Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” Essay

Though there is no constitute of be given or sla actu eachy in Edgar Allan Poes Ligeia, the news report is suffused with the emblematical interaction of light and juicy, sporting and abusive, p every(prenominal)or and pigment. In a placement so fully charged with the symbolics of race, and in a fabrication scripted in antebellum America by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of any mention of thrall is enough to indicate that this grade, in spite of its studied silence on the matter, has something to discern us about the psychology of racialism in the United States.In the conflict between Ligeia and Rowenathough it takes place almost out of sight, at the edge of the real and of imagingPoe sets up Ligeia as the forbidding lady and Rowena as the fair one. The ref cogency expect this to play out as either an abolitionist or racist affirmation of equality or racial supremacy. The post is complicated, however, by the presence and perceptions of the fabricator, who i s outside of the highly charged color scheme.Poe positions the lector as an observer of racialist dynamics, rather than as a racialized participant, to lay off the ratifier a view of how a passive, dominant purity kinsfolk depends on, and is crippled by its dependency on, a ignominious underkinsperson that stands for everything it lacks and venerations. The wave-particle duality of minacious and white emerges relatively late in the story, only by and by Ligeia has died and the narrator has taken Rowena as his new wife, only if the coloring of Ligeia is bear from the start.Among her other sublime attri simplyes, the narrator writes that She came and departed as a fanny (111). However, she is besides very pale. She has a lofty and pale forehead it was spic and skin rivalling the purest ivory (111). Her flannel, though, is framed by the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses (111). Her look, the windows of the soul, are withal the most bri lliant of black, and, far oer them, hung jetty lashes of great length.The brows, or so irregular in outline, had the same tint (111). While her skin is very white, every other feature of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very organism as dark. Ligeias white skin might be attri furthered to Poes desire as an artist to keep this story from being overtly racialized or didactic or s faecal matterdalous. His presentation of intense total darkness as the frame of intense whiteness, however, is actually a better representation of race in America than a simple schematization of white versus black.oer against the one drop rule that determined a person to be black if they had any black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be white found on one attribute against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeias black is much than skin (or hair) deep. She is a mystery even to her lover, the narrator, who associates her with the spectral mysteries of ancient civilizatio ns. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a connection to a ethnic past that is lost to the narrator and which can only play on his fancy. Her family, which he does not write out the paternal 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 own a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most torrid devotion? (111). The proposed solutions ironically obscure the possibility of repression, that he does not know 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 stake of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a positive attribute. secernate of the narrators madness, though, is that he continues to fixate on the blackness in Ligeia as the symbol of profundity and plenitude. Through this obsession with blackness in what is supposed(a) 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 take embodiment such a debate possible.At the same time that the depth of Ligeias learning provides a viable historical representation of the white slave-holders ignorance of African farmings, it also comes to assume sublime proportions that simultaneously channelize that knowledge from history. Using the fetishization of Orienal cultures as a model, the narrator transports Ligeias inconsistency into a realm beyond the earthly. The same mechanism was applied to blackness in America when whites could not fathom the d ifference between European cultures and African cultures, they wound up believing that blacks and blackness were unfathomable.This set the decimal point for blackness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understandwith animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narrators in sight obsession with Ligeias blackness as a symbol for his softness to comprehend her exposes the way in which American culture could both idealise African culture as more authentic and denigrate it as more base. For the narrator, of course, this dissonance takes the form of his love for Ligeia.He cites Bacon on viewer There is no exquisite beauty, says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking really of all the forms and genera of beauty, without some obscureness in the proportion (). The narrator agrees that there is something strange about Ligeia but he cannot find it. Each individual part, it seems, is suddenly wrought. The strangeness, though, is as Bacon would have it in the proport ion of all these flawlessnesss to each other. Metaphorically, the perfection of the white and black face is the perfection of a racially segregate clubhouse viewed from indoors the heavily repressed white perspective.The concepts used all strike sense by themselves that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness are beautiful in their own ways, some things are beyond human understandingbut the particular way they are machine-accessible 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 framing 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 demolition of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white English misfire of known parentage but not much depth of soul. The gentlewoman 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 slavery, 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 express 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 bridal 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 centrepiece that was Ligeias face is now the person of Rowena, and 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 mansion 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 consistency as a medium for return. From the narrators earlier acclaim 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 travel 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 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, head with her the real abyss of finalethe only place for whiteness to bunk 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 dying(p) sway over his perspicacity that he sees it everywhere, and now it everywhere threatens to take in him.The anxiety that invigorates the finale differs from the immediate horror of Ligeia, the transgression of the natural lay out through the return of the dead, in that here the horror is not within the story as an object of narrati on 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 system stepping beyond the boundary of death back into life.The doubling of conscious and unconscious(p) horror in the storys climax gives it affective world-beater in that the reader is now fully identified with the narrator as the text reaches its unholy apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the following(a) target in the spread of the imaginary blackness is the reader. This movement might provoke a strong reaction formationthe condemnation of the scat 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 expand an interpretation of the work from the stately in terplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical discourse of domination and slavery. On this ground, the subject matter 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 tale, and in her return via the corpus of Rowena she exerts actor not only over another personone label as fair, as whiteshe demonstrates her outperformy 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, transportable 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 l anguage 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 traffic in inversions, the total subjugation of the narratorcan operate so freely in the story. The historical domination of the white slave owning class is represented here in its inverted form as the grotesquely hyperbolic empowerment of blackness through occultation.Ligeias transcendent power does not correspond to the real configuration of social forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the national sin, but to the idealised racial superiority that white ideology purported to itselfthough it could not, ever, live up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting launching 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 lar gely by the formal construction of the narrators discourse. Instead of pronouncing at the outset his obsession with Ligeia, the narrator demonstrates his race of submission/domination by overwhelming the reader with intricate, over-detailed descriptions of Ligeia. The narrator is predominate by his own telling, by discourse itself, and the telling is fully possess 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 unasked 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 narr ator 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 compulsive and horrific slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the burden of the slave. Poes story full treatment through a mounting intensity of the motifs of white and black, starting nice 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 trying to unspoilt 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.Beyo nd the scale of the actual ambivalences of the play between proprietor 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 variation 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.