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’sessay “Poe’sLigeia 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).
- =
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 unresolvablyambiguous. 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 scholarlymethod 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
n o 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’sDoctorFa~tzls.~ No one seems to dispute
the importance of Homer to Poe, and Poe quotes
twice from Marlowe’splay (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.5As 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 exclusivelyin an attempt
to clanfy or reinforce Marlowe’streatment; in only
one instance, carefully marked speculative, does
a guess appear about Poe’s possible awareness of
a chapbook.
 Ligeia and Helen
The lack of any criticalwonder 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’seyes, “theybecame 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.”Accordingto 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’sghost 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 Telemachusgrieving 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.”8This 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
65
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’spassage, 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 classicalshades 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 “citynear 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 gratificationin 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’ssacramentality,however, Mephostophilisde-
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.12Indeed, 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, “Wasthis 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, “farlarger than the ordinary
eyes of our race.” Ligeia’sinner 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
and Poe’s Faust-or-anti-Faustnarrator 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.16At any
rate, the gigantic will and learning and the power
to steal soulswith 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
67
“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 “inflamedthe heartn-
most of these, after all, face parts (211).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
sayingLigeia “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’streatment
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 flamingJupiter
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.20Overanalysis 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
worth
Made Greece with ten years’ wars afflict
poor Troy?
3 Scholar:Too simple is my wit to tell her worth.
(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
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 shiftingbalance 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, “comefrom 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 hallucinatoryexis
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,22but 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.23Given 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-
69
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 essentiallyidentical 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’spresence (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 “ c a p
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 “ L o r d
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 “ L o r d
is applied to Bacon, he becomes “Bacon, Lord
Verulam” or simply “Lord Verulam” ( Wmks,2:31l ) ,
the first name giving way entirely to family and
hereditary names. (The expression “ladyLigeia”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
(“Wasthis 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
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 “neverbeing 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 “longyears” 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 selfplace, be where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.
(2.1.127-29)
In this quotidian hell, Mephostophiliswill 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
71
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 criticaljuncture: 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 explainsaway all of Poe’s story, as at
least one study of Ligeia as Homer’ssupposed siren
seems to.26The tale’s mysterious and pervasive
binaries do not become instantly clear when one
realizes that Poe’s narrator meets Ligeia twicejust
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 claimsin the secondaryliteratureabout
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 interrogationabout “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 “essentiallypassive 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’sName ‘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’sSiren: 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’sname 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 Sciences24 (1995): 23. And see
the case for Lazarus in Paul John Eakin, “Poe’sSense 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’soriginal 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
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 SartorResartus
(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. (NewYork 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’sannounced, 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 colossusover 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 H
is
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, Thesoilrresofthe
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 explainsthe Egyptian elements
73
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 familiarwith 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,
saysJames Schroeter in “AMisreading 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 (Delightso 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 (“Styleand 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?
l 4 Gary E. Tombleson recalls that while Madeline
Usher’s face receives no description at all, Ligeia’sreceives
three enormously long paragraphs (“Poe’s ‘The Fall of
the House of Usher’ as Archetypal Gothic: Literary and
ArchitecturalAnalogs 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’sFktiun,
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 “Madnessof Art and Science,”21-32.
l 7 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; andJoseph 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, “MultipleMurders,” 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 “totallyimaginary,”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: “Ligeiaexists 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 (“TheMoral 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 Romontu Faily T&: seedc of Sumalism, trans. Mary B. Cor-
Fiction 4 (1967): 235. That the conclusion is simply a c o r n (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1964). Many
mistake would seem incredible in light of Ruth Hudson's of the speech-interdiction tales Thalmann discussesare
still startling findings that Poe sabotaged other of his translated in Thomas Carlyle's Getmun Romanu (1827),
stones so as not to demct from what he considered the which critics almost universally agree Poe had read.
perfection of "Ligeia" ("Poe Recognizes 'Ligeia' as His
Masterpiece," in Endish Studies in Honm OfJnmes Sourhau 26 Intended isJones, "Poe's Siren."
WiLron, ed. Fredson Bowers [Charlottesville: Univ. of
Virginia Press, 19511,3544). 27 As a recent example of such one-sidedness,
from a feminist/womanist viewpoint, see Manta Nadal's
24 See Ortwin de Graef s claim that "Ligeia" is a
"'The Death of a Beautiful Woman Is Unquestionably
tale in which "literature renders itselfimpossible" ('The
the Most Poetical Topic in the World: Poetic and Pa-
Eye of the Text: Two Short Stones by Edgar Allan Poe,"
rodic Treatment of Women in Poe's Tales," in G e n h
Modern Langwrge N o h 104 [1989]: 1116ff); or Yaohua
I-deolo~:Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film, ed. Chantal
Shi's conclusion that the story is about "the realization of
Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy and Jose Angel Garcia Landa
the insufficiencyof language" ("The Enigmatic Ligeia/
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 151-63. In Nadal' s eyes
'Ligeia,'" Studies in Shwt Fictiun 28 [1991]: 489). Such
Ligeia is a composite of all the weak/morbid/anorexic
verdicts have precursors, among them Garrison's sense
attributes a man could force on a woman (slimness,
that the story projects the "feverish futilityof expression"
paleness, passivity, and immobility), but in truth, until
("Irony of 'Ligeia,'" 140); or D. Ramakrishna's feeling
her fatal illness and death, only paleness characterizes
that the goal of the story is to leave the reader in perma-
Ligeia,who is otherwise a "lofty," "passionate," and even
nent "confusion" ("The Conclusion of Poe's 'Ligeia,'"
"leaping" figure. No interpretation that does not take
ESQ: Emmon Society &rterly 47 [ 19671: 70).
Ligeia's power into account really works; nor does any
25 See, for instance, Marianne Thalmann, The that considers her all-powerful.