne Christi_,”
in which the paradoxical sentence “_Mortuus est Dei filius;
credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est
quia impossibile est,_” occupied my undivided time, for many
weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.
Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial
things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of
by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of
human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds,
trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And
although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond
doubt, that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the
_moral_ condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for
the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature
I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in
any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her
calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that
total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fail to
ponder, frequently and bitterly, upon the wonder-working means by
which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to
pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my
disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar
circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own
character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more
startling changes wrought in the _physical_ frame of Berenice—in
the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal
identity.
During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely
I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence,
feelings with me, _had never been_ of the heart, and my passions
_always were_ of the mind. Through the gray of the early
morning—among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday—and
in the silence of my library at night—she had flitted by my eyes,
and I had seen 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 a thing to admire,
but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the
most abstruse although desultory speculation. And _now_—now I
shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet,
bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to
mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke
to her of marriage.
And at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when,
upon an afternoon in the winter of the year—one of those
unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of
the beautiful Halcyon (*1),—I sat, (and sat, as I thought,
alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But, uplifting my
eyes, I saw that Berenice stood before me.
Was it my own excited imagination—or the misty influence of the
atmosphere—or the uncertain twilight of the chamber—or the gray
draperies which fell around her figure—that caused in it so
vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She
spoke no word; and I—not for worlds could I have uttered a
syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of
insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded
my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some
time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her
person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige
of the former being lurked in any single line of the contour. My
burning glances at length fell upon the face.
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and
the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the
hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow,
and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the
reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless,
and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless, and I shrank
involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the
thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar
meaning, _the teeth_ of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves
slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or
that, having done so, I had died!
The shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found
that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the
disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and
would not be driven away, the white and ghastly _spectrum_ of the
teeth. Not a speck on their surface—not a shade on their
enamel—not an indenture in their edges—but what that period of
her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them
_now_ even more unequivocally than I beheld them _then_. The
teeth!—the teeth!—they were here, and there, and everywhere, and
visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively
white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very
moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full
fury of my _monomania_, and I struggled in vain against its
strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of
the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these
I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all
different interests became absorbed in their single
contemplation. They—they alone were present to the mental eye,
and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my
mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every
attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their
peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon
the alteration in their nature. 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. Of
Mademoiselle Salle it has been well said, “_Que tous ses pas
etaient des sentiments_,” and of Berenice I more seriously
believed _que toutes ses dents etaient des idées_. _Des
idées!_—ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! _Des
idées!_—ah, _therefore_ it was that I coveted them so madly! I
felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace,
in giving me back to reason.
And the evening closed in upon me thus—and then the darkness
came, and tarried, and went—and the day again dawned—and the
mists of a second night were now gathering around—and still I sat
motionless in that solitary room—and still I sat buried in
meditation—and still the _phantasma_ of the teeth maintained its
terrible ascendancy, as, with the most vivid hideous
distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and
shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a
cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause,
succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many
low moanings of sorrow or of pain. I arose from my seat, and
throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out
in the ante-chamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me
that Berenice was—no more! She had been seized with epilepsy in
the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the
grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the
burial were completed.
I found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there
alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and
exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well
aware, that since the setting of the sun, Berenice had been
interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no
positive, at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was
replete with horror—horror more horrible from being vague, and
terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the
record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and
unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in
vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound,
the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be
ringing in my ears. I had done a deed—what was it? I asked myself
the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber
answered me,—“_What was it?_”
On the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little
box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it
frequently before, for it was the property of the family
physician; but how came it _there_, upon my table, and why did I
shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be
accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of
a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the
singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat:—“_Dicebant mihi
sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum
fore levatas_.” Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my
head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become
congealed within my veins?
There came a light tap at the library door—and, pale as the
tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were
wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky,
and very low. What said he?—some broken sentences I heard. He
told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night—of the
gathering together of the household—of a search in the direction
of the sound; and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he
whispered me of a violated grave—of a disfigured body enshrouded,
yet still breathing—still palpitating—_still alive_!
He pointed to garments;—they were muddy and clotted with gore. I
spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand: it was indented
with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some
object against the wall. I looked at it for some minutes: it was
a spade. 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.