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American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research essay |
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Rachel Risinger
Reflections on “Ligeia”: The Unquiet Mind of Edgar
Allan Poe
The Romantic tradition of literature,
specifically the American Romantic tradition, cannot be fully discussed without
mention of Edgar Allan Poe and his contributions to the genre. The American
Romantic writers, Poe in particular, expressed a curiosity of the human mind,
seeking to expand the boundaries of earlier literary conventions.
American Romanticism seeks to explore the boundaries
of the human mind, rather than to consider the capacity for human mental
instability as limited by the earlier European gothic writers' convention that
rational thought was always lurking in the background, and eventually would take
over before the protagonist fell into complete moral decay. However this
convention did not necessarily make the transition into into Poe’s work.
Benjamin Fisher describes this concept as “a
curiosity about the mind/self, a curiosity that defied the limitations in
earlier thought. Such curiosity assumes that the mind had in fact no closed
doors, and that vast depths invited exploration” (29). Poe takes the convention
of “quest” and turns the concept into a mental exercise, rather than as the
formulaic progression of a work of fiction from beginning to possibly
unsatisfying end.
Poe’s use of the Gothic convention of the
color-code is interesting in his work, mainly because his “landscapes” would be
completely devoid of natural beauty if not for his sometimes lavish use of
color, even if he does
keep this palette very sparse.
Further, it is his choice of colors and the lighting
he reveals them with that informs the readers reaction to his interiors. Edgar
Allan Poe set his works in grandly decorated “sets” as if he were directing a
stage play, as well as directing the audience’s reaction to the human depravity
which plays out on the stage .
Poe seemingly wrote for two separate audiences. The first, a
larger group would read his works at face value, relishing what they
interpreted as unquestionable supernaturalism.
These would have been, in my opinion, the people of the late
eighteenth century who were just beginning to be exposed to the luxury of literacy.
As people increasingly moved from the rural agrarian lifestyle which required almost
constant work to the cities where industrialization afforded some the luxury of not having to
work from sunup to sundown, the increasing availability of printed reading
material caused its own demand. Magazines offering short pieces of fiction,
often serialized, became available to larger audiences. People did not have to
rely on the Bible being the sole printed reading material available to them.
A second, far smaller, more discerning readership would
realize that Poe had manipulated conventions of supernatural literature to create
subtle psychological fiction. This second audience would have been Poe’s fellow authors and
literary critics of his time, many of whom he held in little regard for their opinions
or their financial success while he enjoyed more popular success rather than financial.
As Poe’s Narrator describes his idyllic
life with the beautifully dark Ligeia, the reader can easily mark the seeming
downward progression of his mental state, the descent into madness aided by his
increasing dependence on opium. Ligeia is his one true love, yet he does not
remember how they first met or the name of the family she was born into. His
specificity in remembering her best qualities imply that his involvement with
her was the product of his own exercise of intelligence rather than as a love
match. This otherworldly foray into selective memory suggests that he is
“creating” a past rather than remembering one. His lavish praise of her
intelligence, which he described as “immense--such as I have never known in a
woman.” Informs the reader of The Narrator’s capacity for being intellectually
engaged, even if only in an opium influenced recollection of her one true love.
His adoration of such a perfect being leads the reader to consider the
possibility that Ligeia never actually existed in the first place.
His descriptions of her are ethereal and dream-like,
suggesting that all along she was merely a figment of his drug fueled
imagination. His description of his relationship with his “second” wife, Lady
Rowena reveals his disappointment in betrothal to an actual, living human being.
“I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew
back(oh with what intensity and regret!) to Ligeia” (Poe 710).
