Watermarks Darkly through a Looking Glass: Gates and Anchors in Poe's "Ligeia" by Melissa Hill

The mirroring, or doubling, of Ligeia and Rowena in Edgar AIlan Poe's "Ligeia" is more than a technique used to give symmetry and balance to a horror story about the dying who refuse to stay dead. The two women also become emblems of the "real" world and the "dream" world, serving as emissaries and guides to the narrator and reader who mirror both worlds and must choose one. Thus, Ligeia is the dark dream-world personified, a gate to the opium-laden existence the narrator craves, just as Rowena is the fair epitome of the bland, light-infused world of reality, an anchor to the mundane world the narrator literally goes insane to avoid. In order to illustrate the ethereal gating quality of Ligeia and the deadly anchoring quality of Rowena, I will first establish them firmly within their respective realms of fiction and fact. In order to illustrate the "double doubling" of the narrator, I will explore how Ligeia and Rowena interact with him, pushing him to extremes of dreaming and reality, and the deadly choice he must make.

I begin with Ligeia, emblem of the dream world, for she is the driving force of the story. She is the very stuff phantoms and dreams are made of: a dark, madly beautiful woman with a keenly piercing intensity and intelligence framed by an unforgettable mass of black hair, and an indomitable will shining through the microcosm of her black eyes. The first indication that she is more than a lovely, inspiring companion for the narrator comes in the first sentence of "Ligeia" as the narrator admits, "I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia" (1499). This is a strange way to begin a story, for it immediately casts the narrator into a doubtful light, rendering him immediately and irrevocably unreliable. Ligeia is the woman who lends her name to the title of the narrative and the woman who is named as beloved in the very next breath. Surely, the woman who has inspired such a desperate outcry would also inspire her lover to remember the details of their first meeting. The fact that she does not suggests that she goes beyond the role of beloved dead.

The narrator seems to recognize his mistake in admitting his lack of memory and makes an attempt to correct some of the damage done to his credibility, but he ultimately fails in the attempt. Trying to excuse his lack of concrete data, he calls to the forefront his "feeble" memory and the gradual intrusion of Ligeia into his heart. One might almost be inclined to accept his excuses and move on except that he follows with an incredibly gauzy and immaterial description of Ligeia, making vague references to her "placid cast of beauty" and her "low, musical language," as if these shadows alone could suffice to fix a woman firmly in the reader's mind (1499). These vague descriptions are compounded by the narrator's admission that he never knew her "paternal" name, followed by questions that pierce to the heart of the issue of his non-remembrance: Why can't he remember? Was it a game played between lovers? Was it a test of loyalty? The narrator must know that such protestations of innocence only serve to highlight the disbelief that one could love another so completely and never even know one's lover's last name, but he allows the reader no respite from the mystery of Ligeia's birth. Ligeia, divorced from mother and father, and therefore divorced from a human birth, begins to take root in the mind as a strange flower indeed--one who sprang into being from no known seed save for the narrator's mind.

Out of shadows and texture, the narrator has formed a passing glimpse of Ligeia, and in the process he has harmed his own credibility. He has also sparked the creation of a woman who operates beyond normal parameters. In making her less than real from the outset, he has begun the process of making Ligeia the representative of all that is supernatural in the story, a dream incarnate, who comes and departs "like a shadow" (I 499). It is interesting that he chooses the word shadow to describe the characteristics ³on which [his] memory faileth [him] not² (1499). A shadow, after all, is shape, or, as the narrator will describe Ligeia's eyes, "expression," but no substance, and the description of Ligeia that follows is certainly a shadow, painted with a large brush in sweeping strokes of dark ink, leaving us with only an outline. Her face is, of course, unequaled in beauty. One might expect beauty in a tragic female form. However, hers is only in terms of the almost hallucinatory quality of her countenance. And when we combine the reference to opium with the vague and phantasmagoric descriptions of Ligeia that precede and follow, the narrator¹s credibility becomes another departing shadow.

The narrator again seems to realize that he has gone too far or has dwelled too long on abstract concepts such as grace or beauty, for now he begins the litany of Ligeia¹s unparalleled face and form. From her lips to her temples, every feature of Ligeia¹s face is examined in turn. The concrete descriptions, however, are suspect by their very contrast to previous abstractions. Where once we had a shadow, now we have a nose worthy of a Hebraic vase. The narrator seems, to put it quite plainly, to be making it up as he goes along, primarily because he draws on so many cliches of Eastern beauty as seen through Western eyes. He tries to turn those cliches into fresh observations by adding elements of the undefined ³strange² to the mix. However, I argue that even attempting to inject strangeness into a cliche is a cliche, for saying, "She resembles this, except for that² is an older cliche of beauty than "hyacinthine" hair.

The narrator seems to achieve the heights of his ecstatic panegyric ode when he settles in on Ligeia¹s eyes as the source of all her beauty and power. Her eyes merit pages of exposition, but for my purpose, they are important because they, too, are vague. It may seem strange that the most powerful image in "Ligeia² can be called vague--but I argue that Ligeia's eyes are formed only of "expression," which the narrator himself admits to be a "word of no meaning" (1500). Ligeia's eyes are important not because they are concrete, but because, in their haunting dark luminosity, they are the portals to the dream world that Ligeia represents. They are the creative impulse distilled into twin pupils.

