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. Above all, as she dies, she becomes little more than a melodious voice which emits a stream of words. All of these characteristics pointedly refer to Ligeia’s association with a poetic but threatening creativity, which is far beyond the narrator’s comprehension. In life,

Ligeia “came and departed as a shadow” (654), and before her bodily return, the narrator has envisioned “a shadow… such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade” (663). In short, Ligeia becomes not merely as a woman but a well-versed poet whose fierce energy and inspiring sentiment lie in, according to the narrator, her

“miraculous expansion of those eyes” and her “almost magical melody” which at once delighted and appalled him (657). And there is something less than sanctifying about her eyes and the wild words she habitually uttered. In fact, the narrator’s memorial act Chao 46

of his deceased wife just indicates his willing surrender to Ligeia’s sorcererlike,

dynamic power which do not die and will not stay buried in the depths of his unconscious. By informing us that he is imaginatively preoccupied with Ligeia, the narrator also alludes to his failure to unveil the mystery of life and death represented in her power of mind— in a word, his imaginative desire has outrun his psychological capacities, and he seems to be a psychopath who desperately seeks for the meaning, but is nevertheless caught up in his insatiable imagination.

In this regard, Jones is essentially correct in reading Ligeia as a Siren, who not only bears the same name, but manifests those deadly traits traditionally identified with the Sirens of Greek mythology (32-36). Ligeia’s vampirelike quality and salient character traits closely resemble those of the Sirens, who enrapture the sailors and lure them to their compulsive portraiture of death by enchanting a melodious appeal. Her strange character, unusually luminous eyes, and in particular, the music of her low sweet voice all strike the narrator as her most alluring but unsettling qualities. And as we observe, Ligeia nevertheless comes to absorb the narrator’s consciousness, and

appears whenever he demonstrates a presumed oblivion of her ominous presence.

Here, Leland S. Person approaches another significant insight that the narrator

tries to eclipse Ligeia’s image, almost “comically indiscriminate,” by equating the

self-expressive power of her eyes with his own feelings. He remarks that Ligeia’s

expression “is equivalent to his (the narrator’s) emotional response. Describing her, in

other words, means inscribing himself” (31). Person offers a way for us to reconsider

the narrator as an intimidated observer in describing Ligeia’s looks, and to see him

intent on escaping from the implications of her indefinable features. It is perhaps not

surprising that the narrator would flinch from those too unearthly tones and

expressions of Ligeia, and is unwilling to give himself freely to the fierce intensity of

her passion. Yet, no longer pure or passive, Ligeia always returns to his mind, not as a Chao 47

saving, benign ideal, but as a very unpoetic, earthy subject that marks many of the

dissolutions and decays in her poem, thus undermining his reason and rationally

controlled emotions. In other words, not only is Ligeia a poet, but she is taken straight

as an exemplar of what she depicts in her poem, a brute and bloodied scene which

obsesses and simultaneously torments the narrator. In this precise sense, what Ligeia

represents in this story is a poetic, mystic spirit that the narrator dwells inordinately

upon, and more importantly, a sensuous embodiment of recurring death that assumes a

darker, more sinister dimension which cannot be defined by his intellect.

In “Morella,” a kindred piece of “Ligeia,” the narrator shows the same obsession with Morella, who is beautiful, extremely learned, and excessively devoted to her husband. The opening paragraphs likewise help establish the narrator as emotionally threatened by Morella’s mysticism. We learn that he has difficulties regulating the

“vague intensity” of his affection for Morella, and he fears his wife because of the passion she arouses:

WITH a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend

Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul,

from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but

the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the

gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual

meaning, or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us

together at the altar; and I never spoke of passion, nor thought of love.

She, however, shunned society, and attaching herself to me alone,

rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder;— it is a happiness to

dream. (667)

As he explains, he feels no love despite Morella’s passionate devotion to him, and is “bitter” and “tormented” that he fails to define these vague feelings derived Chao 48

from Morella that he had never known before. He dismisses his happiness as that of a

dream, and seems only embittered by his “deep yet most singular affection” for

Morella, which is not of Eros, but of his interests in exploring the mystical writings

Morella leads him unto. In fact, he reiterates Morella’s gigantic powers of mind and her talents “ of no common order” which makes him, in a way, her pupil in many matters. However, at this point, he himself is still reluctant to elaborate on Morella’s

mystic power, and pretends to be bothered by and unable to understand her interests in

“the mere dross of early German literature” (667)— an entitlement that he would

degrade again and again to relieve his anxieties in the face of Morella’s immense

learning. His remarks further reflect his ambivalence to admit how Morella has

exerted the strongest influence on his mind:

In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I

forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any

tincture of the mysticism which I read, to be discovered, unless I am

greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. (667)

It is not difficult to perceive that he intends to rationalize his own study of Morella’s

readings as a possible error that he forgets himself and is greatly mistaken. Moreover,

he prefers to believe that his study is nothing more than a “simple but effectual

influence of habit and example” (667). He protests against Morella’s favorite study,

and persuades himself that he is untouched by her mysticism so as to abandon himself

“with an unflinching heart” to Morella’s guidance (667). Having transmuting his

dedication to Morella’s readings into an inevitable result of habits, the narrator

ambiguously registers her influence upon him, and comes to feel that which he denies

deep within his own psyche.

