SOURCE: “Poe, ‘Ligeia,’ and the Problem of Dying Women,” in New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, edited by Kenneth Silverman, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 113-29.

[In the following essay, Kennedy examines Poe's attitude toward women in his fiction; focusing on “Ligeia,” the critic asserts that like his male narrators who recognize their unwitting emotional dependence on women, Poe himself must have resented women.]

In “The Philosophy of Composition,” that notorious essay which proclaims the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world,” Poe devised a self-congratulatory rationale for the form and content of his popular poem, “The Raven.” At the same time, however, the author also advanced a theory of aesthetics that makes pure poetry contingent on the eradication of female beauty. Through the argument that supports this judgment, Poe exposes a mechanism underlying not only “The Raven” but also several of his related poems; he indirectly comments as well on the fatalistic scheme in a handful of stories about the demise of a lovely, pale lady. Moving between verse and tale over the course of two decades, Poe persistently devised fables of loss that sent females underground, but the conditions and consequences of their erasure vary from poetry to prose in a way suggesting a conflicted response to the beautiful woman's death. In his 1845 essay, Poe distinguished between the genres in terms of their effects, calling Beauty the “sole legitimate province of the poem” and identifying Truth (“the satisfaction of the intellect”) and Passion (“the excitement of the heart”) as the usual objects of prose fiction.¹ In retrospect, we may infer that the author proposed this distinction partly to explain his own sharply vacillating treatment of dying women.

Through the critique of feminist theory, Poe's programmatic elimination of women has come under increasing scrutiny, and understandably so, for the pattern raises troubling questions about an inherent misogyny. Focusing mainly on the tales, recent criticism has tended to regard Poe's destructive poetics as a deliberate, ironic critique of patriarchal attitudes toward women. Seeing the narrator's final horror (in such stories as “The Fall of the House of Usher”) as evidence of a failure to control or repress the female, certain commentators have even credited Poe with an enlightened deconstruction of nineteenth-century gender roles.² Gratifying as it may be to place Poe in the vanguard of male feminists, this political rehabilitation claims both too much and too little for his portrayal of women. A glance at the biographical evidence and a reconsideration of relevant poetry and fiction will suggest why “Ligeia” offers the definitive projection of Poe's tortured thinking about women.

1

In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir discusses, in terms remarkably apposite to Poe, the exaltation of woman in the works of André Breton. She writes that for Breton “woman is poetry,” not simply its subject but the very incarnation of its essential principle: “She is Beauty above and beyond all other things” and has “no vocation other than love.” Breton is drawn to this idealized woman because her beauty seems to reveal esoteric secrets and truths: “Deeply anchored in nature, very close to earth, she appears also to be the key to the beyond.” Whether her name is Nadja or Mélusine, she becomes for Breton the object of an implacable quest for illumination which almost coincidentally involves sexual conquest. Through her “miraculous power,” woman thus occupies a unique position as “the only possible salvation for each man.” Yet this figure of adoration remains resolutely “the other”; although she embodies the poetic principle for the male, de Beauvoir reminds us, “we are not told whether she is poetry for herself also.” In this idealization, she is paradoxically everything and nothing: “Truth, Beauty, Poetry—she is All: once more all under the form of the Other, All except herself.”³

Apart from the sexual reference, this portrayal of woman as a beautiful, sustaining, and illuminating presence will seem entirely familiar to readers of Poe. Especially in poetry, Poe repeatedly expressed the notion that woman's love was for him the essential source of bliss, security, and life itself. In a basic sense, the individual women populating his verse all seem to incarnate the idea—or ideal—of Woman. One of his earliest poems, “Al Aaraaf,” evokes the image of a beloved whose beauty lies in her musicality: “Ligeia! Ligeia! / My beautiful one! / Whose harshest idea / Will to melody run.” Daniel Hoffman has commented that “the chief appeal of the name ‘Ligeia’ to Poe was … [that] this is the only conceivable feminine name (assuming it to be such) which rhymes with the Great Key Word, Idea.”⁴ In “Al Aaraaf,” Ligeia is indeed more an idea of musical (or poetic) creativity than a living, breathing woman; the poet writes that she has “bound many eyes / In a dreamy sleep,” and implores her to arouse with “musical number” the lovely, dreaming maidens “whose sleep hath been taken / Beneath the cold moon.”⁵ Poe thus endows the ethereal Ligeia with a power to place women in a slumber so deep that only she can break its hold.

