Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman
Egaeus, the narrator of
Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice: A
Tale,” which was published in the March 1835 issue of the
Southern Literary Messenger,
was considered, by some of the story's “early readers” to suffer
from “monomania.” Indeed, Egaeus identifies this malady as the
“disease” that afflicts him; the condition, he admits, is
aggravated by his “immoderate use of opium,” a drug the use of
which, for recreational or other purposes, was legal in Poe's day
(although Poe himself did not use the drug):
.
. . my own disease . . . . monomania . . . consisted in a morbid
irritability of the nerves immediately affecting those properties of
the mind, in metaphysical science termed the attentive.
. . . I fear that it is . . . in no manner possible to convey to the
mind of the general merely reader, an adequate idea of that nervous
intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of
meditation (not to speak technically) busied, and as it were, buried
themselves in the contemplation of even the most common objects of
the universe.
Eventually,
his gaze falls upon the teeth of his cousin, who suffers from
catatonia and who, Egaeus believes, is dying. As he beholds her
wasted image, contemplating “her thin and shrunken lips,”
Berenice smiles. For Egaeus, her smile is one “of peculiar meaning,
[revealing] the teeth of the changed Berenice.” Egaeus reacts with
horror, proclaiming, “Would to God that I had never beheld them, or
that, having done so, I had died!”
At
the time, psychology, as a science (even today, this classification
is suspect among many scientists), was considered a division of
philosophy. In Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science
(1786) Imamnuel Kant (1724-1804) had recognized that psychology is
unscientific because the object of its study (first identified as the
psyche, or soul, and then as thought, or cognition, and then, later
still, as human behavior) cannot be quantified. Later, in The
Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl
Popper (1902-1994) suggests that any scientific hypothesis should be
falsifiable through experimentation or observation (the empirical
method), a test that psychology often fails.
Be
that as it may, even today, perhaps for the want of anything else,
psychology retains authority in courts of law and other social
venues. In Poe's time, the better educated among the general public
might have been persuaded by the claims of early psychologists, just
as they were by the pronouncements of phrenologists. In general,
however, many of Poe's readers would have been ignorant even of the
rudimentary psychology of their day. To them, Poe's accounts of the
effects of certain clusters of behavior now considered to be
symptomatic of particular mental disorders to which contemporary
psychologists (but not their predecessors) have put a name would have
seemed mysterious, because their causes were unknown (as, indeed, is
the case with regard to many such conditions even now), which is why
therapy frequently avails little as a method of “treatment.”
(Drugs have proven a more effective means of treatment, in some
cases, a fact which seems to support Dr. Thomas Szasz's contention,
in The Myth of Mental
Illness, that “mental
illness,” as such, does not exist; what does exist, he claims, is
aberrant behavior caused by organic problems.)
We
may not understand the workings of the soul or cognition or human
behavior or whatever psychologists claim to study any better today
than our ancestors did, but many members of the general public are
satisfied by their belief that we do. By identifying the symptoms
Poe's characters display, some contemporary literary critics and
others have diagnosed the mental disorders from which these
characters seem to suffer. However, again, these concepts and their
bases would have been unknown to Poe and his readers.
The
narrator of “Berenice: A Tale,”
therefore, was not suffering from monomania. Instead, he suffers
“from what is now called obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),” a
type of “anxiety disorder” characterized by
.
. . recurrent, disturbing, unwanted, anxiety-producing obsessions
(insistent thoughts or ruminations that at least initially are
experienced as intrusive or absurd) or compulsions (repetitive
ritualistic behaviors, or mental actions such as praying or counting,
and purposeful actions that are intentional, even though they may be
reluctantly performed because they are considered abnormal,
undesirable, or distasteful to the subject.) The compulsion may
consist of ritualistic, stereotyped behavior or it may be a response
to an obsession or to the rules that the person feels obliged to
follow. The obsession often involves the thought of harming others or
ideas that the subject feels are gory, sexually perverse, profane, or
horrifying (Campbell's
Psychiatric Dictionary,
ninth edition).
Admittedly,
this summary of the disorder describes Egaeus's behavior almost to a
“T.” He is undoubtedly obsessed with the teeth of his cousin,
Berenice, so much so that, visiting her tomb, he rips the teeth from
her jaws. As horrific as this revelation is, it is not the most
horrible shock that awaits Poe's reader at the end of this tale of
terror. For that disclosure, one must read the story for him- or
herself.
In
earlier posts, we've considered how an author, by withholding the
cause of the bizarre effects he or she presents at the beginning and
middle of a story (and continues to depict well into the final
division of the narrative), before revealing, at last, the cause of
these effects, can repeatedly generate fear while maintaining or
heightening suspense. Partly by sheer luck—being active as a writer
during a time when psychology had not yet made an attempt to
identify, describe, and categorize mental disorders as a way of
diagnosing and treating them—and, possibly, by design (Poe often
does not identify the causes of his effects, leaving them mysterious
through the lack of a complete context)—Poe accomplishes just these
ends. “Berenice: A Tale” seems all the more mysterious, macabre,
and horrific to those modern readers among us who are not well-versed
in psychology. By dint of the narrator's strange conduct, which is
not explained by the outdated concept of “monomania,” we are left
in the dark as to the cause of Egaeus's bizarre behavior, making it
seem all the more mysterious. (The same is true of those who reject
the claim that psychology is a science and continue to regard it as
little more than unfounded speculation.) There is no reason that
writers today cannot, again, follow in the footsteps of Poe,
emulating his genius as a storyteller who was given to the creation
of horror stories in a class by themselves: present bizarre behavior
without explaining (or explaining away) its cause.
For
critics of psychology, including disbelievers in its mythological
aspects, who reject the study of the soul, or of cognition, or of
human behavior, or of whatever psychologists claim to study, as
having a scientific basis, such “disorders” as OCD, can still
have value, as types of exercises of the sort that the ancient Greek
philosopher Theophrastus (c.
371-c. 287 BC) developed in his Characters.
Its pages describe thirty types
of characters, including “The Flatterer,” “The Garrulous Man,”
“The Boor,” “The Reckless Man,” “The Gossip,” and “The
Superstitious Man.” The descriptions summarize the behaviors of
these various characters, much as the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (now
in its edition) describes the symptoms of various “mental
disorders.” Indeed, looking upon the DSM
not as a clinical source, but as a writing resource similar to
Theophrastus's character sketches, can provide a similar useful
resource, minus the DSM's
psychological trappings.
In
future posts, we will consider more of the character types (i. e.,
“mental disorders”) among Poe's cast of grotesques.
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