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Gloria Lloyd
English 255- Section 7
Franklin Ridgway
December 10, 2004

The Dream of Ligeia and the Fall of the House of Usher

In his short story “Ligeia,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the idea of doubling to

demonstrate the differences between the worlds the narrator is caught between—a

dream-world, represented by Ligeia, and his actual reality, represented by Rowena. Poe

uses these doubles, Ligeia and Rowena, to interact with the narrator and show the

conflicts he faces as he sinks into madness. With the unique symmetry they lend the

story, the characters of Ligeia and Rowena interact to give it new meaning. The two

characters guide the narrator through both the “real” world and a “dream” world. The use

of the doppelganger is also an essential element of Poe’s short story “The Fall of the

House of Usher,” in which Madeline and Roderick are more than twins—they become

the same person. The house they live in, also referred to as the “House of Usher,”

represents their isolation from the world, and with its barely perceptible fissure, it

represents the fatal flaw in the Ushers’ family which will finally bring them both to their

demise.

The narrator of “Ligeia” chooses to live in a world completely detached from

reality, a world which only consists of himself and his beloved first wife, Ligeia. Ligeia

is his preferred dark and dreamy world personified, and his second wife Rowena

epitomizes the narrator’s everyday, whitewashed, sunlight-filled reality, an unwanted

anchor of mundanity that eventually drives the narrator insane. Ligeia is a dream, and

Rowena, by the very essence of her not being Ligeia, is a constant reminder of what the
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narrator is missing. The narrator seems to view Ligeia as a gate to something that is not

what he has right now—the past or the future, anything but his present with Rowena.

Ligeia was the narrator’s first wife, but that is the most detailed information the

narrator provides about her. From the beginning, Ligeia’s story assumes an aura of

mystery—in the first sentence of his tale, the narrator admits, “I cannot, for my soul,

remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady

Ligeia” (Poe 1525). Nevertheless, she is his “beloved,” his “friend and betrothed” (Poe

1525), despite his odd memory lapse. The narrator tells us from the beginning that he can

be less than reliable on facts. He gives a lengthy but oddly vague description of Ligeia, in

which she seems more dead than alive. Dark and beautiful with intensity and

intelligence, Ligeia has hair “blacker than the raven wings at midnight” and black eyes

(Poe 1534). She is emaciated and extremely pale, with “a placid cast of beauty,” and she

has “low, musical language,” a very low voice (Poe 1526). The narrator’s odd

descriptions are compounded by the narrator's admission that he never knew her family

name, even though he is sure that she regaled him with many stories of her family, which

he cannot recall. Why does he not remember all these seemingly important details

concerning Ligeia? Why would she not tell him her last name? Did she even have a last

name? It appears that Ligeia has no mother or father— indeed, that her origins are

something different than human.

Ligeia is so mysterious that she naturally becomes representative of the

supernatural elements of the story, such as the opium-laced dreams of the narrator, and

his dreams of her, in which she “comes and departs like a shadow” or a “phantasy” (Poe

1525, 1530). Ligeia’s appearances in the narrator’s dreams are like a shadow, just as his
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memories are only shadows of what the lady Ligeia must have been. And the face of

Ligeia’s that the narrator describes is like a shadow, only an outline of what she could

possibly look like. But his second description of his first wife is much more concrete, or

at least his words seem to be. The narrator establishes that Ligeia could have been one of

the great Eastern beauties, with some Hebraic touches. But by establishing her as one of

these great beauties, comparable with someone who would have associated with the

mythological god Apollo, or a character in a Homeric epithet, the narrator establishes

Ligeia as not a real person at all, but merely an idea of what beauty should be. Even in

describing her most prominent feature, her large eyes, the narrator resorts to vague

clichés, and he knows it: “the expression. Ah, word of no meaning!” (Poe 1526)

Ligeia’s “expression” seems to be the most distinctive feature of her eyes, as opposed to

color or something more tangible.

