Mark Dery has a fun post about various fears of the human mouth, starting from dental horror. It's grand Dery, an energetic romp across fields and topics with a canny sense of humor and the surreal.
This post's image, drawn from Dery's post, is for one of Poe's oddest tales. "Berenice" (1835) concerns yet another dead woman returning from the grave, but via... her teeth.
They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!...
The teeth! --the teeth! --they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.
I've always thought "Berenice" was uber-creepy for just this reason. Perhaps teeth are horrifying because they're where the skull is exposed and visible, an ever-present reminder of the persistent bone beneath the decaying flesh. *shiver*
Posted by: Gardner Campbell | January 12, 2005 at 19:04