Berenice

Gothic literature developed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. This genre typically features elements such as decay, ruins, secrets, “madness,” domestic spaces, and the inescapability of the past. European novels such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are among the best-known novels of this movement. Some Gothic literature includes supernatural elements, while other works, such as “Berenice,” rely on the morbid parts of real life to shape the plot. The term Gothic refers to a medieval style of architecture, and many works of Gothic literature are reflections upon the medieval past, which many people viewed as a particularly violent, superstitious, and grim period of history. However, American writers, like Poe, who did not live in a landscape filled with medieval ruins, used Gothic literature to explore ideas of moral degeneration and social decline through a Protestant Christian lens. A common trope of Gothic fiction is that domestic spaces, usually a place of protection and comfort, can conceal disturbing secrets or become compromised when malevolent forces take up residence within them.

Gothic literature often features old, ruinous buildings, such as the ancient mansion of Egæus’s family in “Berenice.” Many other works by Poe include Gothic elements, particularly stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher“ (1940), which also involves a woman who is buried alive and a man who experiences mental illness. The horrific and violent elements of “Berenice” were apparently so upsetting to readers that the story was republished in 1840 with several paragraphs removed—those that imply that Egæus may have been aware that Berenice was alive before her burial. In a letter to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, Poe justifies his work by claiming that the story “approaches the very verge of bad taste,” but that other established European writers have written about equally macabre subjects (Poe, Edgar Allan. Letter to Thomas W. White. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 30 Apr. 1835). Poe saw himself as similar to other highly regarded authors who wrote Gothic fiction and believed that depictions of horrific subjects could have artistic value beyond their ability to shock or disgust an audience.