While poring over those forbidden pages, he ultimately feels a “forbidden spirit,”

enkindled by Morella’s cold touch and her melody tainted with terror— those fires he Chao 49

had tired to regulate earlier. He lingers for hours by her side, enraptured by the music

of her voice, but eventually finds himself appalled by the intricacies of her dead

philosophy and some of her low, singular words, “whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my (his) memory” (667). He further remarks, “I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the most hideous, as Hinnom became

Gehenna” (667). The narrator’s account explicitly highlights Morella’s power of mind and the fact that the mystical doctrines of “identity,” which form almost the sole conversation between him and Morella, no longer present “the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella” (668). He refuses to state the exact character of those philosophical disquisitions which mainly come from the volumes they used to be immersed in. Nevertheless, in the midst of their marriage, he has withdrawn within himself so far that his mind is totally occupied by his speculation on the intriguing notion of death and identity which Morella makes a habit of his: “the principium individuationis— the notion of that identity which at death is or is not lost for ever— was to me, at all times, a consideration of intense interest” (668).

Morella now seems to share with her forbidden German philosophy a rich ambiguity, and the narrator thus comes to feel oppressed by the agitated manner in which Morella mentions it. Invariably, he recognizes that Morella is no longer suited to his partner of studies; instead, she seems to become the dramatic enactment of their constant study; or to put it differently, she represents the vital forces that animate those dead doctrines. So vividly is the feeling that several features of Morella begin to irritate him: he is unable to “bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes” (668). In addition, his intellectual language with which he marks Morella’s agitation rather than his betrays even more his repression. The mystery of his wife oppresses him as a spell, which he Chao 50

cannot so fathom, even he feels its spell-like enchantment. It may be noted that he is

painfully aware of Morella’s psychic influences on him, and just as the narrator in

“Ligeia,” shrinks from her passion, which he can only regard as frightening. On the

other hand, Morella is never purged of her threat, and has exposed the unlikeliness of

the narrator’s graduate alienation of his regard from her. And eventually, it is her mystical expression and readings which signal the constant dread of death for the narrator that prevails throughout the story.

Therefore, it is clear that both Ligeia and Morella provide unarguably equivalents to the male protagonists’ obvious but unacknowledged imagination of death, which can hardly be pinned down to a static, rational vision that the narrators might expect to achieve. If Ligeia functions as a poet figure or a paper construct— a passage from Glanvill, a few lines from Bacon, and the idée fixe expressed in “The

Conqueror Worm”— then her death has “sensuously” exemplified what she has avowed in the philosophy she represents. And at the death scene, the dying Ligeia’s frantic invocation of eternal life on hearing her poem recited only confirms again the narrator’s role in this event, and further reveals the psychological crisis in which his psychic shock and frustration of the senses bring on his final and complete mania.

Following Ligeia, he is thus inevitably made present in her organized plot to feel the greatest terror as if he was to confront the evidence of death in its incarnation as writing. Ligeia’s literary power, in a sense, imposes a deathlike slumber on his reason to imagine his encounters with death represented in her narrative and simultaneously, in his self-awareness. Accordingly, his own exposure to the present moment and his participation in a seemingly morbid and violent plot make him sufficiently aware that

Ligeia’s poem is twice real in the reading of it.

Ligeia’s poem therefore puts into play his confidence to stay out of the panorama he observes, as evident in Ligeia’s last hours when he informs us that his suffering Chao 51

comes to parallel Ligeia’s: “I saw that she must die— and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael” (658; emphasis added). This confession he makes to describe his sympathetic and simultaneous anxieties at the sight of Ligeia’s last-minute struggles shows that he could no longer distinguish between a general reader and the kind of reader he is— a reader for whom the imaginary at once turns into real. At this moment, Ligeia has become, precisely, more real to him when death is present in her, and there follows the narrator’s projection of his fears of the flesh on

Ligeia— that she should become another example of what Simone de Beauvoir, in The

Second Sex, conceives man’s palpable, painful encounter with the deteriorations of the flesh. Conceding Ligeia’s creative significance, the narrator comprehends that the plot carried out at that moment is ultimately a plot against himself, and finds himself again unable to control such a dehumanizing narrative which expresses so tangibly a mortal predicament. Hence, his descriptions of Ligeia in the death scene are of primary significance as they reveal his voluptuous imagination and his fierce obsession with the idea that he may not thwart death in spite of a gigantic volition. Ligeia’s failure of spirit against death is thus not the end, but rather the beginning of his grim mania in which he cannot distinguish between dream and reality, and in a sense “wills”

Rowena into a version of Ligeia in his self-made drama of revivification.

Ⅱ. The Death Scene

In the death scene, the strength which Ligeia exhibits in resisting death is a perfect index to the degree to which the narrator has in fact attempted to resist

Ligeia’s ruthless law of death. The dramatic emphasis here, therefore, rests less on the death of Ligeia, but on the twisted response of the narrator who groans with anguish at the pitiful spectacle. It is clear that Ligeia has in her last hours created an experience which seems so immediate and absolute that it constitutes a reproach to Chao 52

the living one. This theme culminates when Poe begins to detail Ligeia’s dramatic

changes resulted from an unknown disease: “Ligeia grew ill,” the narrator recalls,

“those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored” (657).

As we have noticed, the onset of Ligeia’s decline produces ominous physical effects.

Her wild eyes, according to the narrator, “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 motion” (658). Like those other fated ladies in Poe’s fiction— Morella,

Berenice, and Madeline— Ligeia is soon prostrated by her illness, and calls the

narrator to the bedside for her dying words. She exhibits, however, an incomparable

strong volition which suggests to him that she may have overcome death in keeping

with the Glanvill quotation which precedes the tale. In fact, Ligeia’s actions in the tale

seem to support such a literal reading. “And the struggles of the passionate wife were,

to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own,” says the narrator, and he

continues, “in the intensity of her wild desire for life— for life— but for life— solace

and reason were alike the uttermost of folly” (658).

In this literal context, we may find favor with some critics who have argued that

Ligeia’s resurrection at the end fully illustrates the capacities of human will to triumph over death, and it is Ligeia’s wild longing, her eager vehemence of desire for life that impresses us the most as a positive account of man’s disastrous journey.

