Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” Essay

Though there is no mention of race or bondage in Edgar Allan Poes Ligeia, the stage is suffuse with the symbolic interaction of light and dark, pureness and black, p eachor and pigment. In a bureau so fully supercharged with the symbolics of race, and in a legend written in antebellum America by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of whatever mention of sla actually is enough to indicate that this story, despite its studied silence on the matter, has something to tell us about the psychology of racialism in the United States.In the origin between Ligeia and Rowenathough it takes place almost out of sight, at the edge of the real and of visionPoe sets up Ligeia as the dark lady and Rowena as the pretty cardinal. The ref might expect this to play out as either an abolitionist or racist affirmation of equality or racial supremacy. The situation is complicated, however, by the presence and perceptions of the cashier, who is outside of the highly charged color scheme.Poe p ositions the indorser as an observer of racialist dynamics, rather than as a racialized participant, to allow the reader a view of how a passive, dominant white class depends on, and is crippled by its dependency on, a black underclass that stands for everything it lacks and fears. The dichotomy of black and white emerges relatively late in the story, precisely after Ligeia has died and the narrator has taken Rowena as his new wife, but the coloring of Ligeia is present from the start.Among her other sublime attributes, the narrator writes that She came and departed as a shadow (111). However, she is also very pale. She has a lofty and pale forehead it was faultless and skin rivalling the purest ivory (111). Her tweed, though, is framed by the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses (111). Her eyes, the windows of the soul, are also the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length.The brows, slightly irregular in outl ine, had the same tint (111). period her skin is very white, every other feature of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very being as dark. Ligeias white skin might be attributed to Poes desire as an artist to keep this story from being overtly racialized or didactic or scandalous. His presentation of intense blackness as the frame of intense whiteness, however, is actually a better representation of race in America than a simple schematization of white versus black.Over against the nonpareil drop rule that determined a person to be black if they had any black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be white based on ace attribute against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeias blackness is more than skin (or hair) deep. She is a mystery even to her lover, the narrator, who associates her with the religious mysteries of ancient civilizations. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a connection to a cultural past that is lost to the narrator a nd which can only play on his fancy. Her family, which he does non admit the maternal(p) name of, is of a remotely ancient date. Musing on his ignorance of his beloveds family namewhich moldiness seem a little unusual to any readerhe wonders why this is was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my give a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? (111). The proposed solutions ironically obscure the possibility of repression, that he does not k straight off because he does not want to know, that he is afraid to know. The narrator can only imagine that he does not know her name because he loves her so much.The narrators conspicuous forgetting begins to trace the mechanism by which Americans repress blackness, and the dependence of whiteness on a black contrast, for the sake of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a positive attribute. Part of the narrators madness, thoug h, is that he continues to fixate on the blackness in Ligeia as the symbol of understanding and plenitude. Through this obsession with blackness in what is supposed to be a white face, Poe uses Ligeia to pose an inquiry into American racialism that escapes from traditional dualisms of good versus bad into an examination of the psychological mechanisms that make such a debate possible.At the same time that the depth of Ligeias learning provides a viable historic representation of the white slave-holders ignorance of African cultures, it also comes to assume sublime balance wheels that simultaneously remove that knowledge from history. Using the fetishization of Orienal cultures as a model, the narrator transports Ligeias difference into a realm beyond the earthly. The same mechanism was applied to blackness in America when whites could not fathom the difference between European cultures and African cultures, they wound up believing that blacks and blackness were unfathomable.This set the stage for blackness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understandwith animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narrators visible obsession with Ligeias blackness as a symbol for his inability to comprehend her exposes the stylus in which American culture could both deify African culture as more authentic and denigrate it as more base. For the narrator, of course, this dissonance takes the multifariousness of his love for Ligeia.He cites Bacon on beauty There is no exquisite beauty, says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion (). The narrator agrees that there is something strange about Ligeia but he cannot find it. Each individual part, it seems, is perfectly wrought. The strangeness, though, is as Bacon would have it in the proportion of all these perfections to each other. Metaphorically, the perfection of the white and black face is the perfection of a raciall y segregated society viewed from within the heavily repressed white perspective.The concepts used all make sense by themselves that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness are beautiful in their take ways, some things are beyond human understandingbut the particular way they are connected in a slave-holding society has more than a little strangeness in the proportion. Poes presentation of the narrators consciousness directs the reader to precisely this perspective, focusing not any individual part but on the physique of the whole, because it is here that the psychological dependence of whiteness on misappropriated conceptions of Africanism functions.The narrators repression of blackness into a transcendental white worldviewin which blackness only exists at the fringes to serve whiteness and make it more beautiful, both literally and metaphoricallyresults logically in the death of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white English girl of known parentage but not much depth of soul. The Lady Rowena is fair-haired and blue-eyed, a perfect Aryan, in contrast to Ligeias dark hair and eyes, and her family, like the economic system of chattel thraldom, is enthralled to a thirst of gold. When the narrator describes their wedding his memory catches more on the blackness of their surroundings than on the European whiteness of his bride. I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamberyet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment, like Ligeias parentage or the wedding itself (). The details he remembers include a nuptial couchof an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebonya gigantic sarcophagus of black graniteand a tapestry with