American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2015 Research Essay

Melissa Hodgkins

10 May 2015

Poe’s Visions of Womanhood in “Ligeia” and “Usher”: Femme-Fatales, Sirens, and Vampires

          Critics have long had conflicting views of Edgar Allan Poe’s short works of fiction. For some, he is a talentless hack whose visions of Romanticism are best-aligned with French and German Romantic fiction, essentially a traitor to American Transcendental thought; for others he is quintessentially American with a deeply layered, psychologically complex vision of Romanticism and its aesthetic principles. Both schools agree that Poe’s works are concentrated on themes of desire and loss centered around the possession or desire to possess beautiful women. According to Jenny Webb in her article entitled “Fantastic Desire: Poe, Calvino, and the Dying Woman” Poe’s “assessment in “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (214-215) is the central basis for his depiction and seeming obsession with women and the inevitable loss that they represent. Truly, it is difficult to separate women from death in Poe’s works. As we will see in our examination of both “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” “Poe plays out, through repetition and subtle variation, the story of a young woman, beloved by husband, fiancé, or brother, who suddenly and without apparent physical cause is taken ill or otherwise changed. This character also eventually dies, only to return in some form from the grave” (215). These women become emblematic of life that not only defies death, but transforms through death into haunting forms of fantastic sublimation.

          Poe’s women—for the sake of this analysis we will look specifically at Ligeia, Rowena, and Madeline Usher—have been examined and read by critics as both Romantic idealizations of patriarchal standards of femininity, as well as spectral sub-human “femme-fatales” (Belton 8), “Sirens” (Jones 34), “vampires” (Stephanou 45) and/or “succubi” (Jones 33). Inevitably, the female character is seen through the lens of a male narrator, distanced from the reader by the intense psychological disillusionment and/or struggles of the men that obsess over them. These women become something more than human and simultaneously less than human. As Jenny Webb sees it,

There is something indicative of the way the narrative voice, eye, and memory reverses beauty into horror. The narrators constantly misread their loved ones and in doing so fail to understand them in any significant way. They are born in libraries and they embed themselves in bibliographies that grapple with the mystery of the Word made Flesh, and yet ironically it is their fleshy fixations that re-inscribe the beloved in a textuality of false referentiality. Our narrators, Poe insinuates, are not merely bad readers—they are, quite literally, deadly (216).

These women who are “misread” and are “re-inscribed… [with] false referentiality” are studies in contradiction: they are simultaneously beautiful, ideal and intelligent yet horrific, soul-sucking, and haunting. Poe’s depiction of women as ethereal and other-worldly denies them a space within the discourse of human existence; they are phantoms of humanity that are best depicted through the lens of memory and are invariably neglected and mistreated in life. As Joan Dayan sees it “In Poe's mechanics of love, heartfelt men become vague and impotent, while beloved women become shadowy or reduced to  pieces of prized and sexualized symbolic matter” (249).

          The critical perception of women as vampires is explored within the works of several critics I will mention in this paper, specifically by Aspasia Stephanou and Daryl E. Jones. In her article entitled “Lovely Apparitions and Spiritualized Corpses: Consumption, Medical Discourse, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Female Vampire” Aspasia Stephanou writes: “Madeline Usher… and Ligeia represent the dark ladies of Romantic passion, with black hair and dark eyes, whose mysterious deaths are bloodless and their bodies emptied of the blood that constitutes their identity. Poe’s consuming women are especially unique in the way they all die by unknown consuming diseases” (38). Stephanou defends this assertion that Ligeia and Madeline can be read as vampires by expounding upon the nineteenth century perception of consumption as related to the belief in vampirism. She asserts “… New England’s Gothic Literature shows that between 1790 and 1890 the disease of consumption in New England was related to the belief in vampirism. The New England vampires were often imagined as young sexual female “victims turned victimizers,” “draining the vitality” of the community or “fading away and dying” (37). She insists that

Unlike European traditions of blood-sucking revenants, vampirism in New England is bloodless and, like consumption, imagined by some as “a spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation.”  The proliferation of vampire superstitions in the area coincides with New England’s degeneration and rural decay. Vampirism then became a fitting metaphor for the disintegration of the tubercular female body and of the body of New England (37).

