, circa 1909 The narrator relies on Ligeia as if he were a child, looking on her with "child-like confidence". On her death, he is "a child groping benighted" with "childlike perversity". Poe biographer
Kenneth Silverman notes that, despite this dependency on her, the narrator has a simultaneous desire to forget her, perhaps causing him to be unable to love Rowena. This desire to forget is exemplified in his inability to recall Ligeia's last name. The story tells us however that the narrator never knew her last name at all. Ligeia, the narrator tells us, is extremely intelligent, "such as I have never known in a woman". Most importantly, she served as the narrator's teacher in "
metaphysical investigation", passing on "wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!" So, her knowledge in mysticism, