P L nd H l n f Tr

William Crisman

Poe Studies, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, 2005, pp. 64-75 (Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/poe.2005.0004

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William Crisman

Poe’s Ligeia and Helen of Troy

William Crisman, Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German at The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona campus, was author of the 1996 book The Crises of Language and Dead Signs in Ludwig Tieckk Aose Fiction and over thirty articles on German- and English-language romanticism. Having read Crisman’s essay “Poe’s Ligeia and Helen of Troy” in manuscript, the editors of Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism invited it for consideration after his untimely death. The article was accepted posthumously but could not benefit from his revisions; as a result, the journal has made only necessary styling and copyediting changes with the consent of his son. The following overview of the essay’s significance is offered by Joseph Andriano, Professor of English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and author of Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Mab Gothic Fiction (1993) and Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of theFantasticBeast in Modern Fiction and Film (1999).

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Poe considered “Ligeia” (1838) to be his favorite tale. Critics have favored it as well; commentary has become so voluminous, in fact, that Professor Crisman is not exaggerating when he refers to the “enormous industry” of “Ligeia” criticism. So many of the interpretations have contradicted each other that the only consensus critics have been able to reach is that the text is thoroughly and unresolvably ambiguous. The nature of its enigmatic heroine is also ambiguous, but no longer unresolvably so: her role as both victim and victimizer becomes much clearer when she is read as a manifestation of Helen of Troy. Crisman’s expertise on the Faust legend and his meticulous, probing scholarly method have enabled him to build a convincing case. Issues at stake in the text, especially those relating to sexual and linguistic power and impotence, come into sharper focus when Helen is revealed as the model for Ligeia.

-Joseph Andriano

Out of the enormous industry that criticism of Poe’s “Ligeia” has become, the suggestion occasionally arises that we read the tale’s narrator as Faust, either along straightforward or along ironic, anti-Faustian lines. To my knowledge no one has suggested, let alone explored, a complementary connection between Ligeia and Faust’s consort, Helen of Troy (though readers have identified other prototypes for Ligeia among the ancients) .*

The following remarks assume that Poe’s nearly exclusive literary source of information about Helen herself is Homer’s Odyssey, book 4, and about Helen’s relation to Faust is Christopher Marlowe’s DoctorFa~tzls .~ No one seems to dispute the importance of Homer to Poe, and Poe quotes twice from Marlowe’s play (his general interest in Marlowe is further suggested by the possible use of Marlowe’s TumburZaine in constructing his own “Tamerlane”) .4 Goethe’s Fazlst IZ, which contains the “Helena,” was not published in German until 1832, and in English translation until 1871, and none of Poe’s few, sketchy remarks on Goethe sug- gest that he knew of it.5 As for the Faust chapbooks in English, published from 1592 on, no evidence exists that Poe had seen any of them, though the most recent editors of the first edition say that re- printings over subsequent centuries ran to “many,” with interest in English-speaking countries far outlasting that in Germany itself.6 When Goethe occasionally comes up in the present essay it is with an eye toward comparison with this older contem- porary’s response to the Helen material. The Faust chapbooks figure almost exclusively in an attempt to clanfy or reinforce Marlowe’s treatment; in only one instance, carefully marked speculative, does a guess appear about Poe’s possible awareness of a chapbook.

Ligeia and Helen 65

The lack of any critical wonder about whether Ligeia may represent Helen of Troy is surprising because Poe himself, appearing to refer intertex- tually to his own works, seems to plead for this identification. In describing her hair, the narrator of Ligeia says her tresses exempllfy “the full force of the Homeric epithet, ‘hyacinthine!’” (Wmks, 2:312). The expression “hyacinth hair” draws on the central stanza of the shorter of Poe’s “To Hel- en” poems (Writings, 1:166), published six times between 1831 and 1845, and so should specifically evoke Helen, especially since the tale’s narrator labels the epithet “Homeric.”’ Moreover, the nar- rator says of Ligeia’s eyes, “they became to me twin stars of Leda” (Works, 2:313). Ligeia’s eyes, that is, recall those of Helen of Troy’s mother (Leda): the daughter has her mother’s eyes.

This plea seems also to exist in intertextual references to the well-known texts of others, like the presentation of Helen in book 4 of The Odys- sey, which prefigures a much-remarked passage in “Ligeia.” According to a relatively innocent reading of Rowena’s death and Ligeia’ s rebirth (more cyni- cal readings will come into play later), the nanator appears aware that Ligeia’s ghost poisons Rowena in order to be reborn herself: “I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet. . . and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw. . . fall within the goblet. . . three or four large drops of a bril- liant and ruby colored fluid (Works, 2:325). In The Odyssqr, when Helen sees Telemachus grieving for his lost father, she has “a happy thought”: “Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief. . . . This powerful anodyne was one of many useful drugs which had been given to [Helen] by an Egyptian lady. . . . For the fertile soil of Egypt is most rich in herbs, many of which are wholesome in solu- tion, though many are poisonous.”8 This passage brings together two elements important to Poe’s description: obviously the drops in the wine that have the potential to be “wholesome” (for Ligeia) or “poisonous” (for Rowena), and also the Egyp tian origin of these drops. As readers have pointed out, Ligeia’s rebirth chamber is full of Egyptian bric-a-brac, even though Ligeia is a Homeric, Greek figure.g The narrator notes “the solemn

carvings of Egypt”: “[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” ( Works, 2:320,322). The tradition of associating Helen with Egypt, available through Homer’s passage, helps explain the partly Egyptian atmosphere of Ligeia’s room.1°

Beyond such direct pleading, both with and without Poe’s own works, to take Ligeia as Helen, much of her appearance at the tale’s end richly recreates Helen’s situation in the Faust dramas. Her position, in general, is to be brought as a spirit from the world of classical shades and to be depos- ited, incongruously, in a late medieval setting.” This is Ligeia’s final situation too: from the realm of death she has been drawn to the narrator’s ab- bey, a medieval setting and a strange location for one in whom the narrator finds “the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek” (Works, 2:312). In fact, the narrator himselfis careful to say that he “met” Ligeia in a “city near the Rhine,” not that she is German. One wonders if part of the nar- rator’s own confusion about her background has to do with how “ancient” her “remotely ancient” family is, whether it is too old even for a ”decaying” medieval city (Works, 2:310).

