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A Misreading of Poe's “Ligeia”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

James Schroeter
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Extract

One of the finest of Poe's stories, “Ligeia” is perhaps the one in which Poe managed most successfully to give artistic expression to themes with which he wrestled in all of his major literary works. It therefore has a claim to being called the most typical and also the best. On several occasions Poe himself expressed the conviction that “Ligeia” was the best of his stories. He wrote to Edward Duyckinck, the publisher, that “ ‘Ligeia’ is undoubtedly the best story I have written,” and to Philip Pendleton Cooke, the writer, that “the loftiest kind [of tale] is that of the highest imagination—and for this reason only ‘Ligeia’ may be called my best tale.” Poe's critics, also, have agreed. George E. Woodberry, one of the earliest and most reliable of them, says “Ligeia,” along with “The Fall of the House of Usher,” forms the “richest” of Poe's imaginative work, and marks “the highest reach of the romantic element” in his genius. Arthur H. Quinn classifies it as one of Poe's “masterpieces,” and D. H. Lawrence says it is Poe's “chief” story.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1961 , pp. 397 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 397 Tke Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John W. Ostrom (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), ii, 309, 329.

Note 2 in page 397 George E. Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston and New York, 1909), I, 225, 231.

Note 3 in page 397 Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe (New York and London, 1941), p. 269. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1953), p. 77.

Note 4 in page 397 Most of the earlier analyses are incomplete; the more recent interpretations have tended to be misleading.

Note 5 in page 397 The letter from Cooke is included by Woodberry, pp. 208–212. The appreciation by Woodberry is included in his book, pp. 225–229. The Hamilton analysis, first printed in The Reader (1906), was reprinted in Hamilton's A Manual of the Art of Fiction (New York, 1918), pp. 194–201.

Note 6 in page 397 Lawrence probably began working on the book as early as 1915.

Note 7 in page 397 Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe: Étude Psychanalytique (Paris, 1933). This book was later published under the title Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Study, trans. John Roaker (London, 1949). The chapter on “Ligeia,” pp. 224–236, is included under the heading “Tales of the ' Live-in-Death Mother.”

Note 8 in page 397 Roy Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia’,” College English, v (April 1944), 363–372. Clark Griffith, “Poe's Ligeia and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly, xxiv (October 1954), 8–25.

Note 9 in page 398 Griffith, Lawrence, and Easier. Griffith calls one of the passages in which Poe aims at intensity of expression “almost obscene overwriting.” Quoting (incorrectly) Poe's description of Ligeia's eyes as “even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of Nourjahad,” Lawrence simply comments “blarney” (79).

Note 10 in page 398 The Creative Reader, ed. Robert Wooster Stallman and Reginald Eyre Watters (New York, 1954). Roy P. Basler, Sex. Symbolism and Psychology in Literature (New Brunswick, N.J., 1948).

Note 11 in page 398 George Snell, The Shapers of American Fiction (New York, 1947), pp. 54–55.

Note 12 in page 398 Cf. Snell, p. 54, and Basler, p. 370.

Note 13 in page 398 Cf. Snell, p. 55, and Basler, p. 367. Although Snell fails to acknowledge his indebtedness to Basler, his treatment of “Ligeia” is simply an uncritical paraphrase of what Basler had said.

Note 14 in page 400 All of the quotations from and references to “Ligeia” are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Works oj Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James Harrison, Virginia edition, 17 vols. (New York, 1902), ii, 248–268. See pp. 248–254 for the “six-paragraph sequence” referred to.

Note 15 in page 400 Basler, p. 367. Here Basler refers only to the “second half of the story,” but he had earlier warned the reader to “keep constantly in mind that, if the hero is suffering from obsession, his narrative cannot be accepted merely at its face value as authentic of all the facts.” In any event, Basler himself consistently refuses to accept what the narrator says, freely ignoring or altering the narrator's words throughout.

Note 16 in page 402 Several scholars have searched in Glanvill's writings for this quotation, but without success. After searching myself, I have decided that probably Poe invented it. If so, he invented brilliantly. Both its style and sense accord remarkably with Glanvill's.

Note 17 in page 404 Basler, p. 369.

Note 18 in page 404 Basler, p. 369. The image of Ligeia as a “vampire” who is “preying” upon the “body” of Rowena is borrowed from D. H. Lawrence. See Lawrence, p. 84. Indeed, most of the ideas Basler represents as his own are freely translated from Lawrence. Lawrence is the only outstanding critic of “Ligeia” that Basler never refers to.

Note 19 in page 405 It can perhaps be objected that, since the narrator is a self-confessed opium-eater, the return of Ligeia may not be “actual.” This objection, however, can be answered in at least two ways. First, the entire first half of the story plus most of the second has as its chief purpose to make the return probable. If the return is only an opiumistic dream, the preparation has no purpose. Secondly, it seems likely that Poe included the detail about the narrator's use of opium as a way of intensifying rather than discounting the reliability of the narrator's testimony. In other words, the narrator's use of drugs is an earnest of his extreme grief, and, like those nervous disorders with which Poe characteristically endows his heroes, a sign of superior rather than weakened powers of perception.

Note 20 in page 406 Letters, pp. 117–118.

Note 21 in page 406 Woodberry, pp. 210–211.

Note 22 in page 406 See Quinn, pp. 748–749, for an account of this interpolation. Quinn brilliantly points out that “this clause prepares the way for the final assumption by Ligeia of the body of her rival, without appearing to do so.”