LITR 4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments

Sample Student Research Project 2018: Essay

Kristina Koontz

Truth vs Fantasy: The Romanticizing of Women in Reality and Fiction

          Approaching the female figure of the Romantic period, real or fictional, from a modern feminist perspective, is a tricky thing akin to tightrope walking. It was part of the style of the time to romanticize women, but then again it was part of the trend to romanticize basically everything, from religion to nature to human beings to the past. Men and women were both subject to that style; it was not unique to one gender or the other. Men were typically portrayed as dark, brooding heroes while women were often depicted through the fair lady or dark lady portrayal. But when comparing examples of the texts and writings created during the period, there is a notable shift when it comes to the description of women. Male authors and the male figures in their works tend to heavily idealize, even exalt, the female figure. Female authors do not seem show this same tendency. Female figures are idealized in some instances, but not to the extent they become almost inhuman in their beauty and perfection. This depiction in turn seems dependent on whether or not the figure portrayed, especially the female figure, is real or fictional. There is a stark contrast between the fictional Lady Ligeia created by Edgar Allan Poe and the depiction of historical figure Sojourner Truth in the Libyan Sybil by Harriet Beecher Stowe, brought on by the Romantic style and some underlying sexual bias between authors.

          Edgar Allan Poe is a name synonymous with horror and gothic, perhaps more than any other Romantic writer of the time. He is most known for his gothic poetry but was also a prolific prose writer. Female figures play central role in both mediums (though most notably in the poetic avenue) but nowhere is the central female figure more heavily romanticized through appearance than in the short story Ligeia. In the story, Ligeia is a woman the narrator met in Europe and brought back to America after marrying her. From the way the narrator describes Ligeia, one might be excused for thinking she is inhuman. Large dark eyes, extremely pale skin, dark hair, beautiful lips, facial features so perfect the narrator has trouble describing them, a poet who writes in the gothic style – an altogether perfect woman for the narrator. Poe does play with psychological horror frequently in his works under the guise of supernatural. So could Ligeia be a psychological fantasy rather than a ghost? Was she ever real to begin with? That so happens to be the line of interpretation taken by Roy Basler. Ligeia is not real in the sense she is fictional, but also because in the fictional world of the story she is fictional (Basler). She is a fantasy of the narrator’s who never actually existed, but the narrator is convinced she is real. Ligeia is an obsession made psychologically manifest. That does explain the eerie perfection with which the narrator describes her (and the inordinate, unhealthy lengths he goes in describing her physical beauty, or at least the narrator’s idea of beauty). It further might explain the weird “apparition” of her who appears to narrator at the end. It is left up to interpretation whether Ligeia has returned from the dead or if the narrator is suffering a hallucination, something Jack and June Davis agree with Basler on. Ligeia isn’t a real ghost, she’s a hallucination, a manifestation of the narrator’s longing for a woman so inhumanly perfect for him he cannot have her save in his own mind (Basler).

Evidence in the text does support this. At the very start of the story he describes Ligeia as being like “the radiance of an opium dream” (Poe 1838). Near the end, when her apparition appears, he admits that prior he had “become a bounden slave to the trammels of opium” (Poe 1838). Opium and Ligeia seem to have a peculiar link in the story. He never does use the same phraseology to describe Lady Rowena, the woman he married after Ligeia’s “death”. Rowena herself is idealized as the “fair lady” stylization to parallel Ligeia’s “dark lady” but there is a creepiness factor that is mentioned by Basler concerning the relation between the two. If Ligeia is a fantasy and Rowena is real, the “three or four dark drops of a brilliant ruby colored fluid” (Poe 1838) into her glass and Rowena’s “rapid change for the worse” (Poe 1838) has a distinct negative interpretation. Basler argues Rowena was killed in order to bring back the fantasy wife, Ligeia (Basler). That Ligeia does not appear during Rowena’s stint as wife, only showing up again after her death, might support this. Rowena was a distraction to his mind, a real world diversion from his mental obsession. When she dies, and also when the narrator becomes addicted to opium, only then does Ligeia reappear. Coincidence? Basler thinks not.

