Text: Joseph M. Garrison, Jr., “The Irony of Ligeia,” New Approaches on Poe, 1970, pp. 13-17

[page 13, continued:]

Regarded by Poe as his best story, “Ligeia” continues to perplex its readers. And those readers who write interpretations of the story continue to argue among themselves about its meaning, contending — if I may cover the views synoptically — that and the story is supernatural, literal, psychological, allegorical, or satirical, and that it can be rightly understood only when viewed consistently from one of these vantages. Anyone who has read through the commentaries will wonder whether anything has really been solved by the discussion and may even think that in terms of actual results much of it might just as well not have been written. In making these judgments, I am thinking particularly of Claudia C. Morrison's “Poe's ‘Ligeia’: and An Analysis,” an essay which begins with an extensive resumé of extant criticism and then proceeds in its arcane and questionable way to entertain the conclusion that “Ligeia” is “a sophisticated structuring of an unconscious wish for the return of Poe's lost mother.”(1) One almost wishes that C. Auguste Dupin could be [page 14:] momentarily materialized to settle the case, even if he conducted his investigations on the assumption that in affairs of this sort the truth is seldom hidden.

If we begin a reading of “Ligeia” with questions about the narrator, perhaps something can be added to what has already been said that will provide a fresh perspective. James W. Gargano, who has argued cogently for the distinction between author and speaker in Poe's tales, says of “Ligeia:” “The narrator in ‘Ligeia’ blurts out, in attempting to explain his wife's beauty in terms of its ‘expression:’ ‘Ah, words of no meaning!’ He rants about ‘incomprehensible anomalies,’ ‘words that are impotent to convey,’ and his inability to capture the ‘inexpressible.’ He raves because he cannot explain. His feverish futility of expression, however, cannot be attributed to Poe, who with an artistic ‘control,’ documents the stages of frustration and fantastic desire which end in the narrator's madness.”(2) The point is well-taken and should be insisted upon not simply as a lip-service, terminological distinction but as a distinction which necessitates a study of the narrator's role in the story and the dramatic situation which impels him to speak out. Since the late 1940's, most people who have commented on “Ligeia” have accepted the premise that the narrator is not Poe and consequently have avoided the intentional and biographical fallacies which literal-minded readers seldom avoid. But none of them has really explored the context which gives the speaker his raison d'être as a speaker or tried to determine whatever thematic significance this context may have.

Why does the narrator tell his story? Certainly not merely for effect, although Poe, working through him, achieves this end. The narrator has neither the clinical objectivity nor the ruthless deliberateness which are required to sustain a predetermined effect. In the process of telling his story, he frequently becomes caught up in what he is saying, highly conscious of himself as narrator, and at times is almost studiously reflective, as if the activity of writing itself provided him with insights which he had not had before or which he had not previously been able to articulate. Here is one example from the opening paragraph: “And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own — a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself — what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it.”(3) This passage and others like it encourage me to suggest that the narrator is telling his story not to display any abilities he may have as a raconteur but with the hope, perhaps not even consciously acknowledged, that he may arrive at some understanding of his continued preoccupation with Ligeia and that he may learn why he now conceives of himself as a person who is “buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world. ... ”

Clearly, the story emerges out of a dramatic situation which is not ordinary. It establishes a context, like that of a dramatic monologue, in which a conversation or preliminary discussion is implied prior to the opening sentence: “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia.” This sentence would seem to presuppose the presence of an interlocutor (not just the proverbial “gentle reader” of Hawthorne's prefaces) who has actually talked with the narrator and is giving him the occasion to say what he wants to say by asking a question such as “When did you first become acquainted with the lady Ligeia?” and thereby encouraging the story to begin as the narrator responds to the question. This dramatic context is also suggested by another sentence in the first paragraph: “Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine.” But if we insist upon a verbal exchange between the narrator and an interlocutor as the dramatic context for the beginning of the story, we create insurmountable problems for the rest of the story because, as I have already indicated, the narrator is not speaking his tale but is writing it; occasionally, he even calls attention to himself as being in the act of composition: “(what marvel that I shudder while I write?).” Consequently, unless this element of the story has been mismanaged by Poe, it would seem that the dramatic situation in “Ligeia” does not involve the assumed presence of an interlocutor but rather externalizes the narrator's self-prompted attempt to understand something he has not previously been able to understand and that the attempt to arrive at this understanding explains why he tells his tale. The fact that this situation [page 15:] creates an almost divided personality (particularly in the “frame” paragraphs) and confines the narrator to the limitations of his own perceptions points up the isolation that seems to figure so centrally in his dilemma and, incidentally, points it up in a manner not entirely different from Poe's handling of his speaker's situation in “The Raven.”