However, these emphases of Ligeia’s gigantic volition do not in any way ease us into the death scene; on the contrary, her demand for life is complicit with the narrator’s

desire to conqueror death, and just when she dies, she explicitly shows the weakness

of the mortal will in spite of the fervor of life with which she struggles with “the grim

Azrael.” Consequently, despite the narrator’s surface professions that Ligeia possesses

the strongest will he has ever seen, his remarks nevertheless imply that she also Chao 53

displays the most desperate situation where death has come with its greatest terrors, even in Ligiea’s most stern nature, and the wordless narrator cannot account for what he conceives to be the most deplorable spectacle. We are told twice that he protests vehemently against his verbal impotence in Ligeia’s struggle with death: “ Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow…I have no power to portray— no utterance capable of expressing” (658). Besides, he now clearly perceives that Ligeia’s ever-placid demeanor has changed into a wild, irrepressible excitement in her most convulsive writhings. Although her voice grows lower and gentler, the narrator confesses that the wild meaning of the words she quietly utters is the last thing he wants to explore:

“ My brain reeled as I hearkened, entranced to a melody more than mortal— to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known” (658).

What stands out in this extended description is that Ligeia’s dying words hint at mysteries that both “enrapture” and “terrify” the narrator. Ostensibly attributing his unutterable grief to Ligeia’s passing, his statement, however, stands as another literal declaration that his language fails to grasp the fierce energy of Ligeia’s melody “more than mortal.” Here, his reaction carries more than casual significance, for Ligeia seems in this scene not only embodies his imaged death, but discloses her part in a later drama of revivification even before Rowena’s shroud comes undone to reveal her distinctive features. The earthly body of Ligeia dies, but the telltale “vehemence of desire for life,” “but for life,” prefigures her return to life whether in fact or in imagination. Explicitly, her melodious language speaks of her undying strength that makes possible a second living— a voice that he intends to conceal, or to fight against, but can never be killed out of his consciousness. This sense of struggle and threat thus finds expression in the narrator’s unequivocal belief that the dying Ligeia will probably live again in her immortal melody. Ligeia’s indelible will to live, at the end, Chao 54

becomes the clue by which the narrator must intuit her return, not only in the body of

Rowena, but in his consciousness which comes to wear down his normal mind.

Reading the Poem and the “Conqueror Worm” Imagery

Ligeia’s death scene culminates when she makes the narrator repeat the verses

she has composed, as if she would have him read her poem into his imagination and

into his subjective narrative. At Ligeia’s “peremptory” request, the narrator finds

himself unable to resist the poem which is aroused to be a creative voice— in one of

the most terrible, nearly insupportable form— which hardly dies away with Ligeia’s

decease. By calling his attention to her performance of life and death, Ligeia breaks

off his narrative at the moment of her greatest strength. “The Conqueror Worm,”

which the narrator attributes to Ligeia in Poe’s revision of the tale as mentioned above,

can be viewed as a text which expresses the conception of human mortality. To be

sure, the gory worm is associated with death that reduces all human life to “human

gore” for which the angels are “drowned in tears” (659). Poe’s allegorical poem

undeniably represents another masquerade that ends with a moral about the

inevitability of death. On the other hand, Ligeia’s reiteration of a remark that Poe

claims to borrow from Joseph Glanvill also supports such an argument. Ligeia’s own

situation of yielding to death despite her essentially fierce resistance seems to affirm

the concluding sentences of the passage: “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor

unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will” (659; emphasis added).

Nonetheless, the pervasive implications of the nature of “the conqueror Worm” still invite much consideration. Some critics, Person for example, regards the poem as

Ligeia’s complaint of her victimization at the hands of men. Conjoining sexuality and death in the figure of the conqueror Worm, the poem thereby concerns Ligeia’s Chao 55

experience of a wife and a woman, and noticeably the male tendency to conqueror women (33). However, his reading obviously ignores the fact that Ligeia dreads death, rather than sexual conquest. For her, the “Horror”— which forms “the soul of the plot”— derives from the inability of man to defeat the predatory, “blood-red thing” which feeds on human “mimes.” Hence, the narrator’s own identification of Ligeia with death, in the usual sense, represents his inherent response to the problem of dying.

However, we may surmise that the “worm” means more than death that we imagine it to be. In “Morella,” Poe introduces again the word “worm,” and here the situation bears certain similarities to “Ligeia” in that both concern the death of a woman of remarkable determination and will power. However, in the case of

“Morella,” we are further impressed that shuddering at the perfect identity of his daughter with Morella, the narrator, for the first and the only time, refers Morella to

“a worm that would not die,” as he phrases it:

that her (the daughter’s) eyes were like Morella’s I could endure; but then

they too often looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella’s

own intense and bewildered meaning. And in the contour of the high

forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers

which buried themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of her

speech, and above all— oh! above all— in the phrases and expressions of

the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for

consuming thought and horror— for a worm that would not die. (670)

Interestingly, the imagery of “worm” does not suggest death itself, but leads us to something very much like the reminder of death— an omnipresent awareness of death which makes death undeniably present. This explanation seems considerably more plausible in the example of “Morella,” for, appropriately, his daughter inherits Chao 56

Morella’s spirit in nature, and the narrator is increasingly shocked by her dark spirituality into a revelation of Morella’s mystic being which is inseparable from death. In the narrator’s view, the transformation of soul in his wild hallucinations is terrifying, because it continually reshapes his daughter until she is unrecognizable except as Morella, and as whatever is reminiscent of the consequences and afflictions of life that he is meant to feel— namely a worm cannot be killed, because it feeds on his inherent unconsciousness, rather than a literary object outside himself that he is able to defeat. Invariably, he cannot live in defiance of death, because death does not exist as a comprehensible and tangible substance that can be confronted.