In an article entitled, “A
Psycho-Analitical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,”
Lorine Pruette indulges in a whole series of
speculations regarding the hidden meaning of his
use of color and decorations in his relationships
with the women who populate his fiction. Miss Pruette’s observes that Poe’s
women
“are never human; they are not flesh and blood,
loving, hating or coming late to appointments-they are simply beautiful lay
figures around which to hang wreaths of poetical sentiments. HIs emotional
interest lay in himself, rather than in outer objects; he wished to be loved,
rather than to love.” (378) It is perhaps the exercise of this desire to be
loved without consequence or effort on the part of The Narrator which drives him
to lavish decorations and ornamentation to woo and secure a replacement vessel
in the hopes of willing Ligeia to resurrect.
The intense loathing of his new wife by The Narrator suggests
a shift in the desire to be challenged by the intellect of the celebrated and
much adored Ligeia to the desire for more emotional and intellectual dominance
over the Lady Rowena. In The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe, Benjamin
F. Fisher suggests that “the male and female characters make clearer for readers
that the suggestions within this tale, or, to resort to colloquialism, they give
us handles to inward states of mind. The confining architecture that is detailed
and the deathliness fostered by such restriction are excellent symbols for a
human mind that excludes what is emotionally healthy; in fact, the narrator
earlier refers to his “closed study”, as if to confirm from the start his own
closed-mindedness. No wonder that so much illness, dream vision and death occupy
“Ligeia”. (76)
It has been said that every narrative
represents a quest of some sort. In many of the works of Poe the object of the
quest is the expansion of the boundaries of literary convention through the
examination of just how far a protagonist will be allowed to slip into mental
illness before intervention, for better or worse, takes place.
The Narrator in “Ligeia” is without intervention or
boundaries as he delves into the anesthetic qualities of opium to free himself
from the grief of his lost “Ligeia”, a
wife who may never have existed outside the confines
of his fevered imagination.
Poe uses and manipulates first-person
point of view so that the voice of the narrator may seem identical with the
voice of the author; that is, that narrator appears to be a dramatized version
of the author’s “second self”, and in the case of Poe, it is easy for the modern
reader to inform their understanding of “Ligeia” based on biographical accounts
of Poe’s personal life and the descriptions of his relationships with women.
However, the consciousness of The Narrator becomes a
despicable and loathsome entity as Poe develops it through the course of the
narrative. His ultimate aim, the resurrection of “Ligeia” flaunts societal
conventions regarding marriage and treatment of the dead. As the story
progresses, it is abundantly clear that no one is getting out of that pretty
prison alive.
Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters
undertake quests that
venture into the mind where disorientation often
flourishes and overpower their original aims rather than take a physical
journey. These mental explorations are unnerving, causing apathy in some,
violent emotions (and actions) in others. The protagonist's claustrophobia is
central in many of Poe’s tales and poems, indicative of a gradual
turning-inward: the interior scene disturbs this protagonist even more than he
was at the beginning of a given poem or tale. (Fisher 30) However, The Narrator
in “Ligeia” craves isolation, creating himself a gilded sort of fortress,
decorated and reconditioned to keep the inhabitants in rather than encouraging
the normal comings and going of human existence.
Poe stays within the mind of his narrator using hallucinations
to exhibit psychosis. Jack L. Davis and June H. Davis, in their article
entitled, “Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia,” argue that Ligeia is just a figment of The
Narrator’s delusion and the reader is given hints to this fact. They say, “But
in Ligeia’ Poe’s approach in sophisticated; he leaves the reader to
differentiate between imagined and factual events on the basis of clues subtly
disclosed throughout the story. (170) Poe steps outside the realm of reality,
leaving allusions our rational minds cannot grasp and understand. In the very
beginning of the story the narrator tells us “She came and departed as a shadow.
I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear
music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder”
(Poe 705). To say something came and departed “like a shadow” hints at
hallucination or a dream. Poe is providing us with a clue as to the narrator's
mental state while entering into the world of the gothic. It is only the opium
addled first person recollections of The Narrator that the audience receives any
description of the marvelous wife that once shared his life, leaving a close
reader of the story to wonder if Ligeia ever existed outside his own
imagination. Certainly it is human nature to deify the dead, but someone so
perfect could only come from the whole cloth of imagination. Perfection in
another human being is a fluid concept as best, and no one who has ever been in
an intimate relationship with another person can honestly say that their mate
was “perfection” as The Narrator is want to do regarding his relationship with
Ligeia.
