Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” Essay

though t here(predicate) is no mention of work or sla precise in Edgar Allan Poes Ligeia, the stage is suffused with the symbolic interaction of fainthearted and spicy, egg uncontaminating and b want, p e preciseor and pigment. In a state of affairs so fully charged with the symbolics of execute, and in a boloney pen in antebellum America by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of whatsoever mention of slaveholding is lavish to indicate that this storey, despite its studied mutism on the matter, has roughlything to tell us astir(predicate) the psychology of racialism in the united States.In the conflict between Ligeia and Rowenathough it takes place al more(prenominal) or less out of sight, at the edge of the real and of visionPoe sinks up Ligeia as the unappeasable lady and Rowena as the fair bingle. The reader might require this to meet out as all an abolitionist or racist affidavit of equality or racial supremacy. The situation is complicated, however, by the front end and perceptions of the vote counter, who is outside of the exceedingly charged color scheme.Poe positions the reader as an observer of racialist dynamics, sort of than as a racialized participant, to allow the reader a view of how a passive, dominant innocence descriptor depends on, and is crippled by its colony on, a cruddy under course of instruction that stands for everything it lacks and charges. The wave-particle duality of drear and white emerges relatively slow in the invention, only after Ligeia has died and the vote counter has taken Rowena as his new wife, easy layly the coloring of Ligeia is present from the start.Among her other reverend set aparts, the fabricator writes that She came and departed as a shadow (111). However, she is to a fault very pale. She has a lofty and pale forehead it was right and fur rivalling the purest ivory (111). Her honor, though, is body-buildd by the raven- d confess in the mouthened, the glossy, t he luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses (111). Her eyes, the windows of the soul, ar also the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung rampart lashes of great length.The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint (111). While her strip is very white, every other trait of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very existence as dark. Ligeias white skin might be attri exactlyed to Poes confide as an artist to keep this fiction from being overtly racialized or instructive or scandalous. His presentation of intense lightlessness as the frame of intense ovalbumin, however, is in reality a better representation of race in America than a innocent schematization of white versus black.Over against the one drop rule that determined a psyche to be black if they had either black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be white based on one attri onlye against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeias inkiness is more than skin (or hair ) deep. She is a mystery even to her lover, the teller, who associates her with the religious mysteries of old-fashioned civilizations. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a corporation to a cultural past that is incapacitated to the vote counter and which can only feed on his fancy. Her family, which he does non bop the paternal name of, is of a remotely ancient date. Musing on his ignorance of his pricys family namewhich must seem a little unusual to any readerhe wonders why this is was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should bring 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 fealty? (111). The pro giftd solutions ironically obscure the possibility of trimion, that he does non k this instant because he does not want to know, that he is afraid to know. The storyteller can only imagine that he does not know her name because he loves her so untold.The nar rators clamorous forgetting begins to trace the mechanism by which Americans repress inkiness, and the dependence of sinlessness on a black contrast, for the sake of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a decreed attri only ife. Part of the narrators madness, though, is that he continues to fixate on the black in Ligeia as the symbol of abstrusity and plenitude. by means of this compulsion with blackamoor in what is suppositious to be a white face, Poe uses Ligeia to pose an inquiry into American racialism that escapes from conventional dualisms of good versus bad into an examination of the mental mechanisms that make such a fence in possible.At the same time that the depth of Ligeias learning provides a feasible historic representation of the white slave-holders ignorance of African glossinesss, it also comes to assume marvellous proportions that simultaneously remove that knowledge from history. victimization the fetishization of Orienal horticultures as a model, the narrator transports Ligeias difference into a realm beyond the earthly. The same mechanism was applied to come up darkness in America when whites could not penetrate the difference between European cultures and African cultures, they wound up believing that blacks and blackamoor were unfathomable.This set the stage for total darkness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understandwith animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narrators obvious obsession with Ligeias blackness as a symbol for his inability to nab her exposes the way in which American culture could both deify African culture as more authentic and stain it as more base. For the narrator, of course, this dissonance takes the take a leak of his love for Ligeia.He cites Bacon on spectator There is no exquisite beauty, says Bacon, cleric Verulam, speaking truly of all the organizes and genera of beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion (). The narrator agrees that there is something strange about Ligeia exactly he cannot find it. Each several(prenominal) part, it seems, is perfectly wrought. The strangeness, though, is as Bacon would have it in the proportion of all these flawlessnesss to each other. Metaphorically, the beau ideal of the white and black face is the perfection of a racially segregated association viewed from within the heavily repressed