The Third Day of Poe: Bernice

Bernice is a strange short piece of fiction that, while not overwhelming in atmosphere or horror, does tease with hints of premature burial, obsession, madness, and dentistry.

The narrator, Egaeus, is about to marry his cousin, Bernice, who is wasting from an unknown ailment. What is apparent early on is that he has an odd fixation on the morbid and his thoughts are full of visions and fancies which, in most cases, would make him a romantic and soulful person.
In this case, like all of Poe's characters, it does not.

Bernice, once as vibrant as Egaeus is gloomy, has declined and her soon-to-be husband falls ill himself with a malady of the mind; a monomania (a pathological preoccupation) that changes her in his mind from a living creature into something that is both more and less. In a scene where she comes to speak with him her appearance is described as nearly corpse-like, and yet when she smiles, he is captivated by her teeth.
"Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!"


It should be humorous, the idea of a person so obsessed with another's teeth. t isn't. Egaeus agonizes and each written thought leads the reader to the conclusion that he is, or soon will be, insane. Even the  death of Bernice does little to rouse him. It is not until after she has be entombed that he suffers from a blackout and, upon awakening in the study, is filled with an overwhelming horror. Before him on the desk is a box that, until that moment, had never held his attention with the same weight.

What, he wonders, is in that box that so terrifies him?

When an attendant comes with the news that Bernice's grave has been violated and her still living body mutilated. At this point there is no need for Poe to point out he muddied and bloody clothes, nor to the spade by the wall, or even the box's contents.

The reader already knows what is in that box.