At this juncture, I am glad to acknowledge my indebtedness to an essay by Donald B. Stauffer on “Style and Meaning in ‘Ligeia’ and ‘William Wilson,’ ” a study which has given me more help with “Ligeia” than anything else I have read.(4) Mr. Stauffer's observations on the relationship between style and meaning in the two stories he chooses for discussion have helped me see the significance of dramatic context in “Ligeia” and have directed me to elements in the story which I would not have seen without his assistance. What I have to add to what he has said may be only an extension of his leavening ideas, but I think my emphasis on dramatic situation warrants additional comment, since the conclusions I will draw are substantially different from his. Responding to the formal rhythmic properties of the prose of “Ligeia,” Mr. Stauffer observes that “one of the first things we notice about the style of ‘Ligeia’ is its incantatory quality, which makes us feel that the narrator is intoning his story.”(5) He then explores specific examples, calling attention to metrical patterns and Poe's ‘reliance on and taste for a marked beat.” After demonstrating the usefulness of his emphasis on style, Mr. Stauffer states one of his major conclusions: “Analysis of its style shows us quite clearly what we would suspect: Poe wrote ‘Ligeia’ mainly in the language of emotional and dramatic involvement, with a strongly marked rhythm underlying much of the narrator's obsessive delivery.”(6) From this point, he moves on to suggest that “the predominantly emotional quality of its style may be defended by its appropriateness to both the agitated mental state of the narrator and to the supernatural events he relates.”(7) Concluding the section of the essay devoted to “Ligeia,” he says: “The tale is successful finally not because of the lucidity of its prose, but because the reader's rational faculties are momentarily suspended and lulled by its haunting, irrational melodies.”(8)

I do not mean to be ungrateful, but I do not think that Mr. Stauffer has made as much use of his ideas as he might have. Moreover, I simply cannot agree with him when he talks about the style of “Ligeia” as being predominantly “irrational,” because I do not think that the dramatic context or the tale itself supports this judgment. I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Stauffer when he says, in the concluding paragraph of his essay, that “the narrator of ‘Ligeia’ finds himself in a state of lost happiness and seeks to reproduce that happiness ... ;” but I do not think that this reading is carried as far as it ought to be carried or as far as the narrator (and especially Poe) invites us to take it. If, as Mr. Stauffer suggests, the narrator simply attempts to restore his “lost happiness” and fails, revealing in the process the debilitating consequences of irrationality, “Ligeia” is a very superficial story. If, on the other hand, Poe seeks to dramatize the epistemological predicament of his narrator and, through situation irony, to explore both the causes and consequences of his failure, then we have a different story — a better story — and another reading, one which deals with why the narrator does not understand what he wants to understand. Needless to say, the answer to this question should not be trivially supplied by saying that the narrator is mad or that he lacks the rational faculties which help to accomplish self-understanding. If anything, the narrator is too rational, too intellectual; he is the kind of man (to use the phrasing from Poe's “Sonnet — To Science”) who would drag “Diana from her car! and drive “the Hamadryad from the wood / To seek a shelter in some happier star.” He would never admit that he was this kind of man; he would affirm that he loved Ligeia passionately, that he loved her for what she was, and that his only wish was to have her live. But Poe, I think, gives us a different view.

This view may be seen as a fundamental issue in the story when the narrator describes the “circle of analogies” which he found for the expression in Ligeia's eyes: “Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine — in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven — (one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not infrequently by passages from books.” What is [page 16:] interesting here is that the narrator's list of analogies is incompatible with the conception of knowledge which he usually employs in his recollections and self deliberations. Characteristically, what he desires as a knower is a kind of Cartesian clarity, a rationalist's apprehension, an absolute perception. Over and over again, he refers to his compulsive desire to know Ligeia's secret, to penetrate her mystery. Even as he contemplates the memory of her eyes, the most transient part of her beauty, he says: “The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it — that something more profound than the well of Democritus — which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.” The narrator's reference to himself as astrologer and the distance which this reference implies do not testify to the intensity of his love but are rather the habitual characteristics of the ratiocinator. This bent of mind is seen in another passage: “And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression — felt it approaching — yet not quite be mine — and so at length entirely depart!” At one point, in fact, the narrator expresses his desire to “pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!” These details suggest that the narrator makes a devastating error: he does not see the discrepancy between that which he would know and the process by which he would know it. Given a phenomenon of truth in a state of becoming rather than being, as something given to the observer and not possessed by him, the narrator yields to his intellectual acquisitiveness and violates the quality of that beauty which to him now is apparently inaccessible. “Ligeia” dramatizes the irony of his isolation and analyzes its epistemological causes.

