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
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
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
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
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
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?”
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
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
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
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
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