With a dip toward the subtle, one could also note an association between Helen and Ligeia through Faust’s deferred gratification in marriage, pronouncedly in Marlowe and more implicitly in Poe. Faust’s first desire to marry comes abruptly and early, in act 2, scene 1, when he commands Mephostophilis, “let me have a wife, the fairest maid / in Germany” (2.1.14647). (Note, as in Poe, the “in Germany” rather than “of Germany,” “German maid,” and so on). On grounds of mar- riage’s sacramentality, however, Mephostophilis de- nies the request, promising instead a new woman “every morning to [Faust’s] bed” (2.1.156). Faust will not encounter Helen until act 5, where in his final words to her he proclaims her his future “paramour” (5.1.115). This early request for, and denial of, marriage followed by a waiting period of promiscuity receives pronounced attention in the chapbooks, but it takes no reading knowledge of the Faust material beyond Marlowe to be aware of the delay. Goethe, knowing both Marlowe and the chapbooks well, requires the intervening

66 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism

promiscuity with Gretchen, so celebrated in the Faust operas of Berlioz and Gounod, to prepare Faust for his eventual devotion to Helen; but even Poe, working with Marlowe alone, still projects this waiting period. Early, Poe’s narrator refers to Ligeia as “my friend and my betrothed, . . . who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom” (Wurks, 2:311). The “finally” certainly underscores the gradualness and postponement already implied by the study partnership interven- ing between “betrothal” and marriage. Shortly after this passage, the narrator lets drop that Ligeia differs “in passion” from “all the women” he has “ever known” (Works, 2:315). While the narrator’s sexual prowess could well be all in his mind, he has at least verbally preserved Marlowe’s two-act postponement while having a new woman “every morning to [his] bed.” For that matter, locating the promiscuity entirely in the mind could be quite true to Marlowe’s play, which presents the new woman every day simply as a promise that the viewer never sees dramatized.

Along these same lines, but less subtly, this postponement culminates in Faust meeting Helen twice, first when he raises her ghost for the scholars in act 5, scene 4, and second when he raises her for himselfalone in act 5, scene 5. These situations are precisely those of Poe’s narrator and Ligeia. He has two experiences with her, one public (marriage and eventually inheritance) and one private, for himself alone, in the closing revivification scene. Given the enormous literature on significant numbers in Poe, it seems hardly likely that he would have missed the binary nature of Faust’s meetings with Helen, or the significance of these two meetings.12 Indeed, many readers have identi- fied the binary as a structurally informing feature of the tale.13

Beyond the intertextual pleading for Ligeia as Helen, her stationing as a Greek revenant in a medieval chamber, and her involvement in a de- ferred gratification plot in which she, like Helen, appears twice, Ligeia simply looks like Marlowe’s Helen. One reader has emphasized that the atten- tion paid to Ligeia’s face distinguishes her from other major Poe heroines,14 and Faust’s famous speech to Helen in Marlowe begins, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” (5.1.96).

Marlowe, however, omits any details of this face apart from its lips. For this one would have to turn to the chapbooks, where Helen has “cole-black eyes” (211), recalling the “black eyes” that are Poe’s narrator’s final impression of Ligeia (and his major obsession throughout). Black eyes, of course, are probably just a good guess, then as now, for describing a Greek beauty, not to mention the other traditional associations with black that Poe’s tale makes clear; but, interestingly for those intrigued by precedents for the transformation of Rowena to Ligeia,15 the chapbooks’ “Cole-black eye [d]” Helen also has hair “as fayre as the beaten Gold” ( Works, 2:330), a color combination of eyes and hair conventionally unusual in nature. Like a creature in an alchemical manual, this Helen is already halfway between Ligeia and Rowena. Since Marlowe omits the chapbooks’ reference to the black-eyed, blonde-haired Helen, however, any relevance to Poe’s construction of Ligeia and Rowena has to remain solely conjectural. Suffice it to say that the physical description of Helen and Ligeia focuses almost exclusively on the face.

Adding to this focus on the countenance, both women emerge from fairly commonplace tropes of astronomical inspection to become almost liter- ally huge figures, physically and spiritually. Poe’s narrator says he can observe Ligeia’s eyes only as an “astrologer” making a “telescopic” survey. The implications here are several, but the homeliest is that Ligeia must be astronomically tall in the speaker’s imagination. Once the observer fixes on the eyes’ height, of course, he must also confront their great dimension, “far larger than the ordinary eyes of our race.” Ligeia’s inner powers are accord- ingly great, her will “gigantic” and her learning “immense.” In the presence of her powers, the narrator considers himself “child-like” (Works, 2:315, 316). Marlowe’s famous Helen speech also contains a fairly common astronomical compari- son, “thou art fairer than the evening’s air / Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars” (5.1.109-10). As with Ligeia, the implications here are several, but the simplest is one of great size; anyone capable of wearing “a thousand stars” must be huge. Her spiritual power has already been made plain in line 99 of the same speech, when Faust claims, “Her lips suck forth my soul.” At least to this point, Faust

Lage-ia and Helen 67

and Poe’s Faust-or-anti-Faust narrator make plain that they are under the power of their Helens. Perhaps Marlowe’s reference to Helen’s “sucking forth” Faust’s soul also prefigures the vampirelike power some readers have seen in Ligeia.16 At any rate, the gigantic will and learning and the power to steal souls with a kiss make sense of the fact that both Helen and Ligeia are “face people.” For all the implications of their figuratively huge bodies, their powers are primarily that of the mind, soul, and spirit.

Vampiric or not, Helen’s kiss brings Faust to an awareness of his reliance on her (hence her power over him), a situation Poe’s narrator will share:

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies! Come Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips.

