That is exactly why a horror story belongs in Odonto News. Berenice<\/em> is not just a Gothic classic; it is also a window into an era when teeth were easily lost, pulled without anaesthesia and, for many people, synonymous with pain. Reading it today helps explain where much of the fear that still surrounds the dental chair comes from, and why modern dentistry is devoted to the opposite of what Egaeus does: keeping teeth.<\/p>\n “Berenice” in 30 seconds<\/strong><\/p>\n Most nineteenth-century horror stories have aged badly: their castles, curses and apparitions now look like stage props. Berenice<\/em> has not. Its horror does not depend on the supernatural, but on three ideas that still work just as they did then.<\/p>\n The first is obsession. Egaeus is not a classic villain; he is a man who loses control of his own attention, who cannot stop looking at a detail until that detail consumes him. Anyone who has ever had an idea they could not shake understands, at least in a small way, what Poe is describing.<\/p>\n The second is the fear of being buried alive, a very real anxiety in the nineteenth century, when the medical criteria for declaring death were far less precise than they are today. Poe would return to this theme again and again.<\/p>\n The third is the most uncomfortable: the smile. It is the first thing we show other people, the part of the body we use to greet, charm and persuade. Poe took that friendly gesture and turned it into the centre of a nightmare. Those three ideas are worth keeping in mind as we walk through the story.<\/p>\n When he wrote Berenice<\/em>, Poe was far from the celebrated author we know. He lived in Baltimore, in a modest house, with his aunt Maria Clemm and his cousin Virginia, whom he would marry in 1836. He had published a few books of poetry that barely sold and was looking for steady work that would let him live by writing.<\/p>\n He sent the story to the Southern Literary Messenger<\/em>, a magazine founded only the year before in Richmond by the printer Thomas W. White. White published it in the March 1835 issue. As Poe explained in a letter to the editor, the story came from a bet: someone had assured him he could not write anything effective on such a strange subject if he treated it seriously. Poe set out to prove otherwise.<\/p>\n That detail matters when reading the story: from the start, Berenice<\/em> was a deliberate exercise in pushing horror to the limit. Poe knew exactly where he wanted to go, and every page prepares the final blow.<\/p>\n The tale opens with a Latin epigraph, attributed to an Arab poet, that says something like: “My companions told me that if I visited my friend’s grave, my sorrows would be somewhat relieved.” It is the first clue. From the very first line, Poe warns us that this story ends at a tomb.<\/p>\n The narrator, Egaeus, belongs to an old family and lives in his ancestors’ mansion. He was born in the library, spent his childhood among books and hardly ever leaves it. His inner life is more real to him than the outside world.<\/p>\n Egaeus describes with clinical precision what he calls his monomania. It is not daydreaming: a dreamer lets his thoughts expand and drift away from what inspired them. Egaeus experiences the opposite. His mind closes in on something trivial, a letter in the margin of a book, the shadow of a piece of furniture, the flame of a lamp, and contemplates it for hours, repeating a common word until it loses all meaning. That detail becomes more important than anything else.<\/p>\n His cousin Berenice grew up beside him, and Poe presents them as opposites. He is sickly, gloomy, shut away in his books. She is agile, cheerful, full of energy, always outdoors. Egaeus admits something disturbing: in the days when Berenice was healthy and beautiful, he never loved her. He contemplated her as an object of analysis, as an idea, not as a person.<\/p>\n Then misfortune strikes Berenice. Poe describes an illness like epilepsy that transforms her completely: her body, her character, her whole way of being. Worst of all are the trances, so deep they resemble death itself, from which she wakes abruptly.<\/p>\n As she wastes away, Egaeus’s monomania grows worse. And here comes one of the most perverse twists in the story: it is precisely now, when Berenice is no longer the radiant young woman she was, that Egaeus speaks to her of marriage. He did not choose her when she was healthy; he becomes engaged to her once she has turned into a fragile, almost ghostly figure.<\/p>\n For readers in 1835, those trances were not a fanciful device. The fear of mistaking deep unconsciousness for death was common, and Poe uses it to plant a doubt that will not be resolved until the end: how dead can someone be who only looks dead?<\/p>\n The central scene takes place on a winter afternoon, one of those unusually mild, misty days. Egaeus is sitting in the library, lost in thought, and when he looks up he finds Berenice standing in front of him.<\/p>\n He describes her in chilling detail: the high, pale forehead, the hair that was once black and now falls in a vivid yellow, the lifeless eyes, the thin, shrunken lips. And then she smiles. In that gesture her lips part and reveal her teeth.