In more personal terms, he celebrates the nurturing, restorative power of Woman in “To Helen.” The beauty of his apotheosized female brings “the weary, way-worn wanderer” home to safe harbor; her “agate lamp” is the poet's beacon, providing illumination from the “Holy-Land” of the soul. Even the inferior lyric “Eulalie” acknowledges the transformative effect of woman's love: Here, the speaker has “dwelt alone / In a world of moan” prior to his marriage; but espoused to the “radiant girl” Eulalie, he escapes all unhappiness: “Now Doubt—now Pain / Come never again.” Again, in “For Annie,” the poet celebrates the soothing, protective quality of woman's love:

She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast—
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.(6)

His “Annie” plays a patently maternal role, making sure that the sleeping poet is “covered” and “warm” as she prays to the “queen of the angels” for his safekeeping.

Poe openly confesses his idolatry of Woman in the late lecture “The Poetic Principle” when he explains that the (male) writer—transparently, Poe himself—finds true poetry

in the beauty of woman—in the grace of her step—in the lustre of her eye—in the melody of her voice—in her soft laughter—in her sigh—in the harmony of the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments—in her burning enthusiasms—in her gentle charities—in her meek and devotional endurances—but above all—ah, far above all—he kneels to it—he worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty—of her love.⁷

This passage so obviously anticipates Breton's fetishizing of the female as to require little elucidation. Suffice it to say that for Poe, as for Breton, Woman holds the key not only to poetry but also to happiness, inspiration, and productivity. For a certain kind of male writer she is, as de Beauvoir argues, “the only possible salvation,” the nurturing source of life and being who literally preserves him from death.

In many of Poe's best known poems, however, this figure of sustenance and deliverance has already been lost, and the male persona seeks consolation or forgetfulness as he confronts the void of her absence. This is obviously the case in “The Raven,” where the speaker, mourning the death of the “rare and radiant” Lenore, perversely poses to the bird just those questions which will underscore his own hopelessness. The raven's “nevermore” successively rules out forgetfulness, spiritual consolation (“balm in Gilead”), and heavenly reunion, thus foreclosing the future itself; as the poem ends, the speaker faces an endless despair figured by the raven's obstinate presence.

Similar abjection permeates “Ulalume” and “Annabel Lee,” for in both poems the loss of a beloved woman triggers a compulsive return to the burial site. Composed within months of the death of Virginia Poe, “Ulalume” suggests that astral influences have induced the speaker to enter the “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir,” where precisely a year earlier he had brought the “dread burden” of Ulalume's body for interment. Finding his way blocked “by the door of a tomb … the vault of [his] lost Ulalume,” the speaker suddenly perceives his unconscious reenactment of the burial journey and asks himself: “What demon hath tempted me here?” Reconsidering his prior interpretation of the astral signs, he now wonders whether “merciful ghouls” have evoked the “spectre” of the “sinfully scintillant planet” (Venus) to deflect his movement away from the site of grief; yet his obsessive return implies an emotional desperation, a reaching out for Ulalume that betrays his own helplessness.

“Annabel Lee,” on the other hand, depicts a conscious ritual of mourning. After the death of his beloved—attributed to spiteful angels—the speaker adopts the practice of lying “all the night-tide” beside Annabel's “sepulchre there by the sea” to act out the idea of his inseparability from her. Though he claims that neither angels nor demons “can ever dissever [his] soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee,” his nocturnal routine confirms his deprivation and loss; he achieves intimacy not with his bride but with the cold tomb which signifies her irrecoverableness.