(5.1.98-101)

Faust initially believes Helen can impart some “immortality” that he can possess all by himself but quickly realizes it is a shared quality he can have only “here . . . in these lips.” Such is precisely the narrator’s awareness about Ligeia. She cannot educate him to a state of metaphysical grandeur, the “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden,” and then simply die ( W d s , 2:316). Faust’s injunction-”See where [my soul] flies!”-suggests it is flying nowhere satisfactory. Poe’s narrator replaces “soul” with “expectation” but retains the metaphor of unhappy flight, as his studies turn ”duller” during Ligeia’s fatal illness: “I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away!” ( W d , 2:316).

Although Ligeia holds great power over the narrator, as Helen’s lips hold power over Faust’s soul, a number of important readings have also stressed the narrator’s destructive power over Ligeia.” In this regard, Faust’s treatment of Helen resembles the narrator’s treatment of Ligeia in its various degrees of subtlety. Beginning with the least subtle, Faust can raise her spirit at any time, through Mephostophilis. (This is an important departure from the chapbooks, in which “hee could not alwayes rayse vp her Spirit” [211].) Especially for those readers who espouse a strict murder reading of ”Ligeia”-at variance with the

“more innocent” reading of the event discussed above in connection with book 4 of The Odyssty- the narrator essentially has full power to summon her. After administering to Rowena the drops of poison, the narrator states, “Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia” ( W d , 2:326). At this juncture, Ligeia’s metempsychic rebirth begins. What has passed out of the story for good is any exercise of her gigantic volition-whether in bringing herself back or, for that matter, in decid- ing not to come back.

A more subtle aspect of the narrator’s coming to dominion over Ligeia is his desexing of her. De- spite very faint innuendo about a love life (“long hours” of “passionate devotion” [ W d , 2:317]), Ligeia and the narrator do not seem to have one.l* This desexing is, of course, partly a function of Ligeia’s becoming a giant face with little body. Interestingly, the one feature that verges on becom- ing overtly sexy, as with Helen, are her lips: “Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly- the magnificent turn of the short upper l i p t h e soft, voluptuous slumber of the under” ( W d s , 2:312). Unlike in DoctorFuustus, however, here the voluptuousness “slumbers.” Apart from the kiss, desexing Helen appears to be Marlowe’s project as well. Along with the black eyes and blonde hair, all signs of sexiness have departed. Gone are the chapbooks’ references to “hammes,” “amorous” eyes, “lips red as a Cherry,” and the “smiling & wanton countenance” that “inflamed the heartn- most of these, after all, face parts (21 1). Poe, or for that matter any reader, does not need to have seen a chapbook to realize Marlowe’s Helen is point- edly missing that something which contributes to making all men vulnerable, namely sexy parts, even facial ones. Poe, and any reader, probably suspects that these parts are there, but that Faust is simply not seeing them. After speaking of her kiss for a while, Faust summarily remarks, ”none but [Helen] shalt be my paramour” (5.1.115), which in addition to giving her no choice in the matter has all the sexual charge of Poe’s narrator’s saying Ligeia “became . . . the wife of [his] bosom” ( W d , 2:311).

Closely related to desexing Helen and Ligeia is a habit with which Poe’s narrator has some- times been charged, namely that of overanalyzing

68 Poe StudiedDark Romanticism

Ligeia.lg Thus, in addition to implying that she is huge, in subjecting her to “telescopic scrutiny” he applies the tools of cold analysis. The result of this analysis, in the long, three-paragraph paean to her face, is to fragment her into various forms, none ofwhich is hers. The narrator says he “recognized the “sentiment” Ligeia evoked, “sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine-in the contem- plation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water,” and he “felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor.” While the narrator holds this passage up as proof that he cannot “analyze” Ligeia, it shows in fact the opposite; she becomes so thoroughly analyzed as to disappear (Works, 2:314). When the narrator cites Francis Bacon several times on the “strangeness” of beauty, the word takes on an extra sense of “estrangement,” of Ligeia’s beauty not being part of herself as a whole person (Works, 2:312).

These remarks on overanalysis and self-es- trangement certainly apply to Marlowe’s treatment of Helen as well, as can be seen in his remaking of Helen’s first appearance. In the chapbooks she first appears during a stag party held for “students”: “[They] all fell to drinking of wine smoothly: and being merry, they began some of them to talke of the beauty of women, and euery one gaue foorth his verdict what he had seene and what he had heard. S o one among the rest said, I neuer was so desirous of any thing in this world, as to haue a sight (if it were possible) of fayre Helena OfGreece.’’ Having seen the “wanton,” “amourous” Helen, the students all clamor for a “counterfeit” pinup to hang in their rooms, which Faust promises to get for them before they stumble home, “not able to sleepe the whole night for thinking on the beauty of fayre Helena” (210-12). The situation in Marlowe (5.1 .lo-25) replaces “students” with “scholars,” gets rid of the wine (though retaining a reference to a previous “feast”), certainly gets rid of the pin- ups, and converts the desire to see Helen into an ongoing “conference about fair ladies” in which reasoning “determine [ s ] ” which had been “the admirablest.” Again, without even being aware of the chapbooks’ greater lubricity, Poe as Marlowe’s reader would have to be aware of an analytic chill in the scholars’ interest. Helen’s “admirableness,” whatever that is, is something to be deduced; Helen

herself is simply a visual aid to confirm the deduc- tion. “The pride of nature’s work is a taxonomic type specimen that has “worth” and “majesty,” but no particular beauty or brains described in human terms.

As in “Ligeia,” the result of this overanalysis is to turn Helen into a scatter of references in which she herself gets lost, during her second appear- ance in act 5:

0, thou art fairer than the evening’s air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars, Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky in wanton Arethusa’s azure arms.

(5.1.109-1 4)

Most notably, Helen has turned into a man-god (Jupiter), her own father, and has been pulled out of her own myth (his coupling with Leda) to be placed in unrelated stories of his dalliances with other women (Semele, Arethusa). Helen’s beauty, like Ligeia’s, has become strange, alien to herself.

