The first reason to affirm that Ligeia is not a living person is the vague information about her past. The narrator does not remember either her surname or their first meetings. Her origins are important because the past is the root to the reality. Besides, if Ligeia was so dear and important to him, it is hard to believe that he does not remember when and how they met. The only logical explanation to these facts is she never actually exists.The second reason is her idealized description. Her face is depicted with admiration; the harmony and delicacy of her features are given emphasis. Although the description of her face is quite detailed, she is portrayed as a stereotype of the classical Greek beauty and not as truly woman. “Ligeia is one of Poe’s typical heroines, beautiful, emaciated, dying.” (Buranelli, 73)
Then the narrator describes her most impressing characteristic:
And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching – yet not quite be mine – and so at length entirely depart! … Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean, in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And then one or two stars in heaven (one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from string instruments, and not infrequently by passages from books.
If the eyes are the mirror of the soul and he can not define them, then he does not know her indeed, for she does not exists. Moreover, “Poe, in other tales, seems to be obsessed with the eyes to the point of fetishisms. In Ligeia it is the lady’s eyes which represents, to her husband, the total knowledge embodied in her person.” (Hoffman, 228) In fact, “Ligeia’s intellect was immense.” (Griffith, 66) She masters languages as well as sciences and metaphysics. “She guided the narrator, a child in contrast, through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation.” (Griffith, 66) “The narrator’s was Ligeia’s student not in the sense that the dark lady was his teacher. He was a student of Ligeia in the sense that she represented the object of his studies.” (Griffith, 67)
The narrator was in love with an ideal model of beauty and intellect. “Although he makes much of the power of Ligeia’s intellect, his imaginative preoccupation with her physical beauty is highly sensuous, even voluptuous, in its intensity.” (Basler, 53) He wants to make his ideal tangible because he desires her.
Then, the narrator explains how he plans to achieve his ideal trough a quotation he has read:
“And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” Joseph Glanville
These words imply that if the will is strong, avoiding death is possible. But also they may mean, to the narrator, that it is possible to incorporate his ideal of beauty into a real woman. In fact, the narrator is obsessed with this concept. The following events in the story are, thus, a result of this thought. Now, not to question the credibility of the events he is about to narrate is difficult. In relation with this doubt, Lauber states: “The narrator madness need not mean that he is incapable of reporting accurately what he has perceived, but rather that he may be capable of perceiving realities beyond the dull commonplaces of normal life.” (Lauber, 74)
Afterwards, the narrator tells the reader that Ligeia is very ill and that she is going to die. In her last minutes of life, she asks him to read a poem written by her. “The poem is a condensation of the tale, and the philosophy – if it can be called one – which it presents, tells us that life is an unassuaged disaster, an unequal battle between mankind and the inexorable death, enacted for the amusement of angels who make no move on man’s behalf.” (Hoffman, 253) Devastated by Ligeia’s death he moves on and marries a lady named Rowena.
At any rate, Rowena is the opposite of Ligeia because she is alive, of course, she does not outstand for her interior, her intelligence, and they are physically different. Nevertheless, she is the perfect body whom incorporates the narrator’s ideal. He confesses his intentions in the design of the bridal chamber.
The bridal chamber “has its walls enshrouded in rich figured draperies which are continually agitated by some mysterious agency. The fluid shifting of the figures suggest, of course, the behavior of hypnagogic images; but the agitation of the draperies would also produce a perpetual ambiguity of architectural form, and the effect would resemble that of which Pevsner ascribes to the interior of San Vitale in Ravena; a sensation of uncertainty and of dreamlike floating.” (Wilbur, 112) In addition, the ghostly and perverse atmosphere anticipates the strange events that later occur in the room.
Besides he makes a reference to the opium. This fact is important to be considered because in the night where the story ends he is under the effects of this drug. He says:
In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug), I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, i could restore the pathways she had abandoned – ah, could it be forever? – upon the earth.
He expresses that he needs Ligeia as soon as possible. Now that his wife is sick he has a close opportunity of reaching Ligeia.
At this point he begins to feel a presence in the room. And then:
I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as from some invisible string in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid.
Taking advantage of Rowena’s illness, he poisons her, but “his obsession adapts into the pattern of hallucination by perceiving that it is distilled from the atmosphere rather than dropped from a bottle held in his own hand. He cannot in his obsession recognize the bottle or the poison physical facts, for then the power of the spirit must bow to the greater power of a merely physical drug.”(Basler, 60)
Finally, he hallucinates Ligeia has taken possession of Rowena’s body.
Here the, at last, I shrieked aloud, can I never be mistaken – this are the full, and the clack, and the wild eyes – of my lost love – of the Lady – of the LADY LIGEIA.
Conclusion
The ideal of beauty represented in Ligeia becomes an obsession. His determination to incorporate his ideal into a real woman leads him to kill Rowena. In conclusion, this tale does not deal with supernatural events but with events produced by the twisted mind of a mad man. Therefore, “Ligeia” is a psychological study of the obsession: its steps and consequences.
Bibliography
Basler, R., Stovall, F., Wilbur, R., et al. 1967. “Poe A Collection of Critical Essays.” New Jersey: Prentice Hall
Buranelli, V. 1961. “Edgar Allan Poe” New York: Twayne Publishers
Griffith, C., Lauber, J., et al. 1991. “Poe’s Tales” New Jersey: Prentice Hall
Hoffman, D. 1972. “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe” New York: Doubleday