Got Lit U5 Act1
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English
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Nov 24, 2024
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Gothic Literature Unit 5 Activity 1
Berenice and the Tell-Tale Heart: the role psychological disorders play in these stories
Throughout literature, authors adapt instances from their own lives and integrate them into their
works in order to manipulate the psychological aspects of their characters. It is a rarity, however,
for an author to produce a work that can be analyzed both biographically and psychologically.
An excellent example of such writers is Edgar Allan Poe.
Obsession in simple terms is the act of being obsessed with someone or something; to
be unable to control an idea or thought that continually runs through and consumes the mind.
There are many types of obsession as well as different levels, however, in the short stories The
tell-tale heart and Berenice it is clearly apparent that both narrators suffer from a severe
monomania, more specifically of facial attributes. In “Berenice” the narrator of this story, Egaeus,
suffers from a type of obsessive disorder, a disease that makes him fixate on objects. His cousin
Berenice in the beginning, beautiful, but later suffers from some undetermined degenerative
illness, with periods of catalepsy, that he calls trances.
The next time he becomes aware of things around him, filled with terror, he finds a lamp
and a small box in front of him. Another servant enters, telling him that a grave has been
disturbed, and a shrouded disfigured body found, still alive. Egaeus finds himself covered in
mud and blood, and opens the box to find it encloses dental instruments and "32 small, white
and ivory-looking substances" – Berenice's teeth.
The Tell-Tale Heart is told by an unidentified narrator who insists he is perfectly sane but
suffers from nervousness that causes "over-acuteness of the senses". The old man that the
narrator lives with has a clouded, pale, blue "vulture-like" eye which drives him insane literally
and figuratively. It bothers him so much that he plots to murder the old man, even though he
says that he loves him, and hates only his blind eye. The narrator, though the opposite is
apparent, insists that his meticulousness in committing the murder shows that he can’t possibly
be insane. “I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him.”
For seven nights, the narrator opens the door of the old man's room to shine a sliver of light
onto the "evil eye." However, the old man's vulture-eye is always closed, making it impossible to
"do the work," thus making the narrator go further into distress.
The damage presents itself through his writings as a neurotic obsession with death and
violence Throughout his literary works, Edgar Allen Poe mirrors his characters’ mental state to
that of his own insanity. Two examples of such works are Berenice, and the Tell-Tale Heart. The
protagonists in both tales share horrific congruencies, while at the same time remain
unparalleled in nature. Psychological disorders are the driving force behind the heinous events
that take place. To understand the actions of the protagonists, one must understand the mental
illness from which they suffered.
Poe describes both characters as sufferers of monomania- a single pathological
preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind. Emotional monomania is that in which the patient is
obsessed with only one emotion or several related to it; intellectual monomania is that which is
related to only one kind of delirious idea or ideas. In 1880, monomania was one of the seven
recognized categories of mental illness. After the 1850’s, monomania faded as a diagnostic
category in psychiatry.
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