In these poems, the male persona's absolute dependence on Woman's love and the bliss of female presence exposes the terrifying threat of loss (or rejection) and the withdrawal of gratification. For these pathetic figures, Woman is all, and her death generates various compulsive behaviors which imply psychic devastation. Although grief and mourning are necessary processes of accommodation to death, Poe's poems suggest that because the male protagonist has staked his entire being on the love of a beautiful woman, her absence leaves him not simply bereaved but prostrated by melancholy. He has no existence apart from the consciousness of separation from the beloved and finds his life reduced to exercises in self-inflicted anguish, indicating that the grieving male must undergo perpetual self-punishment for the unworthiness implied by the abandonment of the nurturing female.

For those familiar with the tribulations of Poe himself, this pattern has an obvious relationship to his recurrent experience of traumatic, untimely loss. Resisting autobiographical oversimplification, we may yet observe that in three notable instances, the women on whom he depended for comfort, approval, and affection—not to mention other creaturely needs—died and thus deprived him of emotional sustenance and solicitude. Poe perhaps later imagined that he himself had put the kiss of death on his mother, Elizabeth Poe, then on his foster mother, Frances Allan, and finally on his wife, Virginia Poe. When we add to this sequence the demise of the lovely and much admired Jane Stith Stanard (thought to have inspired “To Helen”), we see that Poe repeatedly suffered abandonment, or its psychic equivalent, by a dying young woman: These four ladies succumbed at an average age of thirty-one.⁸

In this context, the poet's late, curious habit of pursuing several women at once (before and after Virginia's death) betrays both an anxiety about emotional deprivation and a consuming need for female warmth and care. To Marie Louise Shew he wrote in 1848: “Unless some true and tender and pure womanly love saves me, I shall hardly last a year longer, alone.” His habit of using the same terms of endearment in letters to different women reveals a conflation of emotional loyalties and even a confusion about the difference between actual, living women and an idealized notion of woman's love.⁹ Increasingly enamored of female poets during Virginia's decline, Poe seems to have courted the attentions of Mrs. E. F. Ellet, Frances Sargeant Osgood, and others to solve the problem of the departing female by surrounding himself with a bevy of women who not only incarnated the poetic principle but who also wrote love poems, thus insuring a kind of affectional redundancy. At other moments he focused his complex emotional needs on his devoted mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, confessing to her: “You have been all in all to me, darling, ever beloved mother, and dearest, truest friend.” After Virginia's death, he craved a new bride and fell in love with Annie Richmond, openly hoping for the decease of her husband so he could propose to her.¹⁰ His contingency plans during those last years also included marriage proposals to the poet Sarah Helen Whitman and (just weeks before his fatal collapse) to his childhood love, Sarah Elmira Shelton. Through sheer plethora, Poe sought a loving female to protect him from desolation and death.

2

Poe's personal dependence on woman's love and his poetic evocations of the beloved's blissful presence or agonizing absence stand in contrast to the sheer malevolence in his prose versions of a beautiful woman's death. He projected in this cluster of tales an antagonism or emotional estrangement between the male protagonist and a fated female. In “The Assignation,” that bizarre remnant of the early Folio Club project, a Byronic stranger saves the Marchesa's child and thus somehow binds her to a suicide pact. “Thou hast conquered,” she tells him as she prepares to poison herself an hour after sunrise. Obsessed by the wasting illness of his lovely cousin, the narrator of “Berenice” ultimately violates her tomb and disfigures her still-living body to extract the teeth which, in his diseased imagination, represent ideas. In “Morella,” the narrator comes to “abhor” his wife and yearn for her death, so repelled is he by her physical dissolution; with her last breath she delivers a daughter who is the very likeness of the mother, and in a revealing gesture the narrator seems to doom the girl as well by perversely naming her Morella. A different scenario of aggression occurs in “The Fall of the House of Usher” when Roderick buries his sister Madeline alive, screwing down her coffin lid despite his worries about the “partially cataleptical character” of her illness. She avenges the act and confirms their antagonistic relationship by falling “heavily inward upon the person of her brother,” bearing him to the floor “a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” Yet another fatal bond figures in “The Oval Portrait,” which recounts an artist's compulsive portraiture of his wife, “a maiden of rarest beauty.” At last the interminable sittings destroy her health and spirits, reducing her to a corpse just as the painter completes his monstrous work.¹¹