Could Ligeia actually be a real woman? Ligeia seems so perfectly constructed,

yet ethereal and beyond actual description, that it seems the most likely scenario is that

she is a construct of the narrator’s mind. From the narrator’s descriptions of her, he

seems to be inventing Ligeia as he continues his tale, constructing his perfect dream

woman out of bits and pieces of what he thinks would be an ideal woman. Just as his

abbey is a physical collection of the remnants of disparate cultures, a room composed of

many elements representing the narrator’s fractured mind, Ligeia is a concoction of the

beauties and ideals of those same cultures the narrator admires. One does not have to

wonder how Ligeia could possibly possess both Oriental eyes and a nose like the

Hebrews, because this woman exists only in the narrator’s imagination. Ligeia is an

idealized creation, hovering in the background of the narrator’s mind while he disengages
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more and more from reality. He uses Ligeia as a muse—she is his perfect woman, his

reason for being and his reason to write and create. Without her, he believes he is

nothing. She remains his muse even after her “death.” When Ligeia no longer appears to

him or he can no longer imagine her as being with him, his creativity ends, and his

madness results from missing his muse.

When Ligeia dies, perhaps from his opium-filled madness or perhaps because he

can no longer be inspired by her, the narrator looks for a mirror of that inspiration--a real,

live woman to take the place of the dead, but never forgotten, Ligeia, who finally

confessed her love for him on her deathbed. However, a mirror is a reflection, not an

exact copy. A mirror shows everything backwards. Ligeia is the culmination of beauty of

the entire human race; Rowena is the “fair-haired and blue eyed lady Rowena Trevanion,

of Tremaine” (Poe 1530). At the same time that the narrator is inspired to tell of Ligeia’s

immense beauty, he cannot really remember or describe exactly what she looks like.

However, Rowena is another matter, dismissed in one sentence as generic—despite the

fact that he actually gives more concrete physical description of Rowena in one sentence

than he did in pages of describing Ligeia. The narrator goes on to highlight the contrast

between Ligeia’s mysterious birth and circumstances and Rowena’s actual parentage. The

narrator lets the reader know which realm of reality he finds more important— Ligeia

merits years and pages of devotion, whereas Rowena merits only half a sentence upon her

arrival. The narrator meets and marries Rowena in the course of one paragraph, as an

afterthought.

Rather than describe Rowena, the narrator chooses to focus on their miserable

marriage—made so both from their lack of love and his insanity. The narrator sinks into
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madness, choosing to pass the vast majority of his days in the midst of an opium-induced

haze. His condition worsens as Rowena also begins to take ill. Rowena seems to

improve, but suddenly, one night drops of red fluid fall from the air into her drink. The

narrator does not prevent her from drinking the altered substance, and Rowena steadily

worsens and then dies later that night. Her husband is not upset— he did nothing to

prevent her from drinking what he could tell was probably poison, and in fact, he might

have murdered her.

With Rowena, his anchor to the world of sanity and reality pulled up, the narrator

can now spend all his time reveling in Ligeia and his visions of her. The death, or murder,

of his world of reality provides a gate into his preferred world, the world of dreaming. He

is no longer willing to live between the two worlds, and one of his worlds, or women, has

to die to make way for the other. As he emphasizes throughout the story, the narrator is

unwilling to join the real world, so he murders the only physical representation of that

world in his life, also killing that part of himself.

Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” parallels “Ligeia” in a myriad of

ways—both tales show a man caught between a vague dream world and the reality he

must live in, a doubled personality, a mysterious sickness, and an idealized woman who

may or may not be real. More specifically, like the narrator of “Ligeia,” the narrator of

“Usher,” and Roderick Usher himself, are trapped in a reality characterized most by its

mysteriousness and vague nature. Where or when the story occurs is inexplicable. The

three characters of the story—like those of “Ligeia”—are also highly mysterious. The

narrator and Roderick are best friends, but they seem to know little about each other—

such as the fact that Roderick has a twin sister.

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In the same way that Ligeia’s husband uses Rowena to symbolize his remaining

grasp on reality, Roderick and Madeline’s own lives seem inextricably linked to the state

of the house they live in—which is even reflected in the name used to refer to both the

Ushers themselves and their mansion—“the House of Usher.” The house is the family of

Usher. The house is in the middle of nowhere, in “a singularly dreary tract of country,”

separated from society in the same way that the Ushers themselves are isolated from

everyone in society but the narrator and from other families, in the fact that none of them

has ever married outside the family. The house itself bears a human-like façade—“eye-

like windows” and a “veil” for clothing (Poe 1534). The mansion traps Roderick and the

narrator, at the same time that they themselves trap Madeline in her tomb, and in the

same way that the Usher siblings are genetically “trapped”—descended from the same

line, their parents brother and sister, the Ushers are condemned by their own family to die

of genetic illness because of the inbreeding, or to procreate together, resulting in a new

cycle of torment for their offspring. the house and the reflection of the house in the pond

relating to Roderick and his twin. They are both out of the same mould. While one

stands, the other stands. When one falls, the other falls. One is merely the image of the

other.

