Sample Student Research Project, fall 2004
LITR
4232: American Renaissance
Sample Student Research Project, fall 2004
Mary Tinsley
November 16, 2004
Edgar
Allan Poe: The Original Hopeless Romantic
Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe is unquestionably one of the world’s most widely recognized and highly regarded authors. As a child, I remember reading some of Poe’s short stories such as The Gold Bug and The Tell-Tale Heart with an uneasy combination of awe and fear, and very little comprehension. Now, years later, in pursuit of a degree in literature, I have had many occasions to revisit these and other of Poe’s tales with greater knowledge and experience, even finding new works by which to be delighted. It is one of these recent discoveries, Ligeia, which will serve as the focus for this research journal. According to every scholarly text consulted in the process of constructing this project, Ligeia was one of Poe’s most favored creations, and with ample reason. This simple short story burrows its way into the reader’s psyche and continues to nag at the heels of consciousness for days after the book is closed. Like most of Poe’s works, Ligeia seems to resist any traditional explanation, but in the following pages I will endeavor to obtain greater insight into the effectiveness of the tale by tracing the elements of romance and the sublime through the text.
Background
Originally published in a magazine entitled American Museum in 1838, Ligeia was later re-issued as part of Poe’s two-volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. This second version of the story, including the poem “The Conqueror Worm”, came to be the most commonly accepted version, and it is this adaptation (included in the Heath Anthology of American Literature) that will serve as the primary text for this assignment. The tale itself concerns the doomed love affair between the unnamed narrator and the beautiful, enigmatic Lady Ligeia. After prolonged illness and much dramatic suffering on the part of both parties, Ligeia dies, leaving the narrator inconsolably grief-stricken. In a somewhat questionable attempt to get on with the tiresome business of living, the widower removes himself to a gothic European castle, takes up an opium habit, and marries Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine. Lady Tremaine is the absolute antithesis of Ligeia, and our hero soon finds himself living in an atmosphere of mutual abhorrence. After a brief time, Lady Tremaine falls ill under mysterious circumstances, and both the reader and the narrator learn a powerful lesson about the supremacy of unrequited grief. Although the tale would grow to be a favorite of audiences worldwide, at the time of it’s publishing, “Poe seems to have received only ten dollars for Ligeia, about fifty cents a page (Silverman 140).”
Biographical Notes
Edgar Poe was born on Jan. 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. By the time he was three, the dark shadow of death had already begun to stalk Edgar (as it would for many years to come). After his mother’s death in 1811, “Poe was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (Merriam-Webster 324).” Poe had John Allan’s support during his brief stint as a student at the University of Virginia, but the two were driven apart when Allan refused to make good on Edgar’s gambling debts. Though the contentious emotional relationship with Allan would continue for years, Edgar was once again abandoned by his “father,” and bereft of a maternal influence thanks to the death of his ailing stepmother. Now reaching the age of 25, Edgar Allan Poe was experiencing considerable success as a writer of poems, articles, and stories, although nearly unable to survive on his meager earnings. “In May of 1836, Poe married his cousin Virginia, who was a few days shy of fourteen,” and began the final tormented love affair that would shape his destiny as a man and a literary icon (Grantz 6). After twelve years of marriage, Edgar found himself once again in the familiar role of deathbed reporter, at the side of his beloved Virginia. “Though Poe lived for nearly three years after Virginia’s death, his existence seems a desperate and tortured one; for he could never entirely escape from the image of his dying love (Grantz 9).” So, it is not surprising that for Poe, death was a tangible reality even in the midst of life. Nearly from birth, Poe was embattled in a soul-crushing struggle with the grim reaper, and though a mere mortal can never defeat death, Edgar Allan Poe drew upon this painful conflict in order to produce some of the world’s most pleasurable and immortal literature.
The Romance
There is no doubt that Ligeia is a love story, though a dark one at that. But does it meet the technical standards of romance? According to the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, romances “tend to have what we would describe as a psychological interest or component; the landscapes of romance are often outward manifestations of the hero’s or heroine’s inner state” (414-5). Without question, the outward projection of the psychological plays a significant role in the development of Ligeia. Perhaps the best example of this within the story occurs when the narrator describes the dark and tomb-like bridal chamber of his second wife, Lady Tremaine. Full of shifting shadows and shaped to resemble a coffin, this bedchamber seems representative of the narrator’s psychological pre-occupation with death, and his lack of feeling for his new bride. With careful examination, one can also find present in Ligeia another common feature of the romance, the captivity narrative. As the story winds to a close, the corpse of Rowena seems to return to life by degrees, only to retreat into death once again. Finally, the re-animation is complete and the corpse arises to reveal not Lady Tremaine, but Ligeia. Originally captured by death and removed wholly from the possession of the narrator, his continuing psychological pursuit of Ligeia eventually leads to her rescue from the grip of death, if only temporarily. Moreover, as life returns to the body in ever-greater degrees, the narrator is repeatedly brought to the brink of reconciliation only to be robbed of his love again with each retreat back into death. “Ligeia is more than anything else a love story, a tale of the ‘unutterable wo’ that follows from the loss of ‘the one only and supremely beloved’ (Silverman 139).” More appropriately, the story qualifies as a tragic or Gothic romance, because it is a tale in which the waning of a powerful love brings about the complete destruction of both the lover and the beloved. “The speaker’s soul pines after his love; for he has lost not just his heart, but his mind as well. He lives in a trance because his soul longs to rejoin with that of his love in paradise (Grantz 15).”