The insinuation is that the female body is representative of the diseased feminine will: the excess of desire that refuses to die alongside the body. By making this argument, it becomes plain to see that all consideration of the obsessive, misreading, and impotent masculine mind plays second fiddle to the misogynistic portrayal of women as monsters. Daryl E. Jones writes “Whether Ligeia is in fact real or instead merely a “demonic and delusive construct” in the mind of the narrator, she is in any event “his vampire, his succubus” (33). Thus, “The wasting and diseased body of the female becomes analogous to evil and sin and embodies a perversion of the natural order. Ligeia is a woman of evil who is driven by her fierce spirit and wild desire for life beyond the grave. This horrifying and passionate will for life is so irrational and persistent that it materializes into a vampire and a diabolical distortion of life” (Stephanou 38). The result is that the female body defies death in order to haunt and hunt the men that failed to protect them. What Poe calls Ligeia’s “gigantic volition” is “her own perverted spirit that seeks to dominate and exploit matter in order to accede to a semblance of life: an uncanny doubling of life itself” (38).

          The physical manifestations of consumptive disease mark the physical descriptions of both Ligeia and Madeline. As John H. Timmerman writes in his article “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” “Madeline… becomes abstracted to little more than a mental evanescence… out of touch with reality. When the narrator first sees her passing in the distance, he is filled with unaccountable dread, so otherworldly she appears. She is, Roderick discloses, simply wasting away of some illness with no known etiology” (242). Ligeia and Madeline are both pale with rosy cheeks, dark-haired, and dark-eyed. In truth, these ideals offered a certain contrast between light and dark, but they were also symbolic of the strange consumptive disorders that ravaged the bodies of these women. “Medical treatises of the nineteenth century speculate on the appearance of female consumptive bodies with diaphanous pale skin and rosy cheeks. Medical knowledge and literature created a metaphorical feminine body, a cultural construct controlled by the authority and gaze of the medical practitioner and writer” (Stephanou 40). Therefore, the medical professionals and the writers of the age helped perpetuate this perception that women were carriers of consumptive disease; these assumptions coupled with the feminine associations with vampirism effectively remove Ligeia and Madeline from the land of “real” women and mark them as the unexplainable and wicked “Other”. But the true terror of Poe’s female vampire is her revivification. “Ligeia” unveils the horror of the reanimating corpse. The narrative presents consumption as the disease of Ligeia’s diabolical spirit that leads to the inversion and distortion of the natural order. Death does not announce the end of Ligeia’s life but her revivification in an undead horrifying state” (43-44).

Unlike Ligeia whose strong-will and feminine wiles create a lasting and impenetrable hold upon the narrator, Rowena is the weak, passive woman who should, given the expectations of patriarchal idealization in regard to the desirability of the passive woman, be the “perfect” match for the narrator, but is instead loathed by him. As Leonard W. Engel writes in his article entitled “Obsession, Madness, and Enclosure in Poe's "Ligeia" and "Morella"” “… in “Ligeia” the narrator exhibits love for one woman and hate for the other: Lady Ligeia serves as the object of his love, becoming the focus of his obsession, while Lady Rowena is hated and rejected, and finally dies like a plant withering from lack of nourishment” (140). Engel is not the only writer who has noticed this despairing view of Rowena. In his article entitled “Poe's "Ligeia": Dream and Destruction” James W. Gargano notes “There is not even a hint that he [the narrator] entertains a single gentle or chivalric feeling for his new wife. He loathes the reality she represents, and while he delights in the pain he inflicts upon her he “reveled in recollections of [Ligeia's] purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love (Poe)” (340). It is this weakness and lack that seems to uphold and criticize conventional womanhood that marks Rowena as a potential conduit for Ligeia to re-emerge, asserting her position not only as victim but now as victimizer. As Stephanou sees it: “Rowena’s… body becomes the medium through which the fanatical spirit of Ligeia will materialize. Her spirit and living force enter Rowena’s bodily form through the materiality of blood: “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid” (Poe). Blood functions as the symbol of life, the fluid that animates the vampire but also the medium of life itself and the carrier of one’s vitality and identity” (43-44). In this way, Ligeia further perpetuates a type of feminine misogyny in which she victimizes another woman in search of reanimation and spiritual dominance. “Ligeia’s… “acquisition” of Rowena’s body [has] something to do with a vampire-like quality; she feeds on other life to preserve her own” (Jones 33). It is fitting then that “Poe’s response to the question of womanhood can be read through… vampirism and disease [as] dramatized through the tension between mind and body, masculine and feminine, life and death. There is an urge for metaphysical union that is disrupted by the horror of woman’s evil spirit (Stephanou 45).