Within this grouping, “Ligeia” occupies a conspicuous and revealing place. Appearing three years after “Morella,” the story seemingly repeats the motif of reincarnation but with the ambiguous suggestion that the narrator's deceased first wife returns to inhabit—and transform—the body of his second wife. Just what Poe meant to represent in the final scene of metamorphosis has long provoked critical debate; in an ironic letter the author himself dismissed the view that “Ligeia [lived] again in the person of Rowena” and hinted that he should have indicated more clearly the failure of Ligeia's attempt to come back to life in the person of her successor.¹² Nevertheless, the rivalry between Ligeia and Rowena, manifested by the narrator's barely concealed scheme to debilitate his second wife, points toward a symbolic opposition thought to mirror the aesthetic differences between German and English Romanticism.¹³ The implied contrast between the raven-haired, mystical Ligeia (who comes from a “decaying city by the Rhine”) and the blonde, Anglo-Saxon Rowena (named, presumably, for the heroine of Scott's Ivanhoe) appears to support such a reading. In the larger context of Poe's fixation with dying women, this opposition carries a more unsettling implication, though, hinting at a secret rage against women who abandon men.

Reaching back to “Al Aaraaf” for the name of his title character, Poe endowed his fictional Ligeia with harmony and musicality, for we are told that her voice creates “a melody more than mortal.”¹⁴ With the suggestion of catalepsy in Rowena's decline, he perhaps also wished to evoke the notion, implied in the poem, of Ligeia's power to impose a deathlike slumber over other women. The key point remains, however, her essentially poetic nature, which Poe underscored when, in revising the tale, he made Ligeia a poet, the putative author of “The Conqueror Worm.”¹⁵ A personification of the poetic principle, she exhibits an incomparable loveliness (“in beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her”) and an indefinable expression which brings to mind transcendental analogies resembling poetic metaphors. In sum, Ligeia represents the presence of poetry within the sphere of the fictional text.

Poe emphasizes the power of that presence by recurrent references to Ligeia's enormous will—her “gigantic volition”—thus preparing us for the possibility of her return from death. He also thereby suggests her domination of the marital relationship. Possessed of “immense” learning, she instructs the narrator in arcane studies; he becomes docile and confesses: “I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation” (316). Emphasizing again the juvenile character of his dependency, the narrator remarks: “Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted.” This simile carries more than casual significance, for if we perceive the beautiful, nurturing Ligeia as an embodiment of the idea of Woman in Poe's poetry, her demise thus conveys broader psychosymbolic implications.

As in “Berenice” and “Morella,” the onset of Ligeia's fatal decline produces ominous physical effects: “The wild eyes blazed with a too—too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent, waxen hue of the grave, and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the most gentle emotion” (316). These signs of impending death sicken the narrator and evoke a “fierceness of resistance” in Ligeia, who in the very process of dying proclaims her “affection” for and “passionate devotion” to the helpless narrator. His reaction to this outpouring seems revealing, for he asks: “How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed by the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them?” (317) His conviction that Ligeia's love for him is “all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed” reveals the narrator's own lack of ego strength and self-esteem. He is nothing; Ligeia is all. The sense that he does not merit her devotion implies his imagined worthlessness, yet he also feels indignant at his wife's “removal” just when she is showering him with affection. He seems in this mixed reaction less concerned with Ligeia's death—with the fate which she must undergo—than with the impending interruption of attentions necessary to his own happiness and stability.