As a final aspect of the narrator’s control over Ligeia, some readers emphasize his cynical use of her literal wealth.20 Overanalysis of her person slips over into analysis of her balance sheets. When she dies, he claims: “I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals”-the fortune that he sinks into the medi- eval abbey and its furnishings ( Wurks, 2:320). One can find even this reading obliquely prefigured in Marlowe, in the scholars’ language of assessment during Helen’s first appearance:

2 Scholar: Was this fair Helen, whose admire

Made Greece with ten years’ wars afflict

3 Scholar: Too simple is my wit to tell her worth.

worth

poor Troy?

(5.1.28-30)

With the repetition of the word “worth,” the reference to Troy’s “poorness” begins to look less like a note of pity and more like an appraisal of monetary resources, as the language of analyzing Helen’s “admirableness” comes close to financial assessment. Even without vocabulary like “worth,”

Ligeia and Helm 69

Helen before the scholars seems plainly up for some sort of market appraisal.

Marlowe’s presentation of the balance of power between Faust and Helen, shifting one di- rection and then the other, seems a precise analog to the shifting balance between Poe’s narrator and Ligeia. The question is whether this resemblance, which appears too close to be passing, can lead the reader even further toward elucidating one of the thorniest mysteries about Ligeia-namely the silence out of which she comes and the silence into which she goes. The speaker does not know where she comes from, who her family is, or the circum- stances of their meeting. At the tale’s end she may be poised to play the Lazarus role-in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all”-but, of course, she says nothing, nor does the reader learn anything about the future, if any, that she shares with the narrator.

Interestingly, the readers who comment exten- sively on the opening silences often avoid or gloss over the final silence, and vice versa. Of the many accounts for one silence or another, most seem dissatisfjmg. By way of explaining the speaker’s opening obliviousness, for instance, many readers suggest Ligeia’s mere fantasy or hallucinatory exis tence: they assume that a hallucination, of course, does not have parents, a hometown, and so forthJ1 The “of course” here is troubling, since it places a naturalized limit on how detailed a hallucination can be. By way of understanding the final silence, some readers see the narrator as gagging Ligeia in a final attempt to control her,22 but this read- ing seems hardly right, since the revivified Ligeia makes no attempt to talk. She merely stands and opens her eyes (the only reference to movement of the mouth, “a tremor upon the lips,” comes very early in the rebirth process and appears more an effort to breathe than to speak [Works, 2327-281). Of course, the longest-standing explanation of Ligeia’s final silence and ostensible evaporation, derived from Poe’s correspondence with Philip Pendleton Cooke, is that the ending is simply a mistake.23 Given these options, one might be tempted in the poststructuralist direction of see- ing the opening and closing silences as confessing narration’s general inability to narrate.24

Notably, a complex pattern of speech inter-

diction and silence is already present in the Faust material as sets of rules for confronting ghosts in general, and Helen’s ghost in particular. These sets of rules are essentially identical in Marlowe and the chapbooks and are announced by Faust himself. For the first ghosts Faust raises for the emperor, those of Alexander and his paramour, Faust says, “demand no questions of the King / But in dumb silence let them come and go” (4.2.49-50)-in the chapbooks, “demaund no question of them” (195). For Helen’s ghost he commands, “Be silent then, for danger is in words” (5.1.27)-in the chapbooks, “I charge you all that vpon your perils you speake not a word” (211). While these two sets of rules seem related, they obviously become more austere in their application to Helen, in two ways. First, although no one is supposed to ask questions of Alexander’s ghost, no rule governs talking in his presence; indeed, the emperor and Faust talk quite a bit in Alexander’s presence (4.2.57-71). The in- terdiction is one against address, not language use, and against address of a particular sort, namely di- rect questioning of the ghost. In contrast, the rules for treating Helen’s ghost interdict all language use, period, whether an address to her, a discussion of her, or any verbalization (muttering to oneself in amazement). Second, the Helen rules cany with them a threat not implied in the Alexander rules. “Peril” and “danger” are involved in speech. What the peril is, Faust does not say; perhaps it is simply that Helen’s ghost will disappear, as happens in folklore when taboos against speech are vi~lated?~ though some greater consequence seems implied. Since the Helen rules follow the Alexander rules, one sees an intensification in the urgency not to use language at all, but one also intuits a genetic connection: it is not just that the Helen rules are more strict than the Alexander rules but also that the Alexander rules help explain that strictness. Faust specifically tells the emperor not to inter- rogate Alexander. Such a taboo against asking for information is not surprising in a fable whose theme is trying to know too much; though ironi- cally he does not seem to realize it, in counseling the emperor not to ask for forbidden knowledge Faust is repeating advice he should once have heeded himself. By the time of the Helen rules, speech itself has come to imply interrogation, so

Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism

that even a statement made about Helen becomes an implied form of asking about her.

The opening and closing silences of “Ligeia” closely parallel the interdictions against speech in Doctor Faustus. The narrator’s initial confusion about Ligeia’s background is notjust muddle-head- ed but accords with established rules:

I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or 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 own-a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? ( W h , 2:311)

These rules appear as “charge,” “test,” and “cap rice.” As such, like the Alexander rules, they are of indefinite importance. The “charge” is “playful,” though it may come from Ligeia herself. The “caprice,” the narrator’s own rule for himself, might seem insignificant, were it not offered “on the shrine of the most passionate devotion.” Like the Alexander rules, the rules against learning Ligeia’s family name are aimed at “instituting inquiries,” at trying to know more than one should.