This idea can also be found in another story, “William Wilson,” where Wilson finally confronts his double he has been avoiding, and stabs him to death without realizing that, as Mladen Dolar reminds us, “his substance and being were concentrated in his double,” and that in killing him, he kills himself (136-37). It is particularly illuminating when Wilson’s double exclaims with anguish in the final showdown:

You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead—

Dead to the world, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist— and,

in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast

murdered thyself. (641)

The very image of Wilson turns up to produce a frightening anxiety in his accustomed reality, and shatters the bases of his world; nonetheless, just as Dolar emphasizes, this image is more fundamental than its owner: “it institutes his substance, his essential being, his ‘soul,’ it is his most valuable part, it makes him a human being. It is his immortal part, his protection against death” (137). As their relation gets unbearable in the end, Wilson is compelled to kill his double, but in a way he also kills himself.

Slavoj Zizek also makes his observation that the double seems strangely always to Chao 57

look askew, the moment he were to confront his subject, Wilson’s life would be soon

over (94). This is of course what Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase aims at: it is only

through one’s mirror reflection that one can establish oneself as an “I” (2-3). And we

may find that the outcome of Poe’s stories are always likely to be tragic, when one

encounters his essential being, there seems to be no way out.

Back to “Morella,” we see that the narrator tries not to acknowledge death as an

absence, and seeks to murder Morella, as if, by doing so, he has murdered death. As

Morella declines, the “crimson spot” and prominently blue veins on her face seem to

manifest her imminent death, but “her meaning eyes” soon sicken his soul, and

frighten him away from acting on what little sympathy he feels. His fear of Morella’s

unrequited ardor thereby leads him cruelly long for her death. Tellingly, he confesses

loathing for Morella’s existence, and perversely, he finds the greatest gratification in

her wasting disease:

Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for

the moment of Morella’s decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its

tenement of clay for many days— for many weeks and irksome

months— until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind,

and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed

the days, and the hours, and the bitter moments, which seemed to

lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined— like shadows in the

dying of the day. (668)

Despite his early pity on Morella, he later acknowledges his coldness, and impatiently awaits her death, as he specifies that ” I (he) grew furious through delay.” Their marriage, as Dayan rightly points out in Poe’s tales of women, always turns what was cherished into what is scorned (“Amorous Bondage” 202). And in this process of reciprocal repulsions, he ultimately kills his wife through his alienation. Chao 58

However, alluding to Morella’s deteriorating condition, he is also ironically

alluding to a supposed situation of his own weakening confidence in his absurd

attempt to kill death. After Morella’s decease, further characterizing his daughter’s

resemblance to Morella, he realizes that, in his desire to keep concentrated his

attention on escaping death, he is simultaneously initiated into a new awareness of

death embodied in Morella’s daughter that defies analysis and explanation— that is,

death is a state of nonexistence, but an inevitable process which is inherent in his

being. Hence, what this presence of Morella’s undying death, as a “worm,” makes

clear to him is that he himself is not yet dead, but he is already dying as long as he

lives. The complete transition from Morella to her daughter thus weirdly repulses him

in the sense that it reiterates what is not there— a speaking death, which he cannot

conqueror, but perpetually reminds him his mortality in its imaginary presence. In this

way, Morella presents death itself as nothing other than the recognition of his mortal

life, and the narrator is thus forced to see death as other than death— a part he could

not live with, but also could not live without.

In this sense, the meaning of the “worm,” either in “Ligeia” or in “Morella,” remains its ghostly image as Poe depicts it not so much as a metaphorical killer that feeds on dead bodies and consumes those who are already dead than as a grim awareness intrinsic to the being of the living. And in Ligeia’s poem, Poe best illustrates this image of death— the primal horror of the worm’s incursion into man’s helpless and mortal mind. When Ligeia literalizes this terror, peremptorily bidding the narrator to read it, the “conqueror Worm” has thus forced itself into his mind, and never gets walled up or shut out of his consciousness even after Ligeia is dead. If

Ligeia has in her last hours articulated the narrator’s fundamentally masculine resistance to overcome death, the poem, which preserves its numinous features of the dying Ligeia, by contrast, has made death more real and undefeatable in his Chao 59

recollection of Ligeia than the fact.

Therefore, the narrator’s terror is to face Ligeia’s poem not as literature but as

reality, and thus to inscribe his own being into it where death cannot be suspended.

And in the poem, this revelation of death is dramatized through the five-stanza

structure, which describes an audience of angels involved in viewing the “tragedy’

Man,’” weeping over a universal ending of man’s life (659). From the outset, we

observe that Poe portrays human beings as doomed to be frustrated in pursuing the

“Phantom” (659), plausibly to be immortality, and have trapped themselves in their

terrifying existence. This point is, manifestly, central to thematic implications in the

text of the poem and in its application to the theater. However, there are still several

issues that occasion some debate in relation to the ambiguities of Poe’s metaphors.

One concerns, as suggested above, the significance of the word “Worm” used at the

end; the others, in general, concern the basic situation and language of Poe’s analogy

of life to a stage play which, declared by some critics, is indispensable to

“Macbeth”— one of Poe’s favorite plays. (Pollin 27).

Indeed, as Pollin points out, it is not remarkable to find that this poem might

allude to a five-act play, particularly in its concluding stanza which contains many

hints for its implication of the well-known quotation from “Macbeth”:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. (2613)

However, in addition to his idea of man as a “poor player,” we may add to his observation that, in fact, the spirit of Ligeia also resembles much the murderous lady

Macbeth, whose poem whispered by her dying lips is allusively provocative in Chao 60

inducing the narrator to imagine its reality and its endless fear that remains in every

word he reads. Accordingly, from the first line to the last of her extraordinarily

suggestive poem, Ligeia is thus imagined by the narrator as a serpent which likewise writhes and devours his reason to the extent that he identifies himself with her.