The true physical existence of Ligeia has
long been a matter of conjecture for critics, but her psychic survival, the
survival of her will after death, seems to have been intended by the author. In
a letter to Philip P. Cooke, September 21, 1839, Poe states: “The gradual
perception of the fact that Ligeia lives again in the person of Rowena is a far
loftier and more thrilling idea than the one I have embodied’: Poe believes that
he “should have intimated that the “will” did not perfect its intention--there
should have been a relapse--a final one-- and Ligeia...should be at length
entombed as Rowena--the bodily alterations having gradually faded away. (Porte
5) Although Porte uses terms similar to Poe’s, he implies that the narrator
himself wills Ligeia’s psychic and physical being; if so, it is the narrator’s
psychological well-being which is at stake in the story, and according to Porte,
the narrator-protagonist “is a
romancer who believes that the dusky world of his
fantasies can be made real, if only he wills it into reality fervently enough.
Poe’s use of the color-code of Gothic
literature which we discussed in class, while rife throughout his work, is
almost claustrophobically evident in “Ligeia”. One of the means by which Poe
achieves his effects is contrast. His silences are eloquent because they
alternate with sound. His lighting is spectacular and mood-creating because it
is arranged in little islands, focuses, surrounded by shadows. His colors are
intense because they are glowing spots in the midst of darkness or no color. In
describing the bridal chamber he prepares for Ligeia’s return, the
comfort of his“second” bride is a complete
afterthought. Poe assails the reader with an overwhelming and oppressive
description of a room that no one could be at ease in without the aid of opium.
The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was
pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of
the pentagon was the sole window - an immense sheet of unbroken glass from
Venice - a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either
the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects
within...The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a
semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this
melancholy vaulting, a hug censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and
with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if
endured with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of particolored fires.
Miss Pruette further notes that in
“Ligeia” there are three colors: gold, black, and red, and concludes that they
symbolize sex and death. She notes the intricate lighting fixture Poe designed
for this heroine’s chamber; it, too-or rather “the serpent-like flames” it
creates-represents sex. Her summary of sex symbols includes “red lights,
crimson-tinted glass, scarlet panes, the ruddy reflection from burning
buildings, the fiery colored horse, fiery colored clouds, blood-red metal,
intense light of rubies, the red poppies, wine red as blood, rain that changed
to blood, the fiery wall of the horizon, red clouds, the red eye of the sun, the
crimson moon.” (385) Preutte certainly finds loads of sexual imagery in the
details of decoration performed by a husband who seemingly had no interest in
forming any sort of intimate bond with his new bride.
It’s important to remember, however, that the bridal
chamber was never intended to shelter the Lady Rowena and create a place of
comfot and safety for her. No, the bridal chamber is constructed as Lady
Rowena’s tomb, and as the substitube “womb” from which the resurrected Ligeia
will emerge. The solitary window, engineered to cast a “ghastly lustre” on the
contents of the room suggest a tomb rather than a bridal chamber suggesting
that,
for the Lady Rowena, her new home is a death sentence. She
has been brought into the home for the sole purpose of providing Ligeia a vessel
through which to return.