If the narrator confronts the Alexander rules at the tale’s beginning, he clearly violates the Helen rules at its end, with his cry at Ligeia’s rebirth: “‘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-f the m y LIGEIA!’” ( W A , 2:330). Not only does a “shriek” clearly break the interdiction against any speech, but this passage is also the narrator’s only quoted speech in the entire story. Coming to articulation and violating the rule against speech happen simultaneously. Clearly, the narrator’s outburst, though a statement in form, is really an answer to an interrogative “Who is this?” Not only is the answer to this implied question ar- rogantly self-assured (“can I never be mistaken”), but the speaker also suggests that the identity of the figure is not the only information he seeks: “Here, then, at least can I never be mistaken”-the “at least” implying other objects of curiosity. Like the Helen rules in Marlowe, the absolute prohibition

against speech is, at heart, one against wanting to know too much.

One might also wonder whether the speaker is on the verge of violating Ligeia’s initial rules about her identity. “These are the . . . eyes . . . of the Lady-” seems on the brink of announcing a family name. The expressions “Lady” or “Lord elsewhere in the story almost always accompany a family name. The speaker has just referred to “the Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine,” and though he does once (only) refer to his second wife simply as “Lady Rowena” ( Works, 2:323), the formula elsewhere always gives the full name with hereditary titles or only the family name “Lady of Tremaine” (Works, 2:321, 330). When “Lord is applied to Bacon, he becomes “Bacon, Lord Verulam” or simply “Lord Verulam” ( Wmks, 2:31 l ) , the first name giving way entirely to family and hereditary names. (The expression “lady Ligeia” in the tale’s first sentence is lowercase, leaving unclear whether “lady” there is a title at all.) In this context, “the Lady-” at the tale’s conclusion suggests that the narrator is about to pronounce Ligeia’s family name (found out somehow, perhaps through the inheritance) or is wondering what it is (if truthfully he has ever known). Either way, he has broken the rules by having already learned the name or wishes he could break the rules by asking now.

The similarity between Ligeia’s revivification scene and Faust’s second raising of Helen becomes particularly striking when one recalls that Faust breaks the Helen rules too. Unlike in the scene with the scholars, in which Helen “passeth over the stage” before the scholars and Faustus start talking, in the second raising scene Faust is talking the entire time she is on stage. What is more, his speech to her begins with an explicit interrogative (“Was this the face . . . ?”), as Poe’s speaker makes felt the implied question of identity behind his bold assertion that he “can . . . never be mistaken.” Both speakers break the rules against articulation; while Faust explicitly breaks them, Poe’s speaker does so implicitly.

However, while both Faust and Poe’s narrators breach all the rules about speaking, the reader has a sense that Faust manages the transgression with greater decorum. For one thing, as previously shown, Faust’s self-interdicted speech includes

Ligeia and Helen 71

an educational moment, in which he learns that his moment of metaphysical transport has to be shared with Helen. The analogous awareness for Poe’s speaker occurs before Ligeia dies and seems forgotten by the tale’s end. The narrator’s pounc- ing and raving about “never being mistaken” are as out of control as they are arrogant. Again, the fact that this last sentence is coeval with the narrator’s first quoted speech in the tale implies that the lack of control inheres in the narrator’s language com- petence itself. In terms of Faustian readings of the story, this supports the anti-Faust camp that sees the narrator as a quester for knowledge, though an inept and impotent one.

Certainly both speakers suffer the punish- ments of violating the interdiction. For both, the Helen figure disappears; in Marlowe, she is not seen again after Faust says she shall be his par- amour, unlike in the chapbooks and Goethe, in which Faust and Helen stay together as consorts or husband and wife and have a child or children. Without knowing any of this, however, the reader has to find the simple disappearance of Marlowe’s Helen striking; although Satan and Beelzebub show up right after the Helen speech to see how things are going on, Faust still has seven more years on the calendar before his actual damna- tion, and Helen is just not there. In other words, she noticeably prefigures the odd evaporation of Poe’s Ligeia, which leaves Poe’s readers queasy. Both male figures also face their own “perils,” for Faust the literal eventuality of hell, and for Poe’s speaker a descent into “long years” of “much suf- fering” (W&, 2:310).

While, of course, a hell mouth appears at the end of Doctw Fazcstus, Marlowe makes clear that this is not his primary model of hell. In what must be the play’s most famous speech after the address to Helen, Mephostophilis declares,

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, be where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be.

(2.1.127-29)

In this quotidian hell, Mephostophilis will describe Faust’s existence to Satan as a “desperate lunacy” where “his laboring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies” (5.2.11, 13-14). Nothing could

be closer to describing the everyday hell of Poe’s narrator as well; without the line numbers, these words could be from “Ligeia.” As hinted earlier, Mephostophilis’ definition of everyday hell comes at a critical juncture: immediately before Faust’s request to many, which initiates the long period of delayed gratification before meeting Helen. Mephostophilis’ description of Faust’s “desperate lunacy” and “world of idle fantasies” follows immediately on Faust’s speech to Helen and her disappearance. The coincidence of the play’s two most memorable speeches with two of the most important Helen “events,” and the relevance of both to Poe’s tale, does not seem accidental.

Certainly, this reading of Ligeia as represent- ing Helen does not mean to imply that this or any influence study explains away all of Poe’s story, as at least one study of Ligeia as Homer’s supposed siren seems to.26 The tale’s mysterious and pervasive binaries do not become instantly clear when one realizes that Poe’s narrator meets Ligeia twice just as Faust meets Helen twice, under circumstances that are in many ways the same (though this fact contributes to understanding the binaries). Still, seeing Ligeia as rather tightly formed on Helen of Troy makes sense in reading Poe’s story. On the one hand, it aids in sorting out the question of who is in whose power, which occupies so much criticism of the tale. Helen provides a prototype of the victimizing victim that touches, at every point, with claims in the secondary literature about Ligeia. In so doing, she certainly helps put to rest any one-sided reading, also common, that Ligeia is one or the other, victim or victimi~er.~~ Beyond that, attention to Helen makes the reader aware of the rules behind the speech interdiction that works so powerfully in the story. In whatever form, language implies interrogation about “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden,” the theme central to Doctor Fuurtus and “Ligeia,” no matter how genuine a “Faust” the work’s main character may be.