The Sublime
According to Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the sublime is related to something terrible and painful, but removed to such a distance as to make it pleasurable. Expanding this definition, Burke goes on to state that the sublime is vast, rugged, dark and gloomy. Clearly, Poe continually evokes the sublime in Ligeia. The psychological dimension of the story certainly meets these standards, the most interesting level of which is the narrator’s near-constant proximity to death and it’s accompanying mysteries. During the death-scene of Ligeia, the heroine transcribes a horrible vision and firmly situates “The Conqueror Worm” within the tale. The poem is graphic and disturbing, but is so generalized to all of mankind that one can hardly relate to it directly, which creates enough distance for a troubling admiration of the eternal scene that it presents. Again referring to the Bedford Glossary, we find that the sublime can also be interpreted as “that quality in a literary work that elevates the reader to a higher plane” (467). Poe’s careful composition doubtlessly reveals just such a quality, which is the very same that creates the lasting impression on the mind of the reader (as mentioned in the introductory section). More revealing for an amateur word sleuth such as myself is yet another definition related to the sublime (sublimation), found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 10th edition: in “chemistry (with reference to a solid substance) change directly into a vapour when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling” (1428). It sounds a little far-fetched at first, but upon closer examination, one can clearly see that the continual shape shifting of Poe’s characters is related to this idea.
“Ligeia is a rich and difficult story, yet for the common reader it is a relatively clear introduction to Poe’s use of alchemical symbolism. Ligeia’s presence is golden, her absence is leaden, and what happens to Rowena is a transmutation. The Lady Ligeia sponsors the transmutation of earthly experience into spiritual knowledge” (Wilbur 168).
Also ever present in the tale is the idea of transcendence, primarily the transcendence of suffering and death into a realm of love and eternal wholeness. In referring to Poe’s narrators, Clark Griffith states: “During a single, transcendent moment, they have had the privilege of calling up out of their beings a totally new order of reality. They are Romantic heroes without peer, for they have been the masters, because the creators, of all that they survey” (131). It is precisely this ever-present idea of transcendence that enables the distance required to convert Poe’s tale from one of fear to one of sublime contemplation. “Beneath a surface of apparently gratuitous Gothicism is an undercurrent of meaning that redeems the horror. This undercurrent consists of the narrator’s salvation through the transcendent visionary experience offered him by Ligeia’s return” (Carlson qtd. in Heller, 2).
Website Reviews
The first thing I discovered upon beginning my research for this project was that there are no shortage of websites relating to Edgar Allan Poe and his works. The trick then, is to weed through all the junk to get at the pertinent information. To this end I found two websites that proved to be very helpful. The first of these was The Gothic Literature Page, which provides a comprehensive list of every sort of research link imaginable, from biographical information on the author to the University of Virginia’s considerable collection of Gothic literature. It was from this site that I was able to discover several additional websites of relevance. The Gothic: Materials for Study was an excellent reference source on many of the themes prevalent in gothic literature. The final site linked to the Gothic Lit. Page proved to be my personal favorite. This source is entitled The Sickly Taper, and if the name alone wasn’t enough to pique my interest, this site contained comprehensive biographical information as well as a considerable bibliography with research links. Additionally, I found The Poe Decoder to be a very helpful and informative site, in particular a link to David Grantz’s article “The Stricken Eagle: Women in Poe” presented a wide-ranging discussion of Poe, and even listed the names of some of Poe’s famous friends such as John P. Kennedy, Charles Dickens, James Lowell, and Francis Sergeant Osgood.
Conclusion
Edgar Allan Poe is a household name the world over for good reason. After nearly 200 years, his masterful tales continue to delight and disturb audiences, and unceasingly emerge in the classrooms of modern students. It is the sheer artistic genius of Poe that in a short story of several pages he can spin a story to rival novels of untold length. Through my research, I came to understand that Poe the man is often confused with his works, and this confusion is not necessarily incorrect. With early exposure to death and the crippling nature of loss, Poe was set up to compose tales of the macabre, and one can only wonder how portentous Ligeia proved to be given the later loss of his beloved Virginia. No matter how many times one reads Ligeia, it continues to be one of his most delightful and intriguing tales, a fact that did not escape the author himself. “The story of the Lady Ligeia is not nearly one of the wonders of literature: it is unparalleled and unapproached” (Shaw 89).
Works Cited
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. 2nd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Grantz, David. “The Stricken Eagle: Women in Poe.” The Poe Decoder. 08 Nov. 2004 <http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/eagle/>.
Griffith, Clark. “Poe and the Gothic.” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1987. 127-132.
Heller, Terry. “Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the Pleasures of Terror.” 13 Nov. 2004 <http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/essays/poe.htm>.
Lanter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, MA: Merriam Webster, 1995.
Shaw, George Bernard. “Edgar Allan Poe.” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1987. 86-90.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.