Ligeia's struggle nevertheless comes to absorb the narrator's consciousness, perhaps because in an odd way, her denial of death seems an inherently masculine response to the problem of dying. Explicitly she conceives of survival as a test of volition, a bid to subjugate the body to the soul. Her reiterations of a remark attributed to Joseph Glanvill—that “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will”—testify to a fierce combativeness.¹⁶ Annie Leclerc has argued that the concept of masculine heroism, as reflected in modern novels and films, is precisely rooted in this notion that death must be conquered, for death amounts to the “monstrous defeat” of masculine power. Hence, according to Leclerc, men need to kill, wage wars, inflict death themselves to demonstrate their presumed mastery over mortality and to sublimate their private anxieties.¹⁷ Ligeia's essentially masculine desire to “win in the face of death” (as Leclerc phrases it) impels her final questioning of divine will: “Shall this Conqueror be not once conquered?” Joel Porte contends that when Ligeia in “The Conqueror Worm” identifies the “motley drama” as “the tragedy, ‘Man,’” she thereby associates the gory Worm with “the conquering male organ.”¹⁸ Yet this reading neglects the obvious point that Ligeia is dying; she dreads death, not sexual penetration. For her, the “Horror” forming “the soul of the plot” springs from the inability of “Man” (the human species) to defeat or even to delay the predatory, “blood-red thing” which feeds upon helpless “mimes.”

The dramatic emphasis of “Ligeia,” however, rests less on the death of the title character than on the twisted response of a narrator “crushed into the very dust with sorrow” at the demise of his beloved. If Ligeia has articulated a fundamentally masculine resistance to the Conqueror Worm, she has in her last hours presumably voiced the narrator's deepest anxieties about death and decomposition. Given his previous “child-like” dependency, he finds himself suddenly bereft of the blissful, protective presence of his mother-mentor-wife and experiences what he explicitly calls “feelings of utter abandonment” (320). The loss of the woman who has preserved him from death triggers a psychic crisis, manifested by his “weary and aimless wandering,” by his recourse to opium use, and by his obsessive renovation of a ruined English abbey. Finally, as if to avenge his abandonment by Ligeia and solve the problem of affectional deprivation, he marries the Lady Rowena “in a moment of mental alienation” (320-1). The narrator's phrase is revealing: For a moment he acts on his suppressed anger, betraying the memory of Ligeia with an impulsive remarriage.

Like those other fated ladies in Poe's fiction—Berenice, Morella, and Madeline Usher—Rowena quickly becomes an object of fear and revulsion. Unlike the poetic Ligeia, she inhabits the realm of prose, associated in “The Philosophy of Composition” not with supernal Beauty but with the expression of Truth and Passion (or “homeliness”), with realities “absolutely antagonistic” to Beauty. Insofar as she embodies the principle of prose, her very existence constitutes a reproach to the idealized memory of Ligeia. From the first Rowena arouses Passion (hatred) and the narrator's obsessive accumulation of funerary artifacts, together with his taste for grotesque and arabesque decor, implies his determination to turn the bridal bower into a torture chamber. As Roy Basler observed years ago, the narrator betrays his own deadly design by alluding to the “phantasmagoric” effect of the tapestries, an effect heightened by “the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind … giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole” (322). When we learn that Rowena's wasting illness has “no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps, in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself,” we recognize the covert purpose of the narrator's renovations and his cruel plan to frighten Rowena to death.¹⁹ In two sentences the narrator summarizes the antagonism which poisons his new marriage: “That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper—that she shunned me and loved me but little—I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man.” The second marriage has become the obverse of the first. Love has turned to loathing and affection to aversion. Tellingly, the narrator confesses “pleasure” at Rowena's avoidance; perversely, he finds gratification in the absence of intimacy.

What accounts for this immediate, unbounded hostility? According to the logic the narrator himself supplies, his contempt for Rowena arises from his longing for Ligeia, whom he hopes to “restore … to the pathway she had abandoned.” As if his espousal to Rowena has marked an emotional betrayal, he imagines that by destroying his second wife he can somehow cancel his mistake and effect the return of the first. The apparent metamorphosis of the closing paragraph seems to confirm his recuperation of Ligeia, and his undisguised yearning for her explains his seemingly gratuitous harassment of Rowena. Like the attack on the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this narrator's cruelty proves on closer inspection to be self-generated; it has nothing to do with Rowena's origins, with their first month of marriage (marked by “little disquietude”), or with his bride's physical appearance. In contrast to Ligeia, who prompts an elaborate description, Rowena remains a nonentity. Little more than a token of gender, she is yet the brunt of a malevolent plot which begins prior to the narrator's remarriage, during the period of wandering that reveals his confusion without Ligeia.