This idea probably occurs to us in the third stanza, where Ligeia manifests

herself as a poet to address her remark to the narrator: “That motley drama!— oh, be

sure/ It shall not be forgot!” (659; emphasis added). For the narrator, Ligeia now

allegorically turns language into life itself which becomes predictably perpetual in his

memory. It is that which demands his attention by calling him to the source of terror,

and simultaneously prepares him for her first dying— an event he has already intuited.

The dying Ligeia first exacts, not a pledge of devotion, but of “remembrance” of the

dramatic scene in which she becomes an expression of death. Her urgent request thus

reinforces the narrator’s seeing his life as a repetition of Ligeia’s, and ultimately, he

has kept Ligeia alive as much as he is completely imprisoned by his wild

remembrance of her slow death in her dying hours.

Now, reaching back to the first stanza for Ligeia’s play of “hopes and fears”

(658), we should note that, in the very beginning, the angels watch the mimes acting out man’s tragedy without making any move on God’s behalf but starting out in tears at the show of horror:

An angel throng bewinged, bednight

In veils, and drowned in tears,

Sit in a theatre, to see

A play of hopes and fears, (658)

Being prescient of the plot of “Horror,” those angelic auditors can do nothing but sit to weep that the anticipated denouement of man is at hand, listening to the orchestra

“breathes fitfully/ The music of the spheres” (658). And when Poe’s curtain, imaged Chao 61

in “a funeral pall,” comes down “with the rush of a storm,” the performance makes

the angels even more “pallid and wan” in viewing “the play (that) is the tragedy, Man/

And its hero, the conqueror Worm” (659). Following this logic, there seems to be a sense of irony in Poe’s description of a play “of hopes,” for we know in advance of the performance that the plot will end in a catastrophe. As in the fifth stanza, with the lights out, the angels cannot change, but uprise, as the audience, to “affirm” its tragic end. Allied to this problem is another word “gala” used at the beginning: “Lo! ‘tis a gala night/ Within the lonesome latter years!” (658). Apparently, “gala” indicates a festive occasion, which is entirely inappropriate for the sorrowful impression expressed in the phrase “the lonesome latter years.” In addition, it is especially strange when joined to “an angel throng” which is “drowned in tears.”

However, we may infer that, as suggested above, Poe draws on these contrasting words to enact his ironic play which emphasizes man’s vain effort at happiness and power in the face of death. Together they illustrate, in the manner of ironic illusions, the irreconcilable death which quickly doubles as “Invisible Woe” (659); their meanings are thus tailored to exemplify Poe’s allegory of terror.

This point then brings us to the second stanza where we shortly learn that men are “Mere puppets” who “come and go/ At bidding of vast formless things” (659).

What is more, in the fourth stanza, we see “a blood-red thing,” described as “a crawling shape,” intrudes and writhes with “vermin fangs” to feed on the human mimes: “ It writhes!— it writhes!— with mortal pangs/ The mimes become its food”

(659). All of these descriptions further explain the nature of “the conqueror Worm” with the stress on its ferocity and on its fangs imbued with “human gore” (659).

Finally, it is on the third stanza that Poe’s major validation of his concept of life and death concentrates:

That motley drama!— oh, be sure Chao 62

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore,

By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

To the self-same spot;

And much of Madness, and more of Sin

And Horror, the soul of the plot! (659)

First of all, it raises the question of the identity of “Phantom.” More reasonable is the

“immortality” or “happiness” suggestion that man fails to grasp. Secondly, we are curious about the meaning of “the self-same spot,” and, according to the context, we may easily conclude it to be “death” to which man is destined to return the minute he is born. Most importantly, Poe suggests in the last two lines that it is “Horror,” instead of death, that constitutes the soul of his plot. This metaphor supports my previous argument that the conqueror Worm stands for a kind of incomprehensible terror at the revelation of the impossibility to escape death. Rather than the meaning of death, it is the effect that terrifies us, for it is contingent on death’s inexplicability. And as we can see, the narrator’s “linguistic impotence” at the death scene precisely suggests that he has brought about his own agony when he takes Ligeia’s poem, and exposes it as coordinate with the most terrifying possession of his spirit.

The Implications of Ligeia’s Dying Words

Ligeia’s poem can be said to be a prelude to her last words, for when she is on her deathbed, shortly after the narrator makes an end of her lines, she half-shrieks, “O

God! O Divine Father!— shall these things be undeviatingly so?— shall this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee?” (659). Moreover, Ligeia now quotes again the passage of Glanvill, this time only the third and last sentences, Chao 63

in an attempt to appeal to God to suspend the law of death. In fact, the Glanvill epigraph appears three times in all in the story. In the first stance, the narrator introduces this statement, and quotes the entire passage with reference to the sentiment Ligeia arouses in him. In the second and third instances, significantly omitting the first sentence “the will therein lieth, which dieth not” (654), the dying

Ligeia repeats only the concluding words which exclusively reveals the weakness of human will. Hence, from their crucial position in the tale proper, it is incontestable that they not only serve as a comment on Ligeia’s own situation, but remain internal to the narrator in foretelling his failure of will. As Ligeia breathes the last sighs, she murmurs those words from her lips with a rage ambiguously admonitory and plaintive, and we recognize immediately that she now contests the recognition of death’s ascendancy that God appears to exact.

