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Date Posted: 14:28:47 04/08/07 Sun
Author: Martinelly Martins
Subject: Re: Task One Group One
In reply to: Adriana 's message, "Task One Group One" on 06:03:48 04/08/07 Sun

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE MINAS GERAIS
FALE – Faculdade de Letras
Student: Martinelly Martins

The thirty-two things that Egaeus loves


The themes in which beauty, youth and death intersect themselves can unquestionably be found in tales of the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, such as The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, The Oval Portrait, Morella and Ligea. However, the tale we are going to analyze is named Berenice and the name itself suggests us that it deals with a woman; in this case, a beautiful woman who died young and who was buried alive by mistake. But what makes Berenice peculiar and different from other Poe’s tales is the fact that the plot was based on the narrator’s obsession for a specific part of Berenice’s body: the teeth. We can believe that Berenice’s teeth reveal many things about the narrator Egaeus, not only his monomania but also he had a sexually deviant behaviour.
This sexual behaviour may be manifested through some points. First of all, it can be a manifestation of gothic inside a romantic perspective. The Gothic itself can be considered as a dark side of the Romantic Movement, since it tries to express the feelings and desires, a deviated nature that the humankind would like to hide, all the imperfection of behavior and attitude inherent to us . As a result, the gothic love expresses in a powerful way, but not always we could refer it as a sublime feeling, since gothic characters do not love in a reasonable or noble way; they demonstrate the individualism in their uncontrolled and excessive love. Then, Gothic love is formed by tension and conflicts, which can end up into terrible consequences. Like in the end of the tale when the narrator reveals himself as an unsettled man by taking out all the Berenice’s thirty-two teeth to satisfy his desire; it is similar to some cases of murders in which the killer masturbates over a chopped body of his victim.
Simultaneously to the Romantic Movement, we have the presence of individualism in gothic characters. For example, in this tale, the narration is made in first person and the protagonist tries to tell us about his desire, his mental disorder and how he is obsessed for Berenice’s teeth. He is constantly emphasizing his personal and individual feelings without taking into consideration Berenice’s ones. According to Lacan, the manifestation of passion is always an individual symptom, for when someone loves another person, he did it exclusively taking into consideration his or her own feelings, because loving is the desire of being loved, to have some recognition indeed . Then, love and desire are individualist feelings that will never fulfill themselves, because it will always be an individual search, there will be neither reciprocity nor realization.
Another point is that romanticism emphasizes irrationality and the world of imagination. All the feeling which involves the gothic character, who is in love, goes through the feeling of idealization, so the reality is not always good and perfect and the romantic character ends up living in a world that does not exist, only in his imagination. In the tale, the perfection and beauty is focalized on Berenice’s teeth. As we can see in this excerpt, when Egaeus depicts how perfect they were:
Not a speck upon the surface – not a shade on their enamel –not a line in their configuration –not an indenture in their edges – but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. (POE, par. 15)

In this case and according to Freud, we usually desire what we do not have and we want to be who we are not ; then, he was obsessed for Berenice’s teeth because he did not feel perfect, he had to make up for lack all the time. So, he loved Berenice’s teeth because it symbolizes the perfection and beauty that he did not have. As he himself told us:
(…) 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. (…) (POE, par.5)

Moreover, as the tale deals with a lonely man who consider himself imperfect and unattractive. We have to take into consideration from a psychological point of view, that all his loneliness - since his boyhood - made him more than a misanthrope man, but a person with a sexually deviant behavior. Through his narration, we know that he had spent his boyhood reading books and dissipated his youth in reverie . As a dreamer man, he was always unable to be happy with a real woman, and then he tries to concentrate all his lack of affection in particular things of his daily life. It even might be the origin of his monomania and from a Freudian conception about dealing sexuality, in which he refers to the three stages of sexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. According to Freud’s theories, when someone suffers a trauma during any of these first three stages it may result in fixation, which may lead the person to a sexual fetish. Then, Agaeus can fulfill himself only if he can get the object of his desire: Berenice’s teeth: As this excerpt show us: “…In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth….” And also: “…I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason”. (POE, pars.15, 15)
Consequently, Agaeus ends up rejecting the Romantic heroine Berenice as a woman by trying to come true his desire. She had become her wife and through all over his life she was supposed to have been the only one. But the narrator does not consider her desires, feelings and life. For Agaeus, she is just a person who carries the object of his fetish: the teeth. We can see, then, Agaeus as a gothic villain, because he avoided her to express her real feeling of woman and all his efforts were concentrated to satisfy his outrageous desire; for this reason, he was a selfish person, jealous and an individualist who kept inside a box Berenice’s thirty-two teeth and let her possibly die in a cowardly way. Berenice has never been loved indeed: Her husband and cousin only could love himself and his obsession. Therefore, Berenice was dehumanized as a person to accomplish the sexually deviant satisfaction of another person.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOTTING, Fred. Gothic. Ed. Routledge, New York: 1996.

FREUD, Sigmund. Fetischismus. 1927. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_fetish#_note-Freud Accessed April 03, 2007.
_______________FREUD, Sigmund. Wikipedia.
Accessed April 04 2007
_______________ Psychosexual development. Wikipedia, February 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosexual_development Accessed April 03, 2007

LACAN, Jacques. No Subject: Love.
http://nosubject.com/Loves Accessed April 03, 2007

POE, Edgar Allan. Berenice – A Tale. Ed. Southern Literary Messenger. March, 1835. First Printing. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. 12 April 1998. http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/bernicea.htm. Accessed April 03, 2007.


>Task One
>
>Reply to this message with your text (4 to 6
>paragraphs long). Consider everything we discussed in
>class based on the handouts (Oshima and Hogue; Smalley
>et al.). Look for ‘Appendices’ and ‘Citações’ at the
>xerox office, for extra support. Get busy, work hard,
>and good luck.
>Adriana

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Replies:

  • Re: Task One Group One -- Marcelo Antonio Fiuza Coelho, 20:10:21 04/10/07 Tue
  • Re: Task One Group One -- Marcelo Antonio Fiuza Coelho, 20:20:21 04/10/07 Tue
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