Poe's Ethereal Ligeia

Abstract

Although numerous literary critics have examined Poe's Ligeia, some at considerable lengths, no single scholar has yet presented an interpretation which does justice to its complexity of technique and meaning. Poe himself once observed in a letter to Griswold that Ligeia was the loftiest of his tales, requiring for its composition the highest imagination.1 Criticism of Ligeia can be roughly grouped into two categories: the traditional view which interprets the story as a literal tale of the supernatural, and the psychological view which interprets the story as happening on both the literal and psychological level. D. H. Lawrence, for example, took Ligeia to be a presentation of Ligeia's reincarnation in Rowena, whose body she obtains by supernatural murder.2 Of the more recent critics, James Schroeter perhaps best represents those who continue to take the traditional literal view that Ligeia is intended to be no more than a simple tale of supernatural reincarnation.3 Schroeter remarks that if Poe had intended it to be something more, he would have presented a factual story simultaneously with the supernatural one. What Schroeter fails to understand is that Poe does precisely that. Apparently Schroeter has been misled by the deceptively simple surface of a highly structured story which functions on both an imagined and a factual level. Schroeter's misreading is understandable because in a number of other stories, for example, The Sphinx and The Premature Burial, Poe directly demarcates the imaginary level from the real. But in Ligeia Poe's approach is sophisticated; he leaves the reader to differentiate between imagined and factual events on the basis of clues subtly disclosed throughout the story. In contrast, in stories of ratiocination such as 'The Purloined Letter, Poe not only discloses the clues, he divulges their meaning. In Ligeia, however, the reader is on his own. Since the clues in Ligeia are revealed unobtrusively, it is not surprising that many readers continue to interpret the story simply as a literal account of supernatural events; such a reading, however, is particularly difficult to justify because Poe has indicated in The Philosophy of Composition that he attempts to remain within the limits of the accountable-of the real.' On the other hand, some critics have perceived the multilevel structure