Yet, from a different perspective, Ligeia’s dying words might imply that if death is but a failure of our will, then we can conqueror death provided our volition is strong enough. Nonetheless, that the tale would almost conclude on this ominously death scene just raises another question that, as Hoffman asks, so then, if our will is strong enough (as exemplified in Ligeia), “ why can we not will ourselves not to die?”

(96). This question here is revealing, because it is none the more answerable for being ostensibly rhetorical in nature. In a similar manner, Ligeia’s exclamation to God is not a question that expects its answer, either: “shall this conqueror be not once conquered?” (659). By its own telling, this question paradoxically becomes an answer to or an accounting for the narrator’s loss of reason, for he knows as much as Ligeia that this question denies any of his answers. And whatever conclusion he may infer by

Ligeia’s yielding to death neither helps to solve her question nor ease his anxieties.

This death scene thus yields its full meaning as we turn to the Glanvill passage which suggests his weakness of will and simultaneously, to Ligeia’s question which Chao 64

implicitly brings out death’s inevitability that is beyond his will’s reach. Consequently,

as Cherniavsky puts it,” inasmuch as it (Ligeia’s question) solicits an equivocal

response, it asks for the resolution that this narrative defers” (132). And as we observe,

the question’s undecidability mutes the narrator, and it is actually death that has its

last words— a fact that is heightened by his bending to Ligeia’s low murmur, and

distinguishes again the dying words which have eventually become so loud and clear.

Thus, this death scene can be read as another look into his conflicted mind, as a

repetition of the early scene when Ligeia stealthily intrudes into his “closed study”

(654), as if she intrudes into his consciousness with all the undertones in her enacted

tragedy where death is hardly comprehensible.

Ⅲ. The Transformation of Souls and the Irredeemable Death

Following Ligeia’s death, in the second half of the story, the narrator claims that

he “crushed into the very dust of sorrow,” and with his wealth, he purchases and

obsessively renovates a gloomy, isolated abbey which has “much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment” in the wildest and least frequented portions of England

(659-60). The closed-off world of his abbey precisely parallels his mind, and the fact that he debauches his senses with opium suggests his obsessed psyche, which affirms his later tendency to delusion and to the “waking visions of Ligeia,” in which he indulges while sitting watch over Rowena’s corpse. On the other hand, we learn that, prostrate with grief, he nonetheless takes his new bride, the Lady Rowena Trevanion, in a moment of his mental alienation. However, he is seen to weirdly justify his remarriage as a result of affectional deprivation— that is, Rowena is but “the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia” (660) to whom he used to be phrenetically devoted.

His claim seems plausible at the first glance if we notice the shocking differences Chao 65

between Ligeia and Rowena: characteristically, Ligeia is described as a maiden with

“raven-black” tresses and brilliantly black eyes in contrast to the “fair-haired and blued-eyed” Rowena. Their symbolic opposition becomes so apparent in Poe’s

dramatic emphasis that many critics, Clark Griffith in “Poe’s Ligeia and the English

Romantics” for example, draw their own distinctions based on their imaginative

geography, whose readings might be too clever by themselves. Nevertheless,

Rowena’s existence has indeed aroused more the narrator’s hatred than love that the

first month of their marriage, according to him, is marked by its “unhallowed hours”

passed with “little disquietude” (661). In two sentences, he summarizes the

antagonism which undermines 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” (661). Here, he notes with perverse

pleasure Rowena’s dread avoidance of him, the absence of their intimacy, and above

all, his immediate loathing for Rowena, which is “more to demon.” In this sense, his

aversion to Rowena and his grotesque décor of the bridal chamber seem to arise from

his longing for his dead first wife, and have foretold his cruel attempt to destroy

Rowena in his torture bower so as to effect the recuperation of Ligeia, his pure and

ethereal love. His fear of desolation after Ligeia’s demise thus, as Benfey observes in

Poe’s characters, leads to disasters when taken to extremes (43). And it could be true

that the unfortunate Rowena is but a token of his confusion without Ligeia, and 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” (Kennedy,

“ Poe, ‘Ligeia’ and the Problem of Dying Women” 124).

However, although Poe’s phrasing seemingly reveals the narrator’s murderous

act, it exposes more the psychic ambiguity in his unequivocal belief that Ligeia is Chao 66

soon to reappear. And rather than diverting himself from the thought of Ligeia’s death, he decorates and readies his room of horror for himself and his new bride which conjures up everything associated with Ligeia. If we recall his elaborate, phantasmagoric décor of the chamber wrought for Rowena, with its “few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure” (661), we are reminded of its obvious connection with Ligeia’s sense of antiquity previously noted in her expressions.

Moreover, the bridal couch is “of an Indian model,” the bed is ebony, the draperies feature some carvings of Egypt, and in “each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against

Luxor” (661). More like a crypt than a place for new life, the room becomes precisely a poisoned environment, which the narrator fashions to be properly prepared for

Ligeia’s return to life. In other words, he intends the bridal room, supposedly the origin of life, to be the obvious death chamber, which expects its own drama of revivification that transpires. Hence, his ghastly treatment of Rowena has in fact nothing to do with Rowena’s origin, her stark contrast with Ligeia, and his maniacal attempt to restore Ligeia to life, because, for him, it is always to Rowena’s body that

Ligeia’s spirit so interminably and insistently lays claim, which leads him to give himself away in his final question: “Could it, indeed, be Rowena at all” (665)?

