Repressed Sexuality Theme Analysis

In “Berenice,” Poe creates two characters who could not be more different, even though they grew up together as cousins and become engaged as adults. While Berenice is guided by her heart and drawn to light and happiness, Egaeus prefers the gloom of his library and the comfort of books. Egaeus’s studies are religious in nature and, possibly because he was always “ill of health,” he seems to be drawn towards misery, turns inwards, and represses his emotions. His mental illness, however, brings closer to the surface his sexual desire for Berenice. In his portrayal of Egaeus and his crime against Berenice, Poe explores how repressing natural desires can lead to unnatural thoughts and acts of violence.

Egaeus was born in his family’s library, surrounded by some “very peculiar” books that he would spend his life studying. Because of this and his family’s long reputation as “visionaries,” Egaeus believes that it is natural that he spent the majority of his life engaging in “monastic thought” in his library. Egaeus uses religious terms to describe his early thoughts and studies, describing his thoughts as “monastic” and his studies as that “of the cloister.” This implies that he is a very religious person and has likely taken to heart warnings of the dangers of sexuality and praises of sexual purity. Egaeus also says that as a child he was “addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation” while his beautiful cousin, Berenice, moved “carelessly through life” before her disease. Unlike Egaeus, Berenice embraced all of her emotions and sought happiness, allowing her to lead a happier life. Part of the reason Egaeus’s thoughts continue to bring him pain could be that he is torn between love and desire for his beautiful and adoring cousin, and the warnings his “monastic” books have given him about giving in to sexual desire.

Egaeus insists that he had never felt love for Berenice, but the passage of the book by Ebn Zaiat that sits open on his table suggests that he considered Berenice to be his “beloved,” something he may only have been ready to admit when he believed she was dead. Egaeus describes “living with in my own heart” as a child, meaning he did not readily express his feelings for other people no matter how close they were to him. Furthermore, he insists that he had never loved Berenice, even in “the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty.” He goes on to say, “feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.” As an unreliable narrator, Egaeus cannot always be taken entirely at his word, but his statement could explain why he became absorbed in observing the changes Berenice’s disease wrong on her body: she developed the added benefit of being an interesting object of study. Before Egaeus exhumed Berenice’s body from her crypt, he had been reading a book by Zaiat and set his book open at a passage about returning to a loved one’s grave to alleviate their concern. The implication is that this passage inspired Egaeus’s compulsion to return to Berenice’s grave, which could mean that he now considered Berenice his “beloved.”

There is reason to believe that Egaeus’s repression of his sexual desire contributed to the deterioration of his mental health, particularly after Berenice becomes ill herself. Egaeus is understandably horrified at the way Berenice’s illness changes her body and her personality, but it is particularly telling that it was only after she developed the “fatal and primary” disease of epilepsy that his own mental illness “grew rapidly.” This rapid mental deterioration is due in part of Egaeus confronting within himself the realization that he does, in fact, desire Berenice. Despite the negative impacts of her disease on her body, Berenice still maintains immaculately white teeth, which Egaeus becomes obsessed with when she smiles at him one night. White is often used to symbolize purity and virginity, and that is what Egaeus is actually becoming obsessed with possessing. During an obsessive episode, Egaeus develops the irrational thought that possessing Berenice’s untarnished teeth will restore his own mind to its untarnished state. Stealing Berenice’s teeth after he thinks she’s dead becomes a form of bodily violation, as he rips her purity away from her to keep it in a box for himself.

Egaeus desires Berenice, but he is also repulsed by this desire. The internal conflict Egaeus experiences between these two things ultimately feed into the mental illness that drives him to mutilate Berenice’s body. Denied the opportunity to possess Berenice by what appears to be her death, and unable to reconcile himself to it, Egaeus steals a tangible symbol of her purity: her immaculately white teeth. The true horror, however, is that Berenice does not die, and Egaeus will have to live with the guilt of knowing he gave in to his base desires and irreparably harmed Berenice.