It is, however, in his interior scenes
that Poe really extends himself. The main action is usually enacted in a remote
tower or turret room or in a strange, high ceilinged room in a distant part of
the building. Access to these sequestered spots is by means of
winding staircases and mysterious passages. The
protagonist must endure the same effort as the reader to discover the secrets
which await him at the end of the labyrinth. The room itself is seldom normal in
shape or dimension; it is vast, circular or pentagonal, full of nooks and
niches, and lighted only in spots, so as to permit weird shadows to hide in
corners and tremble on walls and vaulted ceiling. In spite of the vastness of
the chamber, the action is generally concentrated in restricted sections, over a
bed or ottoman, a chair or a table, which picked up by the flicker of a candle,
the red glare of a torch or flambeau, or the dim waverings of a lamp, all in the
pursuit of a singular object which Poe can cast his next smear of “ghastly”
light which does not serve to illuminate the perspective of the protagonist,
rather it entraps the victims of Poe’s literary contrivances.
The furnishings are carefully selected
and arranged for the atmospheric value. It seems more likely that Poe’s practice
in this respect was deliberate. He knew the value of indefiniteness, or
impressionistic suggestion, as against realistic photography. If the furniture
in Usher’s studio is described
merely as “profuse, comfortless, antique and
tattered,” it is because Poe was striving to create the effect of antiquity and
decay, neglect and dissolution. In “Ligeia” we find a “few ottomans and golden
candelabra, of Eastern figure,” it is because the designer is again striving to
catch the spectator’s eye-not with the details of individual pieces of
furniture, details which on a stage are usually missed anyway, but with spots of
color and glitter, in contrast to the spectral dimness of the surrounding
atmosphere.
Poe’s use of architectural and lighting details in his
descriptions of settings suggest that his fictional writing was influenced by
the subjective details of stagecraft which he would have been exposed to as a
theater critic. An audience, in this case a reader, wants to be able to see the
details of a setting within their mind’s eye, the author must create a setting
or mood that allows the reader to continually immerse themselves in the details
of the setting. The “stage” of Poe’s stories offered him a remarkable
opportunity for the employment of color and light and the ways of blending them
in a way that produced the effects he desired. It is possible that the very
architecture he adopted for a setting, the single leaden window, for instance,
was used simply because it gave him a vehicle to cast a “ghastly” light upon the
room. Poe seemingly acknowledges his tendency to “over emphasise” the
architecture of the bridal chamber himself when The Narrator states, “I had
become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labor and my orders had
taken a coloring from my dreams”. The Narrator, through the decoration of a
gaudy and unsettling “chamber of horrors” has set the stage for a ghoulish
interlude between his wife Lady Rowena and the wraith that was Ligeia.
There are, of course, many facets to
Poe’s work, not only because
he was a kind of literary ventriloquist but because
readers bring such a variety of expectations to his poems and tales. Still, Poe
encourages us to think in terms not merely of literary conventions but the
dichotomy which they expose. The self we know versus the self in the mind which
we don’t know; everyday experience versus the reality of dreams and art; the
mathematician versus the poet; the desire to reach a mass audience verses
disdain for that same audience; the impulse for survival versus the impulse for
self-destruction; faith in the transmigration of the soul versus the fear of the
“conqueror worm.”
And yet even this tendency is only half
of another opposition, another dichotomy, for the same writer who surveyed the
division in human consciousness. Like the transcendentalists he loved to hate,
Poe used the concept of
supernal oneness throughout his career, and yet it
is his insight
into the unexplored caverns of the mind that fueled
his best within. Paradoxically Poes exploration of self-division, in all its
manifestations, unifies his work.
WORKS CITED
Davis, Jack L.
and June H. Davis. “Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia.”
Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain
Fagin, N. Bryllion.
The Histrionic Mr. Poe.
Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins Press, 1949. Print.
Fisher, Benjamin F.
The
Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. New
York, NY:
Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.”
The Norton Anthology of American
Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York, NY: W. Norton & Company, 2003. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan.
The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe.
Ed.
John Ward Ostrom. New York:
Porte, Joe.
The Romance in America: Studies in
Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and
James.
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. 1969. Print.
Pruette, Lorine. “A Psycho-Analitical
Study of Edgar Allan Poe.”
The American Journal of
Psychology 31.
(October 1920): 370-42. Print
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