72 Poe StudiedDark Romanticism

Notes

‘James W. Gargano takes the speaker as a straight- forward Faust, like “many other romantic heroes . . . in his agonized search for an ideal fulfillment” (“Poe’s ‘Ligeia’: Dream and Destruction,” Colkge English 23 [1962]: 338). Jules Zanger emphasizes the anti-Faust aspect: the speaker is “essentially passive rather than ac- tive” (“Poe and the Theme of Forbidden Knowledge,” Amm’can Literature 49 [1978]: 534-35; also see Grace McEntee, “Remembering Ligeia,” Studies in Amm‘can Fiction 20 [ 19921: 79). Difficult as well to reconcile with a positive Faust figure are the phases of numbness or paralysis that readers detect, which seem counter to the general expansiveness of desires in Fausts from the chapbooks to Goethe. See Terry Heller, The Delights of T m w : An Aesthetics ofthe Tate of Terror (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1987), 122; and G. R. Thompson, Poei Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 104.

The derivation of Ligeia’s name from that of a siren putatively in The odyssey (through Virgil to Milton) has been proposed so many times as to make Kent P. Ljungquist weary (“Poe,” in A m ’ c a n Literary Scholarship: An Annual, 1995 [Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997],41). In addition to the sources Ljungquist cites, see Richard C. Frushell, “Poe’s Name ‘Ligeia’ and Milton,” American Notes and Qumies 11 (1998): 18-20; for an extensive at- tempt to understand Ligeia as a siren, see Daryl E. Jones, “Poe’s Siren: Character and Meaning in ‘Ligeia,”’ Studies in ShortFictirm20 (1983): 33-37. Frushell iswise to assign Poe’s awareness of the name’s classical provenance to Poe’s reading of Milton-the classical references them- selves, consisting as they do of a roundabout through the twelfthtentury commentator Bishop Eustathius, are too hard for Poe (and perhaps Frushell). On other deriva- tions of Ligeia’s name from the ancients, see the case for Lilith in LindaJ. Holland-Toll, “‘Ligeia’: The Facts in the Case,” Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (1997): 14; and Beverly A. Hume, “The Madness of Art and Science in Poe’s ‘Ligeia,”’ Essays in Arts and Sciences 24 (1995): 23. And see the case for Lazarus in Paul John Eakin, “Poe’s Sense of an Ending,” A m ’ c a n Literature45 (1973): 1213.

Beyond Homer, classical sources for Helen, such as Euripides’ eponymous play or his many other plays that refer to Helen, appear very unlikely. Donald B. Stauffer’s essay “The Classical Erudition of Edgar Allan Poe,” in Perspectives on P o , ed. D. Ramakrishna (New Delhi: AF’C Publications, 1996), 203-12, contains no reference to any such source. To the extent that

Stauffer can take Poe’s “classicism” as anything more than a “rather hollow display of learning,” he does give him some credit as a reader of Latin (not Greek) and cites, as an example, his scansion of meter from Horace’s “first Ode” in “The Rationale of Verse” (205). Pursu- ing the lead to Horace does reveal one reference to Helen, in book 3, ode 3, the “mulier peregrina” of line 20; Horace does not name her, however, and presents her as an unwitting and unmentionable conspirator in Troy’s un-Roman decadence-a reference that seems to have no relevance for Poe, assuming that he even knew the passage. So confident is Arthur Hobson Quinn about Poe’s familiarity with Homer, however, that he is willing to say Homer taught Poe the true meaning of “the glory that was Greece” (Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography [ 1941; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 19981, 178). Sadly, The OdySSty does not provide the key to Ligeia’s name that some readers assume; Frushell is either confused or confusing in claiming that “Homer’s original name for his siren is A i k i a (i.e., ‘clear voiced’), transliterated ‘Ligeia”’ (“Poe’s Name ‘Ligeia,”’ 18). Actually, Homer does not name his sirens in The odyssey, book 12, nor does Merritt Hughes say he does in the footnote to Milton’s Comus that Frushell accurately quotes (but misreads?): “Ligeia is the name given to one of Homer’s sirens by the commentator Eustathius” (John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major h s e [Indianapolis: BobbsMemll, 19571,111 n. 880; emphasis added). Citing a 1950s book on Greek mythology, Jones says that according to “mythology” the sirens “were three in number: Parthenope, Leucosia, and Ligeia” (“Poe’s Siren,” 34). This trio has a long if not exclusive tradition (it is recorded in Lempriire’s ChsicalDictionary ofRvPer Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors of 1788, along with groupings of different numbers with different names), but neither it nor the trio is from Homer, who follows another tradition, that the sirens formed a duo: “the two Sirtnts . . . sang,” according to translator Robert Fitzgerald (The odyssey, by Homer [Garden City, Ny: Doubleday, Anchor, 19631, 215); they are twins in E. V. Rieu’s translation, Home: The odyssey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), 190. Is Milton implicitly participating in Homer’s duo tradition by naming only Parthenope and Ligeia in Comus, beginning at line 890? At any rate, the name “Ligeia” and her trio are not from The Odyssey.

On Poe’s quotation from Doctor Faustus, see Killis Campbell, “Poe’s Reading,” University of Texas Studies in English 5 (1925): 176; on Poe’s possible use of Tamburlaine, see Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 125. As for the potentially paralyzing difficulty of saying what version of this textually thorny play Poe knew: John D. Jump

Ligeia and Helen 73

fortunately says of editions that Poe could remotely have seen, “all . . . print the B-text” (see Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 19621, d i ] . To preserve the now-familiar organization by act and scene, quotations here are drawn from Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York New American Library, 1969), but all quotations have been checked against Jump to insure the “B” text Poe would have experienced. The still-mysterious name “Mephostophi- lis” (Marlowe’s version), which has neither established meaning nor consistent spelling, will be spelled as it appears in context.

