Edgar Allan Poe's Berenice Sparknotes

Critical Response to Jung’s “Poe’s Berenice”

Jung, Yonjae. “Poe’s Berenice.” The Explicator, Vol. 68, no. 4 (2010): 227-30.
Poe, Edgar A. “Berenice.” In Edgar Allen Poe: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays, 225-33. New
York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996.

Yonjae Jung’s “Poe’s Berenice” uses psychoanalysis to explain the morose themes in Edgar Allen Poe’s Berenice by using Freudian and Lacanian methods of analysis. Jung argues that Egaeus’s fascination with Berenice’s teeth is explained though the Oedipus complex and that her teeth represents vagina dentata and portend to Eugaeu’s fear of castration and of female sexuality. Jung then uses Lacanian theories of the mirror stage and objet petit a to explain how Egaeus’s fascination

Jung, using the Freudian interpretation of Marie Bonaparte and Gregory S. Jay, makes the connection that Berenice represents the mother in the Oedipus complex and that her teeth represent vagina dentata. Vagina dentata is a term used for a metaphorical vagina with teeth. Jung argues that the teeth represented in this way shows that Egaeus is too afraid to approach Berenice as his sexual

Firstly, the author appears to use vagina dentata and the fear of sexual desire as a biased way to explain Egaeus’s deviancy. At the beginning of the article, Jung makes the claim that the short story “is one of [Poe’s] most morbid and grotesque tales.” He continues by stating, “the tale has often been criticized as horrible, offensive, gruesome, and repulsive.”2 Jung is painting the reader a picture of the deviance of the narrator in Poe’s tale without giving examples as to who states that the tale is horrible, offensive, gruesome, and repulsive. Secondly, Jung states that Egaeus only becomes fascinated with Berenice after she becomes stricken with her ailment.2 This is contradictory to Jung’s point when he argues that Berenice is his object of the narrator’s sexual desire, but Poe’s text does not support that statement. Instead, the narrator’s monomania keeps him occupied. He readily admits that despite her desirable looks, he had never loved Berenice when he says, “During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. ” From this, we can see that if the narrator had any sort of fascination with Berenice, it would have been purely intellectual rather than passionate or