Even before he sets eyes on the unfortunate Rowena, he has launched his deadly plot by purchasing the abbey and filling it with “gorgeous and fantastic draperies” and “solemn carvings” from Egypt—all signs of his “incipient madness.” If the narrator is intent on “alleviating [his] sorrows,” then his preoccupation with funereal artifacts displays the “child-like perversity” which impels his actions: He will ease his grief by wallowing in death. Rather than diverting the narrator from the thought of Ligeia's death and his loss of emotional sustenance, the gloomy appointments compel him to recall that loss repeatedly, making it the defining condition of his existence. By evoking terror, the morbid decor also partakes of a scheme of symbolic retribution, for the narrator has prepared this Gothic room expressly to torment himself and the woman who would presume to replace Ligeia. The fact that he readies his chamber of horror and then goes looking for a bride suggests that Rowena is from the outset a sacrificial figure, a random victim of the narrator's own confused need to prove his devotion to Ligeia while avenging his abandonment by her. Contriving to unnerve Rowena, he refuses to block the “artificial” currents which stir the tapestry or even to explain to her its phantasmagoric effects as he carries out his revenge. Displacing the outrage he feels for the dead woman who has left him to languish, he projects on Rowena all his unconscious resentment of Ligeia.²⁰ His enmity for the second wife seems immediate and absolute because it has always been there, lodged in the unconscious, awaiting its object. If the “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid” which fall into Rowena's goblet actually represent the narrator's effort to poison his wife, as Basler has argued, we witness here a confused attempt to kill two women at once: the perfidious Ligeia and her unworthy successor.

The final scenes of the tale expose the psychic ambiguity of the narrator's strategy. Simultaneously longing for his dead first wife and wishing to avenge her rejection, he watches over the “corpse” of Rowena with a “turbulent violence” of emotion, recalling “the whole of that unutterable wo [sic] with which [he] had regarded [Ligeia] thus enshrouded.” Since the second “death” is a willed reenactment of the first, he gazes on Rowena's body with “a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved” (326). Significantly, the remembrance of Ligeia's death evokes bitterness; the spectacle of the corpse awakens the memory of his own misery as it discloses the self-torment of his scheme. This repetition of suffering perhaps accounts for his brutal indifference to Rowena's fate. He is caught precisely between desire and disdain, between dependency and denial. Through the “hideous drama of revivification” by which Rowena appears to undergo a series of recoveries and relapses, Poe gives objective expression to the narrator's own conflicted impulses.

This conflation of the two deaths reaches its shocking conclusion when Rowena seems at last to become Ligeia. In his frenzied condition the narrator imagines that “the thing that was enshrouded advanced bodily and palpably into the middle of the apartment” (329). Here, confronted by the ambiguous image of his wildest hopes and deepest fears, he experiences a “mad disorder” of thought and perceives that the dead woman has grown taller; when the shroud falls away, the narrator sees “huge masses of long and dishevelled hair” which appears “blacker than the wings of midnight.” Finally he looks into “the black, and the wild eyes” of his “lost love,” Ligeia. This scene has occasioned much debate about the narrator's reliability, but the actual situation matters less than his unequivocal belief that his first wife has returned in the body of her successor. This presumed feat of metempsychosis appears to corroborate the power of Ligeia's superhuman will—as well as the pertinence of the Glanvill passage cited three times by Poe.

