Blog Set #11

                                       Berenice

Egaeus grow up in a gloomy mansion and was always in the library which is also where he was born and his mother died. His cousin Berenice grew up with him and also lived at the mansion. Berenice was a cheerful and lively girl until a disease affected her. Berenice turned into a sad and gloomy looking girl inside and out. Egaeus ends up marrying her which is weird because they’re cousins. Egaeus develops his own disease himself called monomania which is an obsession over one thing. His cousin or should I say wife, had false impressions of death that came with her disease but she always woke up from them. Egaeus monomania didn’t seem bad until he saw Berenice smile and got obsessed with her teeth. The next night Egaeus was told that Berenice was dead. Coincidence? I think not. When he went to the funeral he said that her teeth were shown. He says he doesn’t remember anything that happened after the funeral but he knew something had happened. Then one of his servants made him put the puzzle pieces together by saying that someone violated Berenice’s grave. He noticed his dirty close, dental surgery instruments, nail marks on his hands, and 32 actually teeth that feel out of the box. So was Berenice ever truly dead? I don’t think she was because where would he had gotten the nail marks on his hands. He literally blacked out and did something horrible without even noticing. Just like every other women in Poe’s poems Berenice was beautiful and ends up dying.

The Furnished Room

A young unnamed man searches for the love of his life in a large city. He commits suicide after not being able to find her. He dies without ever knowing that his loved one had also committed suicide in the same room only a week earlier. The young man asks the housekeeper about his loved one, but gets a horrible reply. He kills himself with the gas from the lamp. The story ends with the two housekeepers talking about the girl, who the unnamed man was searching for, who died in the room. Why didn’t the housekeepers tell him what happened? Did they not know it was the same girl?

The Boarded Window

This story took place in 1830 where a man named Murlock lived. His house had a boarded window and one single door which led many to question why he had it. Maybe he had some type of secret, who knows. I believe he had it up because he was trying to keep something away. He was left alone after his wife passed away. Murlock was found dead in his cabin due to natural cause but we all know that wasn’t the case. Legend has it that Murlock found his wife with a fever and tried to do as much as he could. Murlock prepared his wife for her funeral and he didn’t shed one tear. In his sleep he hears a cry which he says it was a cry from a “beast”. He hears footsteps in his cabin and senses that someone was there. The table suddenly hits him and he grabs his gone. He finds out that it was a panther dragging his dead wife away. He sees that the animal’s ear was ripped off, could that possibly been that wife? Was she ever dead or did she come back to life? 

Update:The activity in class really did break down all the elements of each of these stories. The supernatural elements were probably the best of them all because most of them have you thinking if it really happened or not. In Berenice there really isn’t any supernatural things but the language makes it seem like it. In the Furnish Room he smells her perfume and feels her presence. Now in the boarded window, was the wife alive the whole time? Did she come back to life? No one really knows, but isn’t that the best thing about science fiction? To think about many scenarios that might of happened. It’s like making up your own story but in your point of view. There can be many ways to look at a story; it all ends up in your hands on what you believe. To me that is the best part of this genre. Science Fiction is all about perspective. In every single one of these horror stories there is always a lost love. In Berenice, he lost his mother and his fist love. The madness he had was kind of creepy, the way he unconsciously took her teeth. When he would just talk about random stuff like fairyland.