Significantly, it constitutes a turning point here, for presumably Ligeia’s death has proved to remain for the narrator an interminable event, and he projects on

Rowena all his unconscious imagination, with his equally tortured mind, that Ligeia is coming back to life. Therefore, the actual situation matters less here than his

“conviction” that his first wife will free herself from the shroud, and bear the second to a corpse. Nor for long, we are informed that about in the second month of their marriage, Rowena is seized with sudden illness, and in view of Poe’s other fated women, her death seems so immediate and absolute. In the macabre furnishings of the Chao 67

room, and in the weird sounds and movements that produce ghostly effects, it is

impossible for Rowena to reanimate. This isolated chamber, a place to her predecessor,

is the ideal spot for the vampire-like, secret word, “Ligeia,” to have meaning again, and to prey upon the febrile, distraught body of Rowena. At this point, he narrates how Rowena, before she dies, becomes aware of Ligeia’s “presence” in the chamber, a supernatural agency at work:

in her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of

motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had

no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the

phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself… she spoke again, and

now more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds— of the slight

sounds— and of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she

had formerly alluded. (662)

Rowena’s dread begins to produce her symptoms of hysteria, and at last, she physically collapses because of what she saw, and heard, and felt. Even though the narrator professes that he could not hear the sounds which Rowena “then heard,” and perceive the motions which “she then saw (662), he has recognized Ligeia’s agency

articulated in the flush and tremor of Rowena, and in those gentle breathings and

variations of the figures on the wall behind the draperies. In fact, we learn that he

wishes to show Rowena that those sounds and motions are but “the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind” (662). Yet, he doesn’t tell her because there arises the shadow on the carpet— “a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect— such as might be fancied for the shadow of shade” (662-63), which he believes to be the evidence of Ligeia’s return at the expense of Rowena’s body. Through the alchemy of that moment, he has fused his two wives into the undying woman with whom he is living out his compulsive fantasies. And Ligeia has thus sustained her actuality when Chao 68

the narrator is experiencing the moment of Rowena’s bodily dissolution and meanwhile, his sensational excitations, which make him unable to free himself from illusions exposed as illusions.

Ligeia’s resurrection is heralded by the fall of “three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid” into Rowena’s goblet. Ligeia’s spectral presence in the form of the “shadow” or “shade” becomes incarnate as drops of blood distilled from the atmosphere. As Rowena’s body writhes in the throes of death, the narrator watches the resistance of her frame to these incursions of Ligeia’s being, which is analogous to the death scene where the same wasting illness carries off Ligeia. For his part, Rowena is reproducing the same death scene where he loses Ligeia. Hence, the three drops of red liquid do not represent his effort to poison Rowena in order to will

Ligeia back through a process of metamorphosis as Basler has argued (55-56); by contrast, they “turn” Rowena into Ligeia, not in her features, the color of her eyes and hair, but in her death-haunted imagination that metaphorically poisons his mind.

Rather than a physical drug in a bottle held in the narrator’s hand, they are the bloody signs in his obsessed mentality by which he intuits Ligeia return. No longer concealed, the blood taint breaks through Rowena’s skin— the face of the victim, and it is at this moment that he begins to hear Ligeia’s voice particularly with his eyes fastened on the dying Rowena, who is “not so Rowena” as she raises the goblet of death to her lips

(663):

She had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself,

while I sank upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her

person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle foot-fall

upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as

Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have

dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring Chao 69

in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and

ruby colored fluid. If this I saw— not so Rowena. (663)

The spectacle of Rowena’s corpse for the narrator thus reinforces the conflation

of two deaths— Ligeia and then Rowena— in this brilliant scene. He watches over

Rowena’s body with a “turbulent violence” of emotion, and recalls “the whole of that unutterable woe with which I (he) had regarded her (Ligeia) thus enshrouded” (663).

The shadow on the carpet disappears; he now hears a sob, low but distinct, from the bed of ebony, which has every appearance of interrupting his “reverie” of Ligeia— his mind is then filled with a thousand memories of the dead— and seems to in fact emanate from Ligeia herself. And it is this tonality of the spectral voice that marks the suspension of life, and gives body to, in a more sophisticated psychoanalytical term, his “traumatic past,” something he does not want to remember, but keeps coming back to him (Salecl 179-81). Again and again, the symptoms of life appear and diminish; the horror of the harden pallor of Rowena’s flesh, of the corpse itself, forces him sink into waking visions of Ligeia even prior to the body’s actual unveiling at the end.

Through this hideous drama of revivification, by which Rowena seems to undergo a series of recoveries and relapses, the narrator recognizes his futility to call back

Rowena’s spirit still hovering and how “each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death” (665). That Ligeia has been and here is thus nowhere more evident in the final section where the living Rowena first confronts him as the dead Ligeia, and Ligeia, with her “huge masses of long and dishevelled hair” and “wild eyes,” finally takes the place of the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena

(665). It is a horror rehearsed and intensified with every reenactment of death, and of the story that Ligeia was dying to tell, with her suppressed intensity of silence, in

“The Conqueror Worm.” When he perceives that the dead Rowena has grown taller with the shrouds falling away, and sees the risen flesh, he thinks, “Can it be Rowena?” Chao 70

only to fall back with a shudder and recognize Ligeia.

As in “Ligeia,” we observe a similar plot of metamorphosis in “Morella” where the second woman can be said to double the first. But whereas Rowena is opposite of

Ligeia, Morella-the-daughter is an exact duplicate of Morella-the-wife, whom the narrator loves with “a love more fervent than I (he) had believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth” (669). In this respect, Curtis Fukuchi might be right in pointing out that the narrator’s love is motivated by remorse; nonetheless, his safe object of affection later shows anxieties he has not expected— the unregulated “fires” and the

“forbidden spirit” previously found in Morella (152). However, the narrator’s affection for the daughter might be read more satisfactorily as a means to kill the still-living Morella, who does in fact lives in the body of her child “ which breathed not until the mother breathed no more” (669). In the child’s growing resemblance to the mother, he fearfully sees in her traces of Morella, and of the remorse Morella foretells at her deathbed in a revealing gesture:

And when my spirits departs shall the child live— thy child and mine,

Morella’s. But thy days shall be days of sorrow— that sorrow which is the

most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees.