Basler’s interpretation of Ligeia as “the idee fixe”, as psychological obsession, ties in with the eerie, ethereal imagery surrounding Ligeia. Jack and June Davis agree with Basler that Ligeia is very likely an imaginary being. “He leaves the reader to differentiate between imagined and factual events,” since he never outright spells out this conclusion (Davis and Davis, 1970) but the evidence suggests imaginary events. Opium being involved helps to further this unrealistic imagery. Both admit Basler comes the closest in his interpretative analysis of Ligeia but admit he also “misses the crucial significance of Ligeia’s dream-like character” in the first half of the story (Davis and Davis 1970). If she is the result of the narrator’s imagination, then of course she is not going to seem fully human. The narrator even says “she came and departed as a shadow” (Poe 1838) which makes her seem transient and ghostly. The narrator describes her as being utter perfection in appearance, from her stature to her eyes to her lips to her cheeks to the way she walks (Poe 1838). Everything about her is unrealistically perfect, to the point he makes it sound as if he’s describing an idol or goddess rather than a human being, which furthers the “obsession” interpretation of Basler. This may be the narrator romanticizing and idealizing her as he remembers her, but Jack and June Davis both point out a seeming gap in the narrator’s words that acts as a red flag: not only can the narrator not remember where he first met Ligeia, he also doesn’t remember her last name (Davis and Davis, 1970).  If the narrator was so passionately in love with her, and misses her so much he can recall her physical appearance easily, why then can he not recall such crucial details about her? Because, as Basler agrees, she isn’t real. She never was real. Ligeia is like an imaginary friend a child might have, brought on by psychological longing and a repeated use of opium.

I do not think it is mere artistic license or even biographical fallacy that Poe uses “I” for the narrator’s perspective in Ligeia. One could very easily argue the narrator is Poe, in it that Poe is putting some of himself into the character rather than directly is – self-insertion with a light twist. In that interpretation, the obsession of Ligeia is a creation of Poe himself, reflecting his own obsession with beautiful women, in particular his peculiar focus on beautiful women dying. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” as he says in “The Philosophy of Composition” (Poe 1846). That statement reveals Poe, like many antebellum men at the time, objectify women. A woman is more of a plot device or plot catalyst than a character. Indeed, Ligeia seems to be more of a decoration than a woman, the way a pretty statue sits in a room and adds an aesthetic to it, like she’s part of the scene setting rather than living in it. Her “ivory skin” and her “marble hand” does seem to invoke a statue more than a human being (Poe 1846). It in turn seems to harken to the Greek myth of Pygmalion who loved his statue of his “perfect” wife so deeply that Aphrodite brought it to life. Poe’s background might have bearing on this obsession with beautiful women. Poe lost several female figures in his life which is probably where his topic matter stems from (specifically the “pretty lady dies suddenly” trope) so it would not be far-fetched to assume he would fictionalize a perfect woman through his prose and poetry to replace the ones he lost. Fiction, like fantasy, is an escape from reality. However, it needs to be addressed that Poe seems to lead more toward outright obsession than mere inspiration because of how frequently he uses his favorite trope.

In contrast, women writers of the same period take a different stance in their depictions of female characters, real or fictional. They are not just pretty objects to admire (dare I say “worship” when it comes to Poe) but characters with genuine stories. They have lives. Some of the later pieces by female authors took inspiration from both the abolitionist movement and the first women’s rights movement. That was the time when women authors really let their voices be heard, directly addressing those issues through fiction and essays. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Beecher Stowe were two of the women to do both and through their respective works address these two key issues.