Ligeia, who seems so perfectly constructed, so delightfully real in force and power, is thus revealed as a construct of the narrator's mind. From the very beginning, he was making her up as he went along, forming her out of bits and pieces of idealized Woman. Just as his abbey is the physical collection of the artifacts of many cultures, a room made up of disparate elements representing his fractured psyche, Ligeia is a mental collection of the beauties and ideals of those same cultures. Stop for a moment and try to imagine Oriental eyes and a Hebraic nose. Like many other things in "Ligeia," it is a strange mixture. Ligeia could not have been a real woman--she could only be the symbol of idealized Woman, serving as the phantom inspiration who hovers over the narrator's shoulder in the dead of night, whispering his madness in recitable lines of poetry and perfect art. The years she spent with him were infused with creativity. To the extent that he created her, she helped him create. Thus, we can see that power flows both ways between Ligeia and the narrator--between the male artist seeking escape into the dream world of creativity and his female muse, who provides just the required opening. At the heart, ³Ligeia² is the story of a man whose exit into the dream world has been suddenly blocked or, to put it mrse succinctly, an artist with a bad case of writer¹s block.

When the force of his inspiration dies, whether through his encroaching madness or his inability to sustain the creative drive necessary to fuel her, the narrator seeks a mirror of that inspiration--a real, live woman to take the place of the dead, but never forgotten, Ligeia. At this point we should realize that the mirror is not a perfect mirror. The reflection is inherently unequal. For, if Ligeia is the perfect culmination of the entire human species, Rowena is the "fair-haired and blue eyed lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine" (1503). The narrator speaks at length of Ligeia's singular beauty and spends almost as much time explaining away his lack of knowledge on her behalf. His memory of Rowena is plagued by no such lack of knowledge. In one sentence, he dismisses her entirely, rendering her generic and common. However, he also (unwittingly?) highlights the contrast between Ligeia's fictional birth and Rowena's factual parentage. In a paragraph that begins with "she died," referring to Ligeia, the narrator meets, knows, and marries Rowena almost as an afterthought. And if Rowena's very realism provides a backwards mirror to Ligeia's supernatural state of being, it also lets us know exactly where the narrator stands on the issue of which realm is the more important. Ligeia merits years of devotion and unparalleled mourning in her passing; Rowena merits half a sentence upon her arrival.

To further associate Rowena with physical reality, the narrator does not launch into clichés and confusing abstractions of beauty that are associated with her. Rather, he immediately launches into a cataloguing of his physical representation of Ligeia by dealing with the contents of his paganized abbey. In a double knot of meaning, the concrete room is associated both with the concrete, if short, description of Rowena, and the unreal, gothic personage of Ligeia. This dualization of descriptions establishes the narrator as the focal point of the struggle between the real world and the dream world: His abbey is at the center of both or, rather, is both at the same time, just as he is.

Because Rowena is real to the narrator, he has no need to describe her. Instead, he focuses on the loveless marriage he shares with her, made miserable by his outbursts of temper and the fact that she does not truly love him. The narrator admits that he is sinking into madness and that he passes the vast majority of his days in an opium-induced fog. He allows Rowena's encroaching illness to mirror his own passage from the bonds of sanity, thereby associating himself with her illness and rendering himself a suspect in her eventual demise. Suspect is, of course, an understatement. After all, is one truly to believe that the drops of red fluid in all actuality descended from thin air? Her death is hardly registered as a cause for grief, though the narrator does see the opportunity to revive his nostalgic grief for Ligeia.

With his anchor to the world of sanity and reality broken, the narrator is once again free to join with visions such as the one imparted by Ligeia. The death, or murder, of the world of reality provides clear entry into the world of dreaming. The narrator, a double of both Ligeia and Rowena, has for most of the narrative been a double-sided mirror caught between two distinct mirrors. One facet of his life has to die to give the other free reign. As the narrator is quite unable, or unwilling, to join the ranks of the real, he murders the physical representation of that world, thus killing that part of himself. In Rowena's death, the narrator finds release into his opium dream. In Ligeia's rebirth, he feels the "crowd of unutterable fancies" pressing in on him once more (1508). A creativity that is another form of "mad disorder² has been reawakened. The loosened black hair is the loosened spirit of the muse, and the one act that confirms the rebirth of his inspiration is the opening of her "full," "black," and "wild" eyes (508).

The rebirth of inspiration in the soul of the narrator is not necessarily the beautiful thing we might expect it to be, and the choice that he makes is not necessarily the one that will lead to a happy ending. After all, his beauty is reborn only through the horror of Rowena's murder and subsequent monstrous transformation, and his genius is only reborn through his direct descent into madness. The narrator describes Ligeia's return in terms of shrieking madness and throbbing veins; obviously, the return of Ligeia is not the return of Romance, and the narrator seems sunk in horror rather than exultation. For good or ill, whether Ligeia is a returning or destroying angel, he makes his choice, and thus he is delivered to the realm of his choosing. It must be admitted that, by virtue of that choice, he is a broken man, left gibbering in the comer of his abbey, but he is also a man with no further restraints on his dark and mad vision.

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