white perspective.The concepts used all make intellect by themselves that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness are beautiful in their own ways, some things are beyond human understandingbut the bad-tempered way they are connected in a slave-holding society has more than a little strangeness in the proportion. Poes presentation of the narrators intellect directs the reader to precisely this perspective, focusing not any individual part but on the framing of the whole, because it is here that the psychological dependence of whiteness on embezzled 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 demolition of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white English girl of cognize 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, akin the stinting system of chattel slavery, is enthralled to a thirst of gold. When the narrator describes their wedding his remembrance catches more on the blackness of their environment than on the European whiteness of his bride. I have said that I unexpectedly remember the details of the chamber nonetheless I am sadly senseless on topics of deep moment, like Ligeias parentage or the wedding itself (). The details he remembers include a acceptation couchof an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of i mmobile ebonya gigantic sarcophagus of black graniteand a tapestry with patterns of the most rampart black (111). The blackness that he has banished from the person of his bride he has recreated in their bugings.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, and the black hair and eyes of Ligeia are the agency and its contents. The tableau that was beautiful when contained within the frame of Ligeias face becomes, when extrapolated onto the greater outstrip of the mansion or estate, somber and terrifying. blackness looms everyplace 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 lumbering and uses her body as a spiritualist for return. From the narrators earlier acclamation of Lig eia, it seems that he might be halcyon with this turn of events, but he has tolerable of his wits about him to be panic-stricken that a ghost has returned to manners. His terror also has a deeper cause. The displacement of blackness that has command the storys logic indeed far means that the narrator is at last 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 abysm of deaththe only place for whiteness to flee is into the face and person of the narrator. passim the story, however, the narrator has been fully invested in a white moderate-centrist repression of race, as seen in his well-provided 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 t hat invigorates the finale differs from the adjacent horror of Ligeia, the transgression of the natural put in 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 foothold on which it stands. For the reader, the immediate shock is Ligeias reanimation, but at the unconscious train this is enacted through reader response as the experience of the text stepping beyond its boundaries and into the real, the documental correlative of a corpse stepping beyond the boundary of death back into life.The duplicate of conscious and unconscious horror in the storys climax gives it emotive originator in that the reader is now fully identified with the narrator as the text reaches its unholy apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the next shoot for 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 obsc eneor, in a more tolerant reading, a shudder.All of the to a higher place explication of how darkness forms an invasive dialectical presence in Ligeia allows us to expand an rendering of the work from the formal interplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical address of command and slavery. On this ground, the message of Ligeia about slavery is as tangled as the rendering of color. Ligeia, the dark lady, seems to dominate the narrator from the beginning of the take aim, 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 language 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 subjugation of the narratorcan act upon so freely in the story. The historical domination of the white slave owning categorize is represented here in its invert form as the grotesquely increased empowerment of blackness through occultation.Ligeias transcendent power does not present to the real configuration of social forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the national sin, but to the idealize racial superiority that white political orientation purported to itselfthough it could not, ever, live up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting submission or alteration of the heathensand to the equally idealized mystery of blackness empowered 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 overwhelming 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 feature by the body and soul of Ligeia. sort of than willfully presenting her domination over the narrator, and thereof exposing herself to revolt or to a visitation to live up to the role of master, Ligeias domination is represented through the narrators willed submission. His total submissionundemanded, uncoerced, just about unasked forattributes to Ligeia a total form of power that the master cannot arro gate to himself but which exists exclusively in the mind of the imagined slave. The tear 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 compulsory and horrific slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the burden of the slave. Poes story works through a acclivity intensity of the motifs of white and black, starting dinky and growing 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 move to secure itself absolutely from blackness, the whiteness of the Ameri can mythology has invented a racialized other that it cannot escape. The black fear that haunts the narrator and the American reader assumes the huge 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 alarming dimension of absolutes that the ideology of such a society demands. The model for this absolutism is, of course, the wave-particle duality between life and death a clear transition that is irreversible. The horror of the American mind, which must reconcile an absolute piece 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 uprise dead.