The narrator's conviction that Rowena has turned into Ligeia carries a deeper and more revealing import, however. Through the alchemy of that charged moment, the hated female has become the “supremely beloved” Other; the beautiful, dying woman of Poe's poetry, that source of bliss and sustenance, has merged with the despised, pale lady of the tales. The confrontation with this spectral figure dramatizes the ambiguous relations which must exist between the narrator and the woman whom he simultaneously loves and loathes. When he throws himself before her (“One bound, and I had reached her feet!”), his obeisance meets with aversion: “Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had confined it.” Rowena/Ligeia responds with a gesture of avoidance linked to her own unbinding; she can only free herself from the shroud by keeping the narrator at arm's length.

In this brilliant scene fusing the two wives into a beautiful, undying woman, Poe suggests that the idolatry of the poems and the loathing of the tales are reciprocal effects of a relationship to Woman predicated on dependency. The very instinct to idealize Woman as “All,” as the incarnation of “Truth, Beauty, Poetry” and the “only possible salvation” for man, creates the basis for inevitable bitterness by making the male's happiness and self-worth contingent on sustained female affection. Within this neurotic paradigm, the absolute power of Woman (who in “Ligeia” represents beauty, learning, and will) is the inverse effect of the male's utter helplessness. By investing all value in Woman's love, the Poesque protagonist assumes a childlike subjection which, in a world of death, must result in loss and abandonment, in the withdrawal of essential gratification. The narrator of “Ligeia,” of course, never suspects the connection between his adoration of Ligeia and his contempt for Rowena. Nor does he comprehend that the plot carried out in the Gothic chamber is ultimately a plot against Woman, an attack on the female loveliness he cannot live without. The pattern of violence against women throughout Poe's fiction repeatedly betrays the male protagonist's outrage at his own helplessness and insufficiency. This violence inverts the melancholy passivity of the poems and turns the experience of absence into an urge to annihilate the Other.

Only once in his later fiction did Poe represent the death of a beautiful woman as a benign event apparently uncomplicated by antagonism, resentment, or guilt. That story, “Eleonora,” seems a cheerful rewriting of “Ligeia” insofar as the beloved but fated female cousin appears to sanction the narrator's subsequent marriage to Ermengarde. Read in relation to Poe's life, the story pre-figures by several years his headlong quest for a new bride after Virginia's demise, offering what amounts to a prophetic argument for remarriage. Despite the narrator's vow, at the hour of Eleonora's death, that he will never “prove recreant to her dear memory” or indeed “bind [himself] in marriage to any daughter of the Earth,” he later acknowledges his yearning for love and (like the narrator of “Ligeia”) travels to a distant place to escape his memories of the departed one.²¹ In a strange city, “bewildered and intoxicated” by the “radiant loveliness of woman,” he providentially meets Ermengarde, a maiden who inspires “the most abject worship of love.” This “seraph” induces a “spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration” because her “memorial eyes” recall Eleonora. When the narrator weds Ermengarde, he imagines that the voice of Eleonora speaks to him at night, releasing him from his vow and blessing his marriage.

On the surface, this story reflects an apparent solution to the fatal dualism of “Ligeia,” insofar as Poe implies a tacit collaboration between two women to fill the “void” in the narrator's heart and satisfy his longing for love. Within this happy scenario, however, lurks the perverse, childlike dependency, the pattern of relentless idolatry which—according to a psychic logic Poe had already intuited—must end in despair and anger.²² Thus, although Poe tells a seemingly different story in “Eleonora” than in “Ligeia,” we still recognize the persistent tendency of a male protagonist to grant to a beloved woman absolute control over his happiness. Whatever considerations may have prompted this ostensibly sanguine version of the death of a beautiful woman, its suggestion of an unconflicted “transferring” of the narrator's love for Eleonora to the more worldly Ermengarde ignores the mechanism of dependency-desolation-retribution depicted in “Ligeia” (and elsewhere) without supplying an equally compelling rationale for its dismantling.²³ According to the fantastic plot of “Eleonora,” the dying cousin first exacts a pledge of devotion and then cancels it. In a “delirium” of passion, the narrator marries Ermengarde without a thought about “the curse [he] has invoked.” Poe's final, improbable evocation of “the Spirit of Love” seems a blatant effort to invest the tale with a sentimentality which overtly mocks the concept of happy endings. As he had already demonstrated in “Ligeia,” whenever the beloved Other becomes a figure of adoration, her very enshrinement makes her an object of fear and loathing, an embodiment of power ultimately despised because the male protagonist has surrendered that responsibility for his own well-being which would permit him to value a woman not as “Truth, Beauty, Poetry,” but simply, humanly, as herself.