Poe must have been aware that Goethe had written at least Faust I. Carlyle, for instance, prints a translation of the EarthSpirit’s speech in Sartor Resartus (book 1, chap. 8). In addition, for the Suuthrm Liter- ary Mwenpr of September 1835, Poe reviewed Robert Folkstone Williams’s Me$hist@hiles in Engirnd; m, The Confwionc ofa Ptime Minister, 2 vols. (New York Harper, 1835), dedicated to Goethe. In fact, in this novel the act of summoning Mephistophiles consists in reading Goethe’s Faust aloud (1:69). The novel contains refer- ences to Faust Z and most obviously to the first Walpur- gisnacht, but no figure equivalent to Helen appears. Guessing how Williams’s book could have influenced Poe, if it did, is difficult. Certainly Williams highlights his main figure’s announced, one-sided quest for knowl- edge (“The mysteries, the secrets, the wonders will be revealed to me. . . . I spumed the idle learning of the world, and laughed to think how soon I might be able to stride like a colossus over the pygmy structure of human wisdom” [ 1:71]). For a brief description of Poe’s review, see Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R Pollin, The GmMn Face of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study ofLitera9 R e f m e s in His W& (Columbia, SC Camden House, 1995), 68 n. 22. Hansen rightly points out that in his scattered comments on Goethe Poe often indulged in the Goethe bashing popular in America at the time (82).

Philip Palmer and Robert More, Thesoilrres ofthe Faust Tradition: From Simon Magus to k i n g (New York Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), 131. All chapbook references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically.

’Clearly “Helen” is a multireference name in Poe, but surely in this poem that evokes “the glory that was Greece” beginning with its 1841 version, ”Helen” also refers to Helen of Troy.

Homer, Odyssey, trans. Rieu, 70. Fitzgerald ren- ders “poisonous” as “maleficent” (60).

Jerry A, Herndon explains the Egyptian elements

as characteristic of interior design at or shortly before Poe’s time (“Poe’s ‘Ligeia’: Debts to Irving and Emer- son,” in Poe and His T i m : The Artist and His Milieu, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher 1V [Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 19901, 115). More recently, the Egyptian decor has been critiqued and censured as an example of “Orientalism”; see Malini Johar Schueller, “Harems, Orientalist Subversions, and the Crisis of Nationalism: The Case of Edgar Allan Poe and ‘Ligeia,’” Criticism 37 (1995): esp. 604,611.

lo According to one Helen tradition, to which Homer apparently subscribes, Helen was not “really” in Troywith Paris but had been spirited away to Egypt, even- tually allowing reconciliation with her husband, Mene- laus. (This tradition persists in H. D.’s twentiethcentury Helen inEgypt) Goethe, through Euripides, subscribes to the countertradition that Helen “really” was in Troy and that Menelaus lies in wait to murder her when she returns home, in a sex reversal of Sophocles’ Agamnnnon. All of this suggests again that Poe is quite familiar with Homer’s account and not with Goethe’s or Euripides’.

l1 In ajustifiably much-anthologized essay, Clark Griffith makes capital of the fact that “Ligeia” begins in Germany and ends in Britain (“Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and the English Romantics,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 [October 19541: S 2 5 ) . In emphasizing the space di- mension, however, he neglects the time dimension: how must the true spirit of ancient Greece feel waking up in a medieval world? Goethe’s ”Helena” section devotes a good number of lines to this time disorientation (Fuust ZZ, 3.9078-121, for instance); Poe’s older contemporary emphasizes the shock of time travel, a theme familiar to Poe, as registered in “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” (whose mode of time travel-walking through the mountains in a mist-bears an accidental, or perhaps archetypal, resemblance to Goethe’s).

l2 Much of the interest in Poe’s significant num- bers comes from his devotion to cryptography, on which John T. Irwin has written extensively. See, for instance, “Reading Poe’s Mind: Politics, Mathematics, and the Association of Ideas in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,”’ A m ’ c a n Literary History 4 (1992): 187-206.

The tale consists of twenty-three paragraphs, thereby dividing exactly into two halves at paragraph 12, says James Schroeter in “A Misreading of Poe’s ‘Ligeia,’” PMLA76 (1961) 401; thenarrator”usesnear1yhalfofhis account of [the] period between Ligeia’ s death and R e wena’s death to describe the new bridal chamber,” adds Heller (Delights o f T m , 117). Donald B. StauEer remarks that the tale falls into two halves, divided by a “central

74 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism

portion” that is “marked” by syntax (“Style and Meaning in ‘Ligeia’ and ‘William Wilson,”’ Studies in Short Fiction 2 [ 19651: 322). Joan Dayan adds that even words suggest halves through the prominence of such prefixes as “semi” -for example, the “semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical” device (Fables of Mind: A n Inquiry into PoeS Fiction [New York Oxford Univ. Press, 19871, 182). To this catalog Dayan could add Ligeia’s “half shriek” ( W&, 2:319), a descrip tion that seems more conceptual than auditory-what does a “half shriek” sound like?

l4 Gary E. Tombleson recalls that while Madeline Usher’s face receives no description at all, Ligeia’s receives three enormously long paragraphs (“Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ as Archetypal Gothic: Literary and Architectural Analogs of Cosmic Unity,” Nineteozth-htury Contexts 12 [ 19881 : 89fT).

l5 These include Muriel West, who also confesses to being irrepressibly conjectural in her thoughts on hair and eye color (“Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ and Isaac D’Israeli,” Comparative Literature 16 [ 19641: 25).

l6 Michael L. Burduck, crim Phantasms: Fear in PoeS Short Fiction (New York: Garland, 1992), 67; James B. Twitchell, The LivingDead: A Study of the Vampire in fi munticLiterature (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1981), 63. The most famous reference to vampirism in “Ligeia” is D. H. Lawrence’s, which takes the narrator to be the vampire (Studies in Classic A m ’ c a n Literature [ 1923; repr., NewYork Viking, 1964],69f€). Cf. Thompson, Poe’s Fktiun, 186. The present study will implicitly take up such ciaims when it turns the tables to see Helen in Faust’s power. For a review of vampirism in “Ligeia” as going both ways, see Hume’s “Madness of Art and Science,” 21-32.