The house is a symbol of the Ushers’ legacy—the two sides of the house,

separated by the faintest of fissures, represent the fraternal twins residing inside, closer to

each other than anyone else, yet doomed to kill each other. In the same way that the two

parts of the house collapse on each other at the end of the story, the twins cannot exist

without each other, and Madeline falls “heavily inward” on Roderick in her “horrible and

final death-agonies,” a fate foreshadowing that of their house itself (Poe 1547).
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Roderick sees himself and Madeline as one and the same, and when she returns to

kill him, he is already dead in all ways but the physical. He cannot see himself as

existing apart from his sister, the other half of the house of Usher. Roderick seems to

have been dead for the entire story—when the narrator first meets his old friend, he

comments on Roderick’s appearance, “terribly altered” from when he last saw him, with

its “cadaverousness of complexion” and a “now ghostly pallor of the skin,” along with

hair which the narrator cannot “connect… with any idea of simple humanity.” He writes

that his friend rises from a sofa on which he was “lying at full length,” as if already in his

coffin or on his deathbed (Poe 1537).

Roderick already seems to be so enmeshed in the world of the dead that his

connection to Madeline after her death is rendered more believable. This aspect of

Roderick’s personality is manifested fully after he and the narrator bury the presumed-

dead Madeline, and Roderick feels tremors from beyond the grave. He spends his time

with his usual artistic pursuits, but they become more closely linked to what Madeline

might be seeing from her tomb than what Roderick could see from the mansion. The

narrator writes that one of Roderick’s paintings “presented the interior of an immensely

long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white… this excavation lay

at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth… no torch or other artificial source

of light was discernable; yet a flood of intense rays rolled through-out, and bathed the

whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor” (Poe 1543).

Indeed, when Madeline makes her triumphant return from the tomb and kills her

brother, is she alive? She might be a shared figment of the narrator and Roderick’s

imaginations. Convinced that Madeline has been buried alive and terrorized by her
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attempts to free herself from the tombs below the house, they might believe that

Madeline is indeed alive when she is only a dream. The situation recalls the very

circumstances of the opium-inebriated narrator hallucinating Ligeia rising from the dead

to kill Rowena in “Ligeia.” The “Usher” narrator first describes the house by comparing

it to “the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into common life—the

hideous dropping off of the veil” (Poe 1535). The “shadowy fancies” the narrator

encounters at the house of Usher are strikingly similar to the encounters the “Ligeia”

narrator relates to the readers. The “lofty and enshrouded figure” could be the real

Madeline returned from the dead after being buried alive, or a ghost, returned to avenge

her death and complete her assigned role in the Usher destiny, killing the other half of

herself, her twin brother (Poe 1547). But perhaps a more likely explanation is that she is

a shared figment of the narrator and Roderick’s imaginations. Convinced that Madeline

has been buried alive and terrorized by her attempts to free herself from the tombs below

the house, they might believe that Madeline is indeed alive when she is only a dream.

And just as the narrator of “Ligeia” used Ligeia’s reappearance to account for Rowena’s

death when he himself was logically responsible, the same could be said of the narrator in

regards to his friend Roderick— the narrator could be a killer in both stories.

In Poe’s “Ligeia,” the narrator is caught between two worlds and two women—

one his own reality, the other the dream life he wants more than anything. In order to

achieve his dream, he has to sacrifice the physical and real part of himself, which is

manifested in Rowena, in order to find a gate to the opium-laden existence he craves. In

Rowena’s death, the narrator finds freedom. To him, freedom is Ligeia. But in “The Fall
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of the House of Usher,” freedom is not as easily attainable for the Ushers—death can be

the only end to the incestuous horrors that their family and house have given rise to.