<\/p>\n Berenice leaves the room, but her teeth stay behind. Egaeus keeps seeing them, sharp, white, perfect, each with its own shape and place. For a mind like his, it is the detail he had been waiting for. What would be a kind gesture to anyone else becomes, for him, the ultimate object of his obsession.<\/p>\n From that moment on, Egaeus can think of nothing else. Berenice’s teeth fill his days and nights. He sees them in the gloom, imagines them on every surface, studies them in his mind from every angle. He even repeats a French phrase claiming that Berenice’s teeth were “ideas”.<\/p>\n In his diseased logic, that phrase explains everything. If the teeth are ideas, possessing them would mean possessing something essential, something that would restore his reason. He convinces himself that only by having them in his power could he find peace again.<\/p>\n What is remarkable is that Poe needs no monsters or ghosts to build tension. It is enough to show, from the inside, how a mind closes in on a single object until it loses control. The reader understands where all this is heading before the narrator does.<\/p>\n Warning: what follows reveals the ending of the story.<\/strong><\/p>\n One day the news arrives: that very morning, Berenice suffered an epileptic seizure and has died. By nightfall, the grave is ready to receive her. It all happens within a few hours.<\/p>\n What follows is the most unsettling passage in the story, precisely because Poe does not narrate it. Egaeus finds himself sitting in the library again, alone, as if waking from a confused and terrible dream. He knows it is midnight, he knows Berenice has been buried, but between one moment and the next there is a void. He senses he has done something atrocious and cannot remember what.<\/p>\n On the table there is a lit lamp and, beside it, a small box. There is nothing special about it: Egaeus has seen it many times, because it belongs to the family physician. But he does not understand why it is there, and looking at it fills him with a fear he cannot explain.<\/p>\n Then a servant knocks at the door, pale with terror. He speaks in a low, broken voice: during the night a scream was heard; the household went looking for its source and found Berenice’s grave open. The disfigured body was still breathing. Berenice had been buried alive.<\/p>\n The servant points to Egaeus’s clothes: they are covered in mud and stained. Egaeus looks at his hands and finds the marks of human nails on them. Against the wall stands a spade. With a cry, he lunges at the box and tries to open it, but his hands shake and the box falls to the floor and breaks. Out roll instruments of dental surgery and thirty-two small, white, ivory-like objects.<\/p>\n Thirty-two is not a random number: it is a full adult set of teeth, wisdom teeth included. Poe left nothing half done. The story ends there, with no explanation and no punishment, just the image of the teeth scattered across the floor. Everything the reader needs to know has already been said.<\/p>\n The reaction was immediate. Several readers wrote to White to complain that the magazine had published such a thing. Poe answered him in a letter dated 30 April 1835, which is now one of the most quoted documents for understanding how he thought.<\/p>\n In it he admits the story verged on bad taste and that he would not go so far again. At the same time, he defends the genre with an almost editorial argument: the magazines that had become famous, he explains, did so with intense pieces in which the ludicrous was heightened into the grotesque and the fearful coloured into the horrible. That kind of writing, he says, is what people seek out, talk about and reprint.<\/p>\n White must have been convinced. That same year he hired Poe to work at the Southern Literary Messenger<\/em>, and the magazine became his first important platform.<\/p>\n Poe, however, kept revising the story. In the 1840 version he cut four paragraphs, including those that showed Berenice, still with signs of life, before her burial. In 1842 he even considered renaming it “The Teeth”. In the end he kept the heroine’s name.<\/p>\n Critics have noted that teeth appear as a symbol of death in several of Poe’s stories, and the reason is almost anatomical: they are the only part of the skeleton we can see in a living person. When someone smiles, they are literally showing a piece of what will remain once the rest of the body is gone.<\/p>\n In Berenice<\/em>, that symbol works in two directions. On one hand, the teeth are the only thing that stays intact while Berenice wastes away: her body deteriorates, but her smile remains white and perfect. On the other, they are the exact point where life and death meet, and Poe makes them the object that links Egaeus’s diseased love to the horror of the grave.<\/p>\n Premature burial, meanwhile, would become one of Poe’s obsessions. Years later he would write “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), in which Madeline Usher is also entombed alive, and “The Premature Burial” (1844), devoted entirely to that fear. Berenice<\/em> was one of his first attempts at the theme.