Can anyone tell me the meaning of E.A. Poe's story Berneice? I read it several times and i have no idea what it is about. Can anyone help me?

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2003

Answers

Partly it satirizes Gothic fiction. If you miss that then the murky odness of the story makes less sense, the narrator being more than a bit befuddled in his mind. The narrator is one of those Romantic obsessives fixated on certain features of Berenice. In a state of trance or intoxication he dreams of the teeth of the recently buried heroine and awakes to discover two things: that he had in his fugue unearthed the body and yanked all the teeth AND ironically that in doing so saved the still living Berenice from the fate of premature burial.

Needeless to say the humor of this strange rescue under such grotesque circumstances was lost on Poe's contemporaries. She should count herself lucky though. Poe's usual feminine obsession was with the "luminous" eyes.

-- Anonymous, October 26, 2003