Sojourner Truth is among the best-known names in American history. Her “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech is where her fame stems from. Made during the Akron, Ohio convention for women’s rights, it is recited to this day for its simple but powerful ribbing of the status quo imposed on females and the double standard that Truth herself had to deal with. Since she was raised a slave, she was not treated the way women were supposed to be treated. She is not this delicate dainty flower that needs to be coddled and assisted at every turn, who can’t look after herself. As she says, “no man could head me!” when it came to physical labor (Truth, 1851). She was a hard laborer and a mother during her time as a slave, and yet despite that she was still treated as less than human. So, it is no wonder that Harriet Beecher Stowe, a women’s rights activist and abolitionist would be captivated by her. Not only was Truth a charismatic figure, she shared many of the same ideas on those subjects. In her non-fiction work The Libyan Sybil Stowe recounts a meeting she had with Sojourner. At the beginning she seems to fall into the trap of trying to characterize her through sentimental stereotyping (she does this in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to a far more patronizing extent) but the more she interacts with her the more Stowe seems to realize she can’t stereotype an individual like Sojourner Truth as easily as she can a fictional character. That doesn’t stop her from admiring her and idealizing her, of course, but she isn’t going the route of a male writer like Poe would if he were in the same situation. She idealizes her in the sentimental style, and she doesn’t overdo it. In fact, she spends far less time describing her appearance (as Poe does with Ligeia) and more in recounting what she says and does.

Stowe’s background as both feminist and abolitionist probably had an influence on her lack of idealization. Well over half the piece is dialogue by Truth to her audience in the home about her experiences with racism and religion and, somewhat more briefly, women’s rights. But throughout the interaction, especially Truth’s narrative that devours most of the account, Stowe, who is transcribing her speech, is not able to romanticize her. To idealize the speech of someone illiterate may not be possible, since romanticizing is often inherently flowery and “upper class” sounding. However, the person doing the speaking can still come off as being romantic. Sojourner, a roving preacher, idealizes her experience with religion to her fellow preachers, proven by the fact no one interrupts her once she gets going. Stowe does remark that “she wanted an audience” so it would be in poor taste to interrupt the visiting speaker (Stowe 1863). She lets her talk, and talk, and talk. And, Lebedun says, apparently that loud, commanding voice of hers led to a moment where a “clergyman denounced her as an impostor, claiming that such a forceful speaker must be a man” at a Michigan women’s rights meeting (Lebedun). The ideal at the time (and still today) is for women to be quiet and not talk a lot. Ligeia and Rowena do both. Truth does neither.

Sojourner Truth, the black feminist, exudes power that Stowe and her audience is enamored by. She is a powerful figure who commands the attention of her audience. She can work alongside any man, better than many, but still bears a kindly, nurturing disposition to the invalid staying in the Stowe home and is a mother. A real figure like her ends up providing far more in the way of complexity than fictional female characters like Ligeia. She is physically strong; she can be blunt when speaking on human issues while also being romantic on spiritual ones, and yet despite the hell her former masters put her through, finds it in her to forgive her mistress in Libyan Sybil. Forgiveness is arguably a thing more attributed to female characters but the kind of forgiveness she is giving and to whom is just remarkable. That kind of wholesome forgiveness would sound corny if attributed to a fictional character that doesn’t have the same level of complexity as a real figure. Romantic era fictional characters aren’t so much “complex” as they are dramatic, like the characters and happenings in Ligeia.

This rapture Stowe held towards her was so great that her recount of this meeting leads to the statue “The Libyan Sybil” being made in honor of and inspired by Stowe’s description of her (Lebedun). Which, yes, admittedly that statue is heavily idealized when compared to an actual photograph of Sojourner, who inspired the piece, but that is the fault of the male sculptor, William Wetmore Story, not the female author. Story, like Poe, went overboard in his idealizing of the female figure, regardless of race, through the statue. It must be acknowledged that Story only had Stowe’s account to go from and his own imagination was thus provided quite a bit of leeway. Stowe’s recount of her meeting with Truth could have been embellished to the sculptor through his own artistic imagination, since, as Daniel Stempel says, he was a “romantic who spoke to the imagination of the public.” And therein lies some of the problem that I think sums up the whole notion of female figures during this era: something beautiful and idealized is far more pleasing to the imagination than something real and believable to the romantic mind. If one compares the statue to Truth as described in the account, there is an almost laughable contrast. The statue’s limbs are much thinner, her facial features Greek-style in their perfection, wearing a shell crown Truth never wore and draped by thin cloth only at her waist. While Stowe had romanticized Sojourner to some extent the lengths Story went to idealize her is honestly almost funny. Stowe describes her as a “tall spare woman” and notes there was “an almost unconscious superiority, not unmixed with a solemn twinkle of humor” (Stowe 1836) and yet the statue Story makes of her is a woman half-clothed, wearing a shell crown, sitting with a brooding expression. There is a power there for certain but far quieter than the power Truth was known for. In fact, Truth idealizes herself without any help from Stowe and Story: she recounts that she changed her name from Isabella to Sojourner Truth after God gave her that new name (Stowe 1863), an altogether romantic act, and idealizes her spiritual encounter that led her to find religion and begin her life as a roving preacher, an encounter that seems pretty in line with revivalist teachings at the time. But is far easier to idealize a figure through their appearance than through their speech when the speaker is illiterate.