l7 The most time-honored of these is Roy Basler, “The Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,’”CollegeEnglish 5 (1944): 362-72. John Lauber elaborates in “‘Ligeia’ and Its Critics: A Plea for Literalism,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1966): 28-32; and Terrence J. Matheson radicalizes the interpretation by imputing several killings in “The Multiple Murders in ‘Ligeia’: A New Look at Poe’s Nar- rator,” Canadian Review of Ametican Studies 13 (Winter 1982), 279-89, esp. 284. For sturdy and bemused o p position to Ligeia as murder victim, see David Ketterer, The Rationale ofDeception in Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 189-91; Joan Dayan, Fables oJ Mind, esp. 178; and James Schroeter, “A Misreading,” 404. Perhaps the best compromise reading of Ligeia as victim and victimizer appears in Leland S. Person’s Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1988). esp. 28.

l8 See Zanger, “Poe and the Theme of Forbidden Knowledge,” 536; and Joseph Andriano, “Archetypal Pro- jection in ‘Ligeia’: A Post-Jungian Reading,” Poe Studies/ Dark Romanticism 19 (1986): 28.

”See Joseph M. Garrison Jr., “The Irony of ‘Ligeia,”’ ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 60, supplement, pt. 1 (1970): 16; and Hume, “Madness ofArt and Science,” 24. For an analysis of turning Ligeia into a scatter of properties unrelated to her, see Schroeter, “A Misreading,” 400; and David R. Saliba, A Psychology ofFear: The Nightmare Formula of Edgar Allan Poe (Washington, DC: Univ. Press of America, 1980), 150.

2o Matheson, “Multiple Murders,” 283,285; G. R. Thompson, “‘Proper Evidences of Madness’: American Gothic and the Interpretation of ‘Ligeia,”’ ESQ: A Journal oftheAmerican Renaissance66 (1972): 39.

21 For an early, and the authors feel overdue, state- ment that Ligeia is “totally imaginary,” a “hallucination,” see Jack L. Davis and June H. Davis, “Poe’s Ethereal Ligeia,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain M o b Language Association 24 (1970): 171, 174. For a post-Lacanian u p date, see Elisabeth Bronfen, “Risky Resemblances: On Repetition, Mourning, and Representation,” in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), 109: “Ligeia exists primarily in the imaginary register of the narrator.” Ketterer finds the narrator’s obliviousness to Ligeia’s past “quite appropriate,” since she represents a supernatural, perhaps muse, figure (Rationah ofDectg tion, 190). How can Ligeia have an ancestry, if she is the speaker’s muse? asks Muriel West in “Poe’s ‘Ligeia,”’ Explicator 22 (1963), item 15. Walter Garrett goes the final step by proclaiming her God (“The Moral of ‘Ligeia’ Reconsidered,” Poe Studies 4, no. 1 [ 19711 : 19-20),

22 The narrator keeps Ligeia from telling the “story Ligeia is obviously dying to tell,” says Cynthia S. Jordan in Second Stories: The Politics of Language, Form, and Gender in Early American Fictions (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 139.

23 Philip Pendleton Cooke (in a letter to Poe of 21 September 1839) suggests that the dead Rowena should turn only temporarily into a revived Ligeia and then re- vert to the dead Rowena again, a suggestion Poe seems to accept (but a change he never performed). An especially good reading of the correspondence with Cooke appears in Thompson, “‘Proper Evidences of Madness,”’ 36-38. It seems to me that one has to take Poe’s response to Cooke as mordant, against the misreading of Schroeter, “A Misreading,” 406, emphatically supported by Claudia

Lipia and Helen 75

C. Morrison, "Poe's 'Ligeia': An Analysis," Studits in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 235. That the conclusion is simply a mistake would seem incredible in light of Ruth Hudson's still startling findings that Poe sabotaged other of his stones so as not to demct from what he considered the perfection of "Ligeia" ("Poe Recognizes 'Ligeia' as His Masterpiece," in Endish Studies in Honm OfJnmes Sourhau WiLron, ed. Fredson Bowers [Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 19511,3544).

24 See Ortwin de Graef s claim that "Ligeia" is a tale in which "literature renders itselfimpossible" ('The Eye of the Text: Two Short Stones by Edgar Allan Poe," Modern Langwrge N o h 104 [1989]: 1116ff); or Yaohua Shi's conclusion that the story is about "the realization of the insufficiency of language" ("The Enigmatic Ligeia/ 'Ligeia,'" Studies in Shwt Fictiun 28 [1991]: 489). Such verdicts have precursors, among them Garrison's sense that the story projects the "feverish futility of expression" ("Irony of 'Ligeia,'" 140); or D. Ramakrishna's feeling that the goal of the story is to leave the reader in perma- nent "confusion" ("The Conclusion of Poe's 'Ligeia,'" ESQ: Emmon Society &rterly 47 [ 19671 : 70).

25 See, for instance, Marianne Thalmann, The

Romontu Faily T&: seedc of Sumalism, trans. Mary B. Cor- c o r n (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1964). Many of the speech-interdiction tales Thalmann discusses are translated in Thomas Carlyle's Getmun Romanu (1827), which critics almost universally agree Poe had read.

26 Intended is Jones, "Poe's Siren."

27 As a recent example of such one-sidedness, from a feminist/womanist viewpoint, see Manta Nadal's "'The Death of a Beautiful Woman Is Unquestionably the Most Poetical Topic in the World: Poetic and Pa- rodic Treatment of Women in Poe's Tales," in Genh I-deolo~: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film, ed. Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy and Jose Angel Garcia Landa (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 151-63. In Nadal' s eyes Ligeia is a composite of all the weak/morbid/anorexic attributes a man could force on a woman (slimness, paleness, passivity, and immobility), but in truth, until her fatal illness and death, only paleness characterizes Ligeia, who is otherwise a "lofty," "passionate," and even "leaping" figure. No interpretation that does not take Ligeia's power into account really works; nor does any that considers her all-powerful.