For the hours of thy happiness are over; and joy is not gathered twice in a

life, as the roses of Paestum twice in a year. (669)

Elenora in “Elenora” follows this similar pattern in her relationship to Ermengarde and to her husband; her supposed blessing— “Sleep in peace,” as Dayan comments, becomes even a potential curse (Fables of Mind 221-23).

Accordingly, read as a true successor of Morella, the daughter makes more possible the ghostly transformation of souls in “Morella” than that in “Ligeia,” because, for the narrator, she is not simply Morella’s stand-in, but the living spirit of his dead wife. And just as Morella predicts, he comes to love the daughter so fervently Chao 71

that Morella becomes a reflection in her. Moreover, the child grows so rapidly not only in bodily size, but in the development of her mental being, in which he perceives daily the adult faculties of his wife, of a nature “fearful” and “exciting,” in “the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella” (669). He admits that the child’s resemblance raises his terrible, tumultuous thoughts that he could not hide from the soul; yet, he trembles to receive them, and intentionally maintains a “rigorous seclusion” in his home to preclude the child from receiving any impression from the outer world and from all other intercourse (670). In addition, he keeps the child nameless, other than “my love,” which he claims is prompted by a father’s affection:

“Morella’s name died with her at her death,” says the narrator (670).

Ironically, he regards the daughter as a pledge of love between him and Morella, which he earlier rejected, and he is, to some degree, compelled to adore his daughter, as compelled by his wife’s mysticism. Finally, at the ceremony of baptism, he tries to project onto the identity of the dead to kill the living by naming his daughter

“Morella.” What prompts him to disturb the dead deep within his heart, he confesses, is a “fiend” who convulses his child’s features with “the hues of death” (670). Poe’s

narratives stop here when the child falls prostrate on the slabs of an ancestral vault,

and the narrator lays again the second Morella to the charnel; yet, we know Poe’s

refusal of narrative extension, as set forth in Punter’s The Literature of Terror, invites

us to share in the doubts “in a situation of ambiguity with regard to fears” (182-83).

We may yet surmise that the second Morella is not laid to rest; instead, she lives in the

image of her abrupt death, because at the moment the narrator has usurped her life, he

admits that, among the flitting shadows passing by him, “I (he) beheld

only— Morella” (671).

In conclusion, we have discussed Ligeia’s poem, its relation to death, along with

its relevance to “Morella,” to demonstrate that in Poe’s paranoic fiction, his fated Chao 72

ladies have left their ineffaceable stamps of death so deeply in the narrators’ souls.

The seemingly supernatural mental identification of the living and the dead shapes their sensations in the final scene, and their “intuition” of the dead’s return recognized in the transformation of Rowena’s corpse and Morella’s child only accentuates the spectacle’s horrific nature. Whether the metamorphosis actually happens is a moot point; what is certain is that, this transference of identities, whether supernatural or merely psychological, reflects a scene of possession, by a spirit, conjured and risen up from a quiescent memory to prey upon the narrators’ cold, normal mentality. As we read these compelling narratives of the men, we are no only dealing with a narrator in an opium trance, a madman whose perceptions are mere hallucinations produced by his obsessional desires, but a man who unconsciously reveals himself, a painful truth that he has been unable to establish what is and is not real, yet he is certain that the spirit which so fills the living body will soon react and take him over.

Hence, he becomes a drugged murderer, like the narrator in “Morella,” who kills his wife in baptizing the child as her substitute, as if, following Bickman’s psychological interpretation, his fear of the child’s physical and mental growth into

Morella (anima) needs to repressed by his ego— his right mind (29-32). Such is the case with the narrator in “Ligeia” who— though the story does not suggest his physical attempt at murder— has neglected his bride Rowena, and indirectly kills her through the phantasmagoric influences of the Oriental chamber, which projects everything connected with Ligeia. In this sense, they have been almost restricted exclusively to the mysteries, taboos, and to the forbidden knowledge of death from the readings their wives guide them into, whose implications and symbols appear thrillingly attractive, and seem to take on more reality than the physical world itself.

However, they fail to alleviate the phrenetic tension of their hallucinations about what they read and what they see, which ultimately mounts in their mania. This sense of Chao 73

hopelessness, for instance, wears down the narrator in “Ligeia,” as Ligeia lingers on her deathbed, has him read the verses, and makes the scene the only defining condition of his existence. He witnesses Rowena’s final lapse into certain death, thus painfully recognizing his part in Ligeia’s drama of death. As such, Ligeia’s decease in

a sense gives life to her creation, “The Conqueror Worm,” which, for him, is a

real-world equivalent— the spirit of a poem made flesh. Likewise, although the

narrator in “Morella” has secluded the child, and has never spoken of the mother, he

so unconsciously raises the daughter as but a version of Morella. In brief, he projects

onto and cultivates in the child the identity of Morella, which eventually molds her

into Morella’s image, into those mystical readings and the dead philosophy whose

meanings he always finds unbearable and dangerously unregulated. Refusing to

suspend the narrators’ suffering for a moment, Poe has compounded his terror with this repeated affirmation of death, which can be seen as an intensification of the reality in the act of reading. Therefore, though “Ligeia” shows a vampiric tendency, it

does not lead us to condemn it. In a way, Poe has enabled most of us to transfer our

attention to the narrator’s ostensible triumph at some moment, and with the same

emphasis as we see the dangers of a paper construct to be consistent with or take the

place of that which actually exists, a tragedy as evident in the story’s last few

sentences: “’Here then, at least,’ I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never— can I never be

mistaken— these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes— of my lost love— of

the Lady— of the LADY LIGEIA’” (666).

Chao 74