<\/p>\n To understand why a box of dental instruments was so terrifying, you have to imagine what going to the dentist was like in the 1830s. In the United States, dentistry had no schools or degrees of its own. Pulling teeth was the work of barbers, blacksmiths, apothecaries and travelling dentists who went from town to town.<\/p>\n There was no anaesthesia. The first public demonstration of ether anaesthesia took place in Boston in 1846, thanks to a dentist, William Morton. Until then, an extraction was done with the patient fully awake, using tools like the dental key<\/a>, which levered the tooth until it came out. Lost teeth were often replaced with dentures made of ivory or even human teeth, as our story on Waterloo teeth<\/a> explains.<\/p>\n Change began, curiously, in the very city where Poe lived. In 1840 the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery was founded in Baltimore, and it is considered the world’s first dental school. The city where Poe imagined Egaeus was also the city where dentistry began to become a profession with training, ethics and method.<\/p>\n Read from the present, Berenice<\/em> leaves us with several ideas that go beyond the scare.<\/p>\n The first is about the smile. Poe understood something we know well today: a smile is part of our identity. It is what others remember about us, what we show in a photo, what we communicate without words. That is why the idea of losing it, or having it taken away, touches such a deep nerve.<\/p>\n The second is about fear. For centuries, teeth were associated with pain, improvisation and instruments that now look like horror-film props. That past helps explain why so many people still feel anxious before a dental visit, even though conditions are radically different.<\/p>\n The third is almost a reversal of the story. Egaeus wants to possess Berenice’s teeth at any cost; modern dentistry works so that every person keeps their own for as long as possible. Today an extraction is the last resort, not the first, and it is done with diagnosis, anaesthesia and consent. Between Egaeus’s box and a modern practice lie almost two centuries of science and care.<\/p>\n Documented:<\/strong><\/p>\n Interpretation:<\/strong><\/p>\n Berenice<\/em> works because it turns something we see every day into a threat. In real life the story is the opposite: caring for a smile is a matter of prevention, diagnosis and treatments designed to preserve.<\/p>\n At The Special Teeth in Tijuana, just across the border from San Diego, that is our everyday work: making your smile a source of confidence, not fear. If you have been putting off a check-up, request your appointment here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n It is the story of Egaeus, a man obsessed with details who develops a fixation on the teeth of his cousin and fianc\u00e9e, Berenice, after she falls ill.<\/p>\n Berenice is mistakenly buried alive. Egaeus, in a state he does not remember, violates her grave and pulls out her teeth. He finds out when he sees a spade, his mud-stained clothes and a box holding dental instruments and thirty-two teeth.<\/p>\n In March 1835, in the Southern Literary Messenger<\/em>, a Richmond, Virginia, magazine edited by Thomas W. White.<\/p>\n Because that is the number of teeth in a complete adult set, including the four wisdom teeth.<\/p>\n No. It is fiction. According to Poe himself, the story grew out of a bet over whether he could write something effective on such a strange subject.<\/p>\n The story is still free to read. Now that you know the ending, notice how many times Poe mentions a smile before the box is opened.<\/em><\/p>\n The character illustrations in this article were created with artificial intelligence for Odonto News and do not depict real people.<\/p>\n\n
Why an 1835 story still unsettles us<\/h2>\n
Poe in 1835: a broke writer and a bet<\/h2>\n
![\"Daguerreotype](\"https:\/\/thespecialteeth.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/edgar-allan-poe-daguerrotipo-1849.jpg\")
The story: Egaeus and the library<\/h2>\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Edgar_Allan_Poe,_circa_1849,_restored,_squared_off.jpg\")
Berenice’s illness<\/h2>\n
The smile that changed everything<\/h2>\n
Egaeus’s obsession with teeth<\/h2>\n
The ending of “Berenice” explained<\/h2>\n
The scandal and Poe’s letter<\/h2>\n
Why did Poe choose teeth?<\/h2>\n
Dentistry in Berenice’s time<\/h2>\n
Reflections: what “Berenice” tells us today<\/h2>\n
What is fiction and what is not<\/h2>\n
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From fiction to the dental chair<\/h2>\n
Frequently asked questions about “Berenice”<\/h2>\n
What is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Berenice” about?<\/h3>\n
How does “Berenice” end?<\/h3>\n
When and where was “Berenice” published?<\/h3>\n
Why thirty-two teeth?<\/h3>\n
Is “Berenice” based on a true story?<\/h3>\n
Sources<\/h2>\n
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