Berenice (Poe)
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Berenice is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1835 . In it, the first-person narrator's slipping into a mental illness is portrayed, which ultimately causes him to commit a horrific act - without his being able to remember it.
action
The ailing first-person narrator Egeus grows up in the castle of his ancestors together with his cousin, the graceful and lively Berenice. After a while, Berenice becomes infected with an epilepsy-like illness that weakens her body, disfigures her essence and clouds her mind. Egeus, too, sinks into a state of mental derangement in which he concentrates for hours and days only on banal objects or single read sentences, sinking into them, only to emerge from this trance-like state every now and then and a certain degree of mental clarity to win back. Despite the mysterious infirmity of both protagonists , Egeus Berenice promises marriage "in a bad hour".
"The day we had set for the wedding was approaching." Egeus believes he is alone in his study . But suddenly Berenice stands in front of him in dark clothes. He is shocked by her emaciated, tall figure and the sight of her lifeless eyes and her "thin, shriveled lips". When, without saying a word, she opens her mouth with a “special, meaningful smile”, he then feels completely dominated by the “white ghost of her teeth” and believes “that only her possession [him] will ever have peace, ever The mind can return. ”Until the next evening he sinks into a kind of monomania , from which the scream of a servant startles him. He learns that Berenice “is no more! She had had an epileptic attack early that morning. Well, when night fell, the preparations for the funeral were finished ”.
At this point there follows an amnesia of the first-person narrator that is decisive for the effect of the narrative , which Poe describes as follows:
- I knew it was midnight and that Berenice had been buried after sunset. But I had no idea what had happened in the meantime. My memory of it was a feeling like horror that made its indeterminacy only more gruesome, like horror that made its non-objectivity only more hideous. It was a terrible hour of my life, filled with hazy, unspeakable, hideous memories. I tried to see the reality on which they were based; in vain!
Then a servant “pale as someone who has stepped out of the grave” enters the library room. While Egeus is looking at a small, well-known box on his desk with an incomprehensible horror, the servant reports "of the desecration of the grave, of the disfigured body torn from the shroud, which was still moaning, still pulsing, still alive!" tells Egeus about his clothes soiled with dirt and blood, about his hands scratched by fingernails and the spade on the wall. In a panic, Egeus then opens the box, it slips away from him and "dental instruments fall out and thirty-two small, white objects that shimmer like ivory" - Berenice's teeth, as not expressly stated, but the reader is without a doubt clear.
interpretation
The key to a biographically oriented interpretation of the story is likely to be found in the second paragraph of the story:
- All the memories from my early youth are closely connected with this room and its books, about which I will not say anything more. In this room my mother died. I was born here.
Poe had lost his mother as a toddler. The formulation used here allows the possibility that Egeus' mother died giving birth, that is, that he involuntarily killed her by giving birth. In his cousin Virginia Clemm, who like his mother also suffered from tuberculosis (and was supposed to die from it), Poe had found a partner. The fetishistic focus on details, in the course of the narrative on Berenice's teeth, is on the one hand characteristic of the shifted perception of the opium consumer, but on the other hand it is also an expression of the fear of incest with regard to the mother's lover : the wedding does not come about, and it is not without reason First-person narrator emerges:
- I knew for sure that I had not loved her (Berenice) in the shining days of her incomparable beauty.
Poe may have chosen the name Berenice because there is a constellation called Haar der Berenice . The hair played a special role shortly before her death when it turned from black to yellow:
- Her hair, once pitch black, fell partly over her forehead and shaded her hollow temples with countless curls of a screaming yellow color, the fantastic sight of which contrasted cruelly with the weary sadness of her features.
It has been suggested that this hair color corresponds to that of "Life in Death" in The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge , who was highly revered by Poe .
Motto and quote
Berenice is the English form of the ancient name Berenike . In Poe's time it was pronounced in such a way that it rhymed with "very spicy". The Latin motto, which is taken up again in the text, is translated: "My friends told me that I would find relief from my misery if I visited the grave of my loved ones." The quote "Que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments" (translation: "That all her steps were feelings.") Refers to the dancer Marie Sallé .
expenditure
- Verlag Klaus Bielefeld, Friedland 1999 ISBN 3932325877
- POE: Stories. Series: International Classics, Work Edition. German Book Association, Gütersloh 1959 a. ö. (License from Winkler Verlag Munich). From American English
- again Reclam's Universal Library , Stuttgart 1989 ISBN 3150086191
- Poe: Romantic love stories: Morella, Eleonora, Berenice, The oval portrait, Ligeia. Translated by Paul Steegemann . Four drawings and binding by Ernst Schütte . The Zweeman Verlag - Robert Goldschmidt, Hanover 1919
- Online edition see web links
Edits
- In 2004, Durs Grünbein made Poes Berenice the basis of a libretto that was set to music by Johannes Maria Staud .
- Edgar Allan Poe (radio play series) , radio play, freely based on Poe
- Éric Rohmer filmed the story in 1954. Rohmer himself played the main role.
Web links
- Original English text
- The opperation by Staud / Grünbein
- Further criticism of the Staud / Grünbein opera
notes
- ^ Translators A. von Bosse, M. Bretschneider, J. von der Goltz, H. Kauders and W. Widmer; Afterword by John O. McCormick. Without ISBN
- ↑ pp. 19-29. Further edition by Artemis & Winkler - Patmos, Düsseldorf 2001, ISBN 3538069336 . Available in online bookshops
- ^ Ernst Heinrich Conrad Schütte, 1890-1951, stage designer and graphic artist