13 Days Until Halloween Night (13) - Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice"

BLOT: (18 Oct 2010 - 03:57:59 PM)

13 Days Until Halloween Night (13) - Edgar Allan Poe's "Berenice"

Written 1835, the same year he married 13 year old Virginia Clem, "Berenice" is sometimes cited as Poe's first horror tale. Not true, but it looks to be the first time he published a horror story under his own name. It might be of interest to know that the most common version of the text is expurgated. Upon its publication, public disdain at the "unnecessary" depravity of its ending led to a removal of four paragraphs. In the wider context of the thing, those four paragraphs do very little besides make the main character's actions a slice more sympathetic, but it seems to have worked a bit to settle down the public. It was reprinted in the second volume of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabasque, and the copy I have has the full version, but copies I have seen in all of the Complete Tales sort of reprints has been short of those four paragraphs.

So, for my first of 13 Halloween goodies, I'll start with this: Poe's first [with name] horror story, and a classic example of censorship in the horror genre. It is also a good example of Poe's largest failing: his overwrought prose.

The unedited text of "Berenice" taken from Southern Literary Messenger

Sample: Was it my own excited imagination—or the misty influence of the atmosphere—or the uncertain twilight of the chamber—or the grey draperies which fell around her figure—that caused it to loom up in so unnatural a degree? I could not tell. Perhaps she had grown taller since her malady. She spoke, however, no word, and I—not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable...My burning glances at length fell upon her face...The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once golden hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with ringlets now black as the raven's wing, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and I shrunk involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted: and, in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!

TAGS: 13 Days to Halloween Night, 2010

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010