Notes

1. “The Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 16.

2. This view surfaces in Leland S. Person's claim that Poe's female characters resist male efforts to transform them into “aesthetic objects,” and hence that Poe implicitly criticizes these “objectifying tendencies.” See Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 23. Cynthia S. Jordan presents a similar argument, though she sees a shift from the early tales (in which men repress women) to the more “androgynous,” enlightened attitudes of Roderick Usher and C. Auguste Dupin. See Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 133-51.

3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), pp. 232-7. See also the similarities and differences between Poe and Breton noted by Patrizia Lombardo in Edgar Poe et la Modernité: Breton, Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa, 1985), pp. 76-86.

4. Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), p. 247.

5. “Al Aaraaf,” Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 110-11.

6. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, p. 458.

7. “The Poetic Principle,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 93-4.

8. This figure is inflated by the relatively later death of Frances Allan at the age of forty-four; the average is based on the assumption that Elizabeth Arnold Poe was born in 1787.

9. See my discussion of Poe's letters to various women in Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 101-13.

10. Letter to Maria Clemm, July 7 [1849], The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (1949; rev. ed., New York: Gordian, 1966), vol. 2, p. 452; letter to Maria Clemm, August 28-29 (?), 1849, Letters, vol. 2, p. 459.

11. Elsewhere I treat in slightly different terms Poe's projections of the death of the beautiful woman. See Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, pp. 60-88.

12. See Poe's equivocal admission to Philip Pendleton Cooke, September 21, 1839, in Letters, vol 1, p. 118. There is good reason to doubt the sincerity of Poe's self-criticism.

13. This thesis appeared first in Clark Griffith, “Poe's ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (1954): 8-25. G. R. Thompson builds on Griffith's assumptions in Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), pp. 82-3.

14. “Ligeia,” Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, p. 317. Subsequent parenthetical references to the text of “Ligeia” will correspond in pagination to this edition.

15. “The Conqueror Worm,” with three sentences before and two paragraphs after the poem, was inserted when Poe revised the story for the New York New World in early 1845.

16. The source of this quotation has never been located, prompting speculation that perhaps Poe manufactured the esoteric allusion.

17. “Woman's Word,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981), pp. 79-86.

18. The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), p. 67.

19. See Roy P. Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,’” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 58-9.

20. It should be noted that both Leland S. Person, Jr., and Cynthia Jordan register the narrator's unconsciously repressive hostility toward Ligeia. See Person, Aesthetic Headaches, p. 30, and Jordan, Second Stories, p. 139.

21. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 2, p. 642. Subsequent parenthetical references to the text of “Eleonora” will correspond in pagination to this edition.

22. Benjamin Fisher notes the narrator's ironic confession of madness and its ambiguous implications. See “‘Eleonora’: Poe and Madness,” in Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990), pp. 178-88.

23. Joan Dayan has exposed the unlikeliness of Poe's conclusion to “Eleonora,” calling the dead woman's supposed blessing—“Sleep in peace”—a “hollow beatitude,” even a potential curse. Dayan makes another point consonant with my own argument: that Poe's transformation of woman “into superlatives, her idealization,” amounts to her “reduction into generality.” See Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 221-3.

Texts of Poe's Tales

As indicated in the various essays, all quotations from Poe's tales are drawn from the standard scholarly edition, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vols. 2 and 3 (Tales and Sketches) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Also to be recommended are Patrick F. Quinn, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: The Library of America, 1984) and Burton R. Pollin, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Imaginary Voyages (Boston: Twayne, 1981). These contain the texts of three lengthy tales not included in Mabbott's edition: “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” “The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfaall,” and “The Journal of Julius Rodman.”