The change in style which some critics have observed in the story can be directly related to the narrator's conception of knowledge. Mr. Stauffer, for example, offers this explanation: “Much, but by no means all, of ‘Ligeia’ is written in this half-hysterical, highly emotional style, since Poe varies the style in this tale as he does in almost all his serious tales. Later in the tale we discover a much more measured, rational tone, as the narrator describes the fantastic interiors of the English abbey to which he retires after the death of Ligeia. The center portion is marked by complex, compound, and compound-complex sentences quite different from the simpler syntax of sentences in the early part of the tale. In his recollections of Ligeia he has been rhapsodic, conveying to the reader the frame of mind into which the memory of her puts him; now, in the second half of the tale, as he recalls the sequence of events leading up to the reappearance of Ligeia, he attempts to get a grip on himself and his emotions as he recounts the early history of Rowena dispassionately and with apparent detachment.”(9) While Mr. Stauffer's description of what happens to the prose in “Ligeia” is certainly accurate, I would account for the change in the style of the story with another explanation, one which adds to Mr. Stauffer's reading an explanation of the significance of the narrator's failure and attempts to interpret this failure in terms of the theme of the story. I see the beginning paragraphs of “Ligeia” not as a “half-hysterical, highly emotional” release but as an initial attempt on the part of the narrator to employ a knowing process which might have been successful, had he been able to sustain it. Drawing heavily upon aesthetic criteria, he sounds as if he were trying to summon up Ligeia, using the technique of indirection to realize a vision which at the beginning of the story he clearly knows is elusive. At times, he speaks as if he were open to whatever revelations his rhetoric would disclose. But as the story proceeds, he becomes less and less receptive; he imposes confining rational norms upon his quest, and finds himself at the end of the story in a condition of unrelieved bewilderment.

Given the basic points upon which critics have disagreed in their considerations of “Ligeia,” one other detail should certainly be accounted for in terms of the setting which this essay provides. The epigraph which Poe attributed to Glanvill has been taken as a crucial clue to the meaning of “Ligeia.” I do not explain the epigraph as an editorial finger, pointing at Ligeia's materialization in the body of Rowena and insisting upon her superior will. While the epigraph is applicable to Ligeia, I think it derives its major import in terms of its application to the narrator. Here are the words in question: “And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the [page 17:] weakness of his feeble will.” In view of what I have already said about the narrator, his dramatic situation, and the failure of his epistemological venture, it seems to me that the epigraph is an ironic comment on the truth of the tale as Poe would have us see it. What is finally important in the epigraph is not the reference to the will but the fact that the will functions as a symbol for the elusive essence without which human beings cannot exist, that essence which man cannot finally understand and which the narrator of “Ligeia” presumptuously and disastrously attempts to fathom as if it were a reasonable entity. Viewed in this context, the last stanza of “The Conqueror Worm,” spoken by the narrator at Ligeia's last request before her death, takes on ironic meaning:

Therefore, Ligeia's final action — her attempt to reincarnate herself in the body of Rowena — ought not to be interpreted as a successful effort. Her towering intellect failed to grasp fully “the mysteries of the will.” This interpretation is confirmed by Poe's remarks to Philip P. Cooke in a letter dated 21 September 1839: “One point I have not fully carried out — I should have intimated that the will did not perfect its intention — there should have been a relapse — a final one — and Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey an idea of the truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena — the bodily alterations having gradually faded away.”(10) Although Ligeia's partially successful attempt to return in bodily form to the narrator would seem to prove the fierceness of her love for him, her failure to sustain the habitation produces the ultimate irony. The narrator's desire to repossess a living Ligeia, and thereby to profit from the death of Rowena, is dashed to the ground. His epistemological quest proves a failure. Vampire-like, he had hoped to suck Ligeia's wisdom from her. In his obsession to learn the secrets of nature, his heart became cold to her passion; and because his epistemological quest continued after her death, he was incapable of loving Rowena. Now, with the deaths of both women, he is left desolate. The consciousness of his own failure to penetrate “the mysteries of the will” while losing so much in the attempt is certainly a fitting punishment of his intellectual error.

That Poe's ending needs amplification for the sake of clarity and emphasis goes without saying. His recognition of this fact shows how good a critic of his own work he could be when he had time to survey it objectively. Nevertheless, his ending is not a complete failure. It is not so obscure in meaning that its ironic implications cannot be fathomed. The reader who has been alert to Poe's ironies up to the final episode — particularly because of the presentation of the worm as the conqueror of man — is led to guess the ironic meaning of the conclusion of the story. Poe did, however, commit the artistic fault of allowing himself to be content with an ending that has proven highly ambiguous to most readers. Nevertheless, in spite of this error of construction, “Ligeia” remains a great story, especially when its irony is taken into consideration.

Mary Baldwin College

[[Notes]]

1. Studies in Short Fiction, IV, (Spring, 1967), 237. The first twelve notes in Miss Morrison's essay are a good finding-list of recent criticism of “Ligeia” (see Ibid., pp. 234-235). The best evaluation of recent critical views, however, is in James Schroeter's “A Misreading of Poe's “Ligeia,’ ” PMLA, LXXVI, (September, 1961), p. 397-406.

2 “The Question of Poe's Narrators,” College English, XXV, (December, 1963), 178.

3 This quotation and all subsequent quotations from “Ligeia” are taken from Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, (New York, 1902), II, 248-268. Since “Ligeia” is short and well-known, I will not distract my “reader with footnote references to the text or parenthetical page citations.

4 Studies in Short Fiction, II, (Summer, 1965), 316-330.

5 Ibid., p. 318.

6 Ibid., p. 323

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 324.

9 Op cit., p. 322.

10 The Letters of Edgar of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom, (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), I, 118.