patterns of the most jetty black (111). The blackness that he has banished from the person of his bride he has recreated in their surroundings.The composition of black and white is by now recognizable to the reader the alabaster centerpiece that was Ligeias face is now the person of Rowena, an d the black hair and eyes of Ligeia are the room and its contents. The tableau that was beautiful when contained within the frame of Ligeias face becomes, when extrapolated onto the greater scale of the preindication or estate, somber and terrifying. Blackness looms everywhere in the bridal room. By being marginalized, blackness also comes to surround whiteness and threaten it.The climax of the story comes from just such an incursion of blackness into the white center. Ligeia seemingly poisons Rowena from beyond the grave and uses her body as a medium for return. From the narrators foregoing praise of Ligeia, it seems that he might be happy with this turn of events, but he has enough of his wits about him to be terrified that a touch sensation has returned to life. His terror also has a deeper cause. The displacement of blackness that has guided the storys logic thus far means that the narrator is at expiry implicated in authorizing a racial economy.In the black room (with black curtains) Ligeia has supplated Rowenaand now Ligeia really is a dark figure, bearing with her the real abyss of deaththe only place for whiteness to flee is into the face and person of the narrator. Throughout the story, however, the narrator has been fully invested in a white moderate-centrist repression of race, as seen in his convenient forgettings and fetishizations of Ligeia. Furthermore, the version of blackness that he has set up is dangerous to whiteness blackness holds such an anxious sway over his mind that he sees it everywhere, and now it everywhere threatens to engulf him.The anxiety that invigorates the finale differs from the immediate curse of Ligeia, the transgression of the natural order through the return of the dead, in that here the horror is not within the story as an object of narration but surrounding the story as the ground on which it stands. For the reader, the immediate shock is Ligeias reanimation, but at the subconscious level this is enacted through reader response as the experience of the text stepping beyond its boundaries and into the real, the objective correlative of a trunk stepping beyond the boundary of death back into life.The doubling of conscious and unconscious horror in the storys climax gives it affective power in that the reader is now fully identified with the narrator as the text reaches its unholy apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the next target in the spread of the imaginary blackness is the reader. This movement might provoke a strong reaction formationthe condemnation of the work as unliterary or obsceneor, in a more tolerant reading, a shudder.All of the above explication of how darkness forms an invasive dialectical presence in Ligeia allows us to boom an interpretation of the work from the formal interplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical discourse of domination and slavery. On this ground, the message of Ligeia about slavery is as tangled as the rendering of color. Ligei a, the dark lady, seems to dominate the narrator from the beginning of the tale, and in her return via the corpus of Rowena she exerts power not only over another personone marked as fair, as whiteshe demonstrates her mastery over life and death itself.Ligeias empowerment seems paradoxically at odds with aligning this story with the historical circumstances of slavery black African slaves were legally considered chattel, moveable property, and had all the same rights that cattle or the like would have, that is, virtually none. If we remember, though, that as a tale of the grotesquean imaginative exaggeration that partakes of the inversions and reinvestments of the subconscious Ligeia does not disclose its truths at the level of literal or represented but in the nomenclature of (bad) dreams.What correlates the play of power in Ligeia with the logic of slavery is that the very idea of total dominationor rather, since we are dealing in inversions, the total subjection of the narrator can operate so freely in the story. The historical domination of the white slave owning class is represented here in its invert form as the grotesquely hyperbolic empowerment of blackness through occultation.Ligeias transcendent power does not correspond to the real configuration of accessible forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the national sin, but to the idealized racial superiority that white political theory purported to itselfthough it could not, ever, buy the farm up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting submission or conversion of the heathensand to the equally idealized mystery of blackness sceptred through an assumed (and constructed by apathy) opacity.The form of domination operating in the story is evidenced largely by the formal construction of the narrators discourse. Instead of pronouncing at the outset his obsession with Ligeia, the narrator demonstrates his relationship of submission/domination by ove rwhelming the reader with intricate, over-detailed descriptions of Ligeia. The narrator is dominated by his own telling, by discourse itself, and the telling is fully possessed by the body and soul of Ligeia.Rather than willfully presenting her domination over the narrator, and thus exposing herself to revolt or to a failure to live up to the role of master, Ligeias domination is represented through the narrators willed submission. His total submissionundemanded, uncoerced, almost unrequested forattributes to Ligeia a total form of power that the master cannot arrogate to himself but which exists exclusively in the mind of the imagined slave. The countercurrent of this is that the story is told by the slave though discourse is supposed to be the exclusive domain of the master.Yet the thrall is narrator is truly what the master class of a slave-owning society requires to receive the adulation is craves, and is in keeping with the logic of slavery. The slave class exists to labor on behalf of the master class the final step in establishing an absolute and horrific slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the burden of the slave. Poes story works through a mounting intensity of the motifs of white and black, starting small and outgrowth to a climax in which blackness appears everywhere.Through this progression, Poes story shows that even though a white perspective gets to tell the story of Ligeia and of U. S. history, it is not safe from a backlash. To the contrary, in trying to secure itself absolutely from blackness, the whiteness of the American mythology has invented a racialized other that it cannot escape. The black fear that haunts the narrator and the American reader assumes the massive proportions of the problem of racial chattel slavery itself.Beyond the scale of the actual ambivalences of the play between owner and slave is the nightmarish dimension of absolutes that the ideology of such a society demands. The model for this absolutism is, of course, the dichotomy between life and death a clear transition that is irreversible. The horror of the American mind, which must reconcile an absolute division between master and slave with a contingent division between classes that are actually interpenetrating, is brought into the light of representation in Poes horrific tale of the risen dead.