In a way, Story (and by accidental association, Stowe) embraced some of Sojourner’s glamor but discarded the real, hardy but gentle figure of a powerful woman of color in favor of one more appealing to the aesthetically-driven audience that would receive it, creating a fictional character to admire in favor the one that inspired it. The statue itself looks aristocratic and wealthy, something Sojourner was not, and the pale color of the stone used kind of ruins the dark, foreign mystique that had captured Stowe. She did not fit the romantic ideal of being a tall, thin, elegant white woman or even a dark-skinned foreign queen. It is a nice sentiment to depict a former slave in such a way but there lies an inherent flaw in creating fiction out of real people the artist has never met: aesthetic falsehoods and artistic liberties are added to make the character more appealing. Story made that statue for an audience, in a way giving in to the penultimate sin of pandering. Stowe was not trying to pander so much as she was relaying her own fascination with Truth’s character, though her problem with sentimental stereotyping does create a sense of racial bias that cannot be ignored, as this bias is hardly confined to her works alone. The same can be said of Poe’s Ligeia. He embraces all the melodrama her aesthetic brings but fails to really give Ligeia much in the way of substance. She lurks in a grey zone between fiction and fantasy like a dream, never really there, while Sojourner is tangible enough to interact with her audience in her famous speech.

By comparing the styles of a male and female author when writing female characters, it seems men tend to romanticize female figures more heavily than female ones. Ligeia is a fictional woman in a fictional world written by a man with a strange obsession on female beauty and seeing said beautiful woman die. Sojourner Truth, a black women’s rights activist and avid orator was a real figure yet still became an idealized one through a romantic sculptor. It is easier for a male writer or artist to fall into the trap of fantasy female in fiction than it is to fall into that trap with a real-life figure, while female authors take a more nuanced stance in depictions of their fellow woman, seeing them as a gender equal rather than a goal to be pined after, gained, and lost.

Citations

“Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Wikipedia. Accessed 24 Nov 2018.

Basler, Roy P. “The Interpretation of Ligeia.” College English, vol 5, no. 7, 1944, pp. 363-372. www.jstor.org/stable/371048

Davis, Jack L. Davis, June. H. “Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia.” The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, vol. 24, no. 4, 1970, pp. 170-176. www.jstor.org/stable/1346725

Lebedun, Jean. “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Interest in Sojourner Truth, Black Feminist.” American Literature, vol. 46, no. 3, 1974, pp. 359-363. www.jstor.org/stable/2924416

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.” The American Museum, 1838. Texts for Craig White’s Literature Course. University of Houston Clear Lake, American Renaissance, 2018. coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AmClassics/RomFiction/Poe/PoeLigeia.htm

Stempel, Daniel. “Biography as Dramatic Monologue: Henry James, W. W. Story, and the Alternative Vision.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, pp. 224-247. www.jstor.org/stable/366421

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Libyan Sybil.” Atlantic Monthly 1863. Texts for Craig White’s Literature Course. University of Houston Clear Lake, American Renaissance, 2018. coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AfAm/StoweTruth.htm

Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Convention for Women’s Rights, 1851, Akron, Ohio. Texts for Craig White’s Literature Course. University of Houston Clear Lake, American Renaissance, 2018. coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/texts/AfAm/TruthWoman.htm

"Great Star" flag of pre-Civil War USA