 Yet the monstrosity of these women and the potential readings for their dark representations of femininity do not stop with Stephanou’s vision of Ligeia and/or Madeline the vampire. Instead, we see Ligeia the siren. In his article entitled “Poe's Siren: Character and Meaning in "Ligeia"” Daryl E. Jones writes “Ligeia is a siren. She bears the name of a siren, and she manifests traits traditionally identified with the sirens of classical antiquity” (33). Jones makes his case based on Poe’s seemingly deliberate choice in naming Ligeia as he did, as well as discussing the legends that surrounded these vixens of the deep, arguing that Poe would have not only known these classical myths, but that he purposely chose to make illusions to them. Jones explains the legend of these mythical sirens:

According to Greek mythology, the Sirens resided on a small island… Accounts differ, but generally they indicate that the Sirens were three in number: Parthenope, Leucosia, and Ligeia. Singing in voices of ethereal beauty, and accompanying themselves on such delicately soul-stirring musical instruments as the lyre, Ligeia and her companions enchanted mariners and lured them to shipwreck and death (34).

Yet again, the source of inspiration and desire for women is a source of death. This equation is inescapable in Poe’s fiction. What is immensely interesting is how reading Ligeia as siren and as vampire can be achieved simultaneously, as the critics that support each reading focus on the character’s ability to achieve revivification. “The sirens were capable of revivification… they also reappeared centuries later [after the initial birth and dissipation of their myth] along the banks of the Rhine… Traditionally associated with seduction and death, the sirens… were also considered agents of spiritual destruction” (34). This makes for a startling contrast to Poe’s narrator’s elusive memories of where he met his beloved— “first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine” (Poe). Indeed, the narrator’s fuzzy memory serves a dual purpose according to Jones— it not only provides a vision of the unreliability of the narrator, but it also serves as an indication that his scant facts depicting an unknown and unknowable force of destruction that was Ligeia the Siren fail to account for his deep and abiding affection. He claims further that the narrator’s recollection that “her family is of a remotely ancient date” (35) is an indication of the antiquation of her origin and that “Ligeia’s facial features, which partake of “the softness and the majesty, the fullness, and the spirituality, of the Greek” (35) serves as equal endorsement to his reading.

          And yet, what of Ligeia’s characterization would align her with the myth of the siren? According to Jones it is the repeated recollection of Ligeia’s beautiful, ethereal voice that captures the imagination and desire of the narrator and aligns her with the mythology of old. He references “the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language,” “the dear sweet music of her low sweet voice,” and “the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice” which contrasts markedly with “the wild words which she habitually uttered” all of which “made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and so stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown” (35).

          The chief objective of the siren is enchantment. It is clear from previous discussion that the concentration on the beauty of the female form (both in the bloom of memory and in the decay of disease) that Ligeia’s person was physically enchanting to her husband. Poe describes Ligeia’s beauty through the eyes of the narrator:

Yet her features were not of that regular mould… I perceived that her loveliness was indeed "exquisite,"... I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses… I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose… There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly—the magnificent turn of the short upper lip—the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under—the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke—the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles…

Yet, “He is also enchanted by her “rare” and “immense” learning “in the classical tongues… she [was] deeply proficient” and she was well abreast of “all the wide areas of moral, physical and mathematical science” (Jones 35). These references to Ligeia’s immense knowledge seem to indicate an appreciation for vast amounts of female knowledge, but I would assert that this information not only helps to identify Ligeia as a woman outside of humanity and the patriarchal ideal of woman, but it identifies her as a threat to the masculine identity that the narrator wishes to exert and yet seemingly abandons in his melancholic and obsessive yearning for Ligeia. But this yearning has less to do with the feelings of the narrator and the sincerity of his love, but rather with the enchanting prowess that Ligeia the Siren possesses. Even from beyond the depths of death, she calls and he must answer. Jones claims that “the narrator resigned himself “with child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of meta-physical investigation” (35).

