Chapter Two1

Chao 41 Chapter Two The Dead Do Not Die: Meeting Death in Ligeia’s “The Conqueror Worm” 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 do not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. — Joseph Glanvill Daryl E. Jones has neatly categorized the interpreters of “Ligeia” into two camps: those who argue a case for literalism, and accept Ligeia’s resurrection at its conclusion by reference to the Glanvill quotation which precedes the tale, and those who direct their attention to Poe’s subtleties of characterization and claim that the tale is a probing study of erotic obsession (33). Though this tale may be read literally as a supernatural account of Ligeia’s reincarnation in Rowena’s body, my reading concurs with the latter school, and regards Ligeia, at a deeper level, as an apt and richly allusive image forever imprinted in the narrator’s obsessed mind. Without going so far as to see the narrator as a murderer to will Ligeia’s return, a close reading of this tale shows how his extreme fascination with Ligeia and his preoccupation with idée fixe expressed in the poem, “ The Conqueror Worm,” have established him as a victim of his drug-confused mind that the “hideous drama of revivification” at the end, in his own words, is fundamentally a product of his imaginative process— a self-induced resurgence of the being of Ligeia which eventually reproduces the horror of death that he earlier attributed to the dying Ligeia at the deathbed. In addition, it is worth noting that Poe has presented Ligeia as a poet who is particularly associated with language and text. Her learning is unparalleled, and Chao 42 everything about Ligeia, as we observe, comes from a book. It is this powerfully poetical mystery that the scholarly narrator intends to probe, but his senses have never revealed the final meaning of that mystery aroused in Ligeia’s sentimentality. In fact, in one of Poe’s earliest poems, “Al Aaraaf,” Poe has attributed Ligeia to an idea of musical creativity, and celebrates the nurturing power of her melodious language: “Ligeia! Ligeia! / My beautiful one! / Whose harshest idea/ Will melody run (1000). And in the case of “Ligeia,” the poem, “The Conqueror Worm,” had appeared separately in 1843 until it found its way into Poe’s revision of “Ligeia” for the New York New World in February 1845. As we know, Poe not only added the poem to the story but attributed the poem to Ligeia. In this sense, Poe’s own identification of Ligeia with a creative voice has made her a putative poet, whose powerful creative presence greatly influences the narrator’s subjective mind. Hence, for Poe, “Ligeia” has become a real name for a creator in her own right, whose poem clearly manifests her poetic vitality in a fictional text, and makes especially clear the narrator’s inextricable participation in her directed play of terror. Whether Ligeia comes back to life in fact or in imagination, as we read the tale, we sense how much the terror rests upon the narrator’s will to remember and to conjure up the dead Ligeia and her poem from his already enfeebled memory. Thus, it is tempting to think that the poem is not only a fearsome projection of Ligeia’s imagination that embodies some hidden aspects of repressed unconsciousness, but an objectification of otherwise vital aspects of Ligeia’s character with which the narrator is identified. In a precise sense, “The Conqueror Worm,” irrespective of Ligeia’s subsequent resurrection, has hinted at a kind of fluid mental world which enraptures the narrator, and simultaneously provides for him an uneasy animation of his life on the whole. From the beginning, Ligeia’s poem is an object of fear; specifically, by fixing his attention on the poem, the narrator is confronted by a physical reality that, Poe would have us to believe, he has Chao 43 “no power to portray— no utterance capable of expressing” (658). Ligeia, the dream-dimmed, ethereal living dead in her mystic power, remains to the narrator a hermetical nightmare that unspeakably slips between human and non-human, an angel and a demon, and above all, life and death. Ⅰ. During His Recollections: The Forbidden Mystery of Ligeia This story is divided into two nearly equal halves: the first part is an expanded description of Ligeia and her death; the second comprises an even lengthy description of the bridal chamber in the narrator’s English abbey and the death of Rowena, his second wife. In the beginning paragraphs of the story, the narrator’s portrait of Ligeia’s physical beauty and profound learning has already negated her materiality, as if she exists in a fluid dimension of imaginary space. Frequently, Ligeia is described as being more spiritual than physical, and the narrator has been oblivious of all but her power over him: “I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” (654). Furthermore, there comes his interesting admission that he has never known her paternal name despite the fact that her family, for him, is “of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted” (654). That Ligeia would not tell her husband about her family, or ever reveals her paternal name makes her dangerously alien to the narrator in her mystical origin. On the other hand, although we are constantly informed that the lapse of time and the extent of his suffering have enfeebled his memory, the narrator has kept Ligeia’s supreme beauty, her rare learning, and the enthralling eloquence of her low musical language painfully alive in his every thought. All of which, he notes, “made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive, that they have been unnoticed and unknown” (654; emphasis added). And significantly, it is only by the word “Ligeia” itself that the narrator can recall his beloved wife: “Ligeia! Ligeia! Chao 44 Buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone— by Ligeia— that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more” (654). Here, it crosses our mind that “Ligeia” seems to be a secret word which raises the dead from the grave, and has given his presumably dead wife a compelling reality and presence in his memory long impaired by opium. Unlike most of Poe’s storytellers, the hero in “Ligeia” is not relating an episode which comes instantly from his memory, he is struggling to compose his story, but fails to recall all the details. Still, Ligeia comes vividly to his mind in her infectious power as an agent of spiritual destruction. In this sense, the incongruity of his unbelievable ignorance during his recollections just shows Ligeia’s “infinite supremacy” over his madly hallucinating mind and his psychic incapacities which cannot reveal to him the mysteries and the “forbidden knowledge” Ligeia represents. The narrator’s obsession with Ligeia becomes clearer with every statement he makes about her, and Ligeia has clearly become the site for a psychological crisis of his inabilities to define and regulate the meanings hinted in her expressions. Although he makes much of Ligeia’s seemingly powerful creativity which has enthralled him, he admits his failure to find the lasting meaning of life in Ligeia’s large, expressive eyes and her sirenlike voice that reiterate “strangeness” in her beauty and passions. Ligeia’s expressions, for instance, provide Bacon’s “strangeness in proportion” which gives her an exquisite beauty— the narrator ultimately employs Bacon’s aesthetics to locate Ligeia’s beauty which altogether exceeds a material formation (655). However, the narrator ambiguously and abruptly empties her “expression” of its meaning. For him, there is no possibility of fathoming the mystery in her beauty of “expression,” in the coils of her raven-black hair, her ivory skin, and her huge black eyes which, we learn, are “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race,” “even fuller than the Chao 45 fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad” (655; emphasis added). Poe goes further to have the narrator claim that the strangeness of Ligeia’s eyes fails his rhetoric even though he has served as the “devotest of astrologers” to detect the secrets behind Ligeia’s “divine orbs,” which suggest a depth “more profound than the well of Democritus” (656). Moreover, referring again to Ligeia’s connection with language/a poet, Poe likens the feelings aroused by her expressions in the narrator to the feeling aroused when observing “the twin stars of Leda,” a rapidly growing vine, a moth or butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water, the ocean, a falling meteor, the glances of old people, certain sounds from the instruments, and above all, some passages of Joseph Glanvill from books (656). Pondering upon Ligeia’s expressions, his words rapidly lose their power; he finds himself “upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember” (656). We observe that Ligeia’s beauty is Bacon’s, and her will is Glanvill’s; she induces the narrator to resign himself with a child-like confidence to many of the secrets of transcendental scholarship. She is seen to guide the narrator-pupil through the chaotic world in her presence and in her readings alone.

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