          How does this representation of Ligeia as siren work, even after the illusions to her status as siren as have been decoded and understood? After all, she is the figure that could not escape death… or is she? According to Jones’ interpretation this is where the siren’s revivification renders the reading of Ligeia as siren whole. He writes “If Ligeia’s earthly existence is contingent upon her service as an agent of divine destruction, we may speculate that her return to life must represent a second chance to seduce and destroy the narrator. And if the strength of will she exhibits in possessing Rowena’s body is any indication, this time Ligeia will not fail in her mission” (36).

          Both images of the dark women we have seen, the vampire and the siren, are types of the “femme-fatale”, women that destroy and feed off of the men that they enchant. According to Robert J. Belton in his article entitled “Edgar Allan Poe and the Surrealists' Image of Women” many painters of the surrealist movement looked to the works of nineteenth century artists and writers, including Poe and his collection of short fiction, and formed a kinship in their presentation of women as predators feasting on men. He writes: “Despite their rejection of 20^th century bourgeois norms, the Surrealists' attitude toward women was rooted in the 19^th century age of the femme fatale—the voracious devouring woman who caused man's fall from grace” (8). He goes on to claim “They were aided in their interpretations by fashionable analogies between human and insect behavior, and the female praying mantis, renowned for devouring her mate after the sex act” (8). Indeed, it takes little imagination to connect Ligeia the vampire, Madeline the vampire, and/or Ligeia the siren as figures emblematic of a human praying mantis, the deadly femme fatale of fiction.

          Poe’s treatment of women is psychologically and allegorically complex. The truth remains that although they are idealized in many ways, they are inescapably linked to male impotence and death. They are women who are “misread” and are “re-inscribed… [with] false referentiality” and they are studies in perpetual contradiction: they are simultaneously the most beautiful, most ideal and most intelligent yet horribly horrific, scarily soul-sucking, and horrifically haunting. Poe’s repeated usage of superlative language when describing his narrators’ madness and the nature and person of his female characters further illustrates my point that the feminine in her ethereal light is both dark and markedly “Other”.  Therefore, Poe’s depiction of women as ethereal and other-worldly denies them a space within the discourse of human existence; they are phantoms of humanity that are best depicted through the lens of memory and are invariably neglected and mistreated in life as seen by the death of Ligeia, the hatred towards Rowena, and the neglect of Madeline. Poe’s women are more like shadows than people.

Works Cited

Belton, Robert J. "Edgar Allan Poe and the Surrealists' Image of Women." Woman's Art Journal 8.1 (1987): 8-12. JSTOR. Web. 2 May 2015.

Dayan, Joan. "Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves." American Literature 66.2 (1994): 239-73. JSTOR. Web. 1 May 2015.

Engel, Leonard W. "Obsession, Madness, and Enclosure in Poe's "Ligeia" and "Morella"." College Literature 9.2 (1982): 140-46. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2015.

Gargano, James W. "Poe's "Ligeia": Dream and Destruction." College English 23.5 (1962): 337-42. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2015.

Jones, Daryl E. "Poe's Siren: Character and Meaning in "Ligeia"." Studies in Short Fiction 20.1 (1983): 33-37. Ebsco. Web. 2 May 2015.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. N.p. Web.

Stephanou, Aspasia. "Lovely Apparitions and Spiritualized Corpses: Consumption, Medical Discourse, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Female Vampire." The Edgar Allan Poe Review 14.1 (2013): 36-54. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2015.

Timmerman, John H. "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Papers on Language & Literature 39.3 (2003): 227-244. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 May 2015.

Webb, Jenny. "Fantastic Desire: Poe, Calvino, and the Dying Woman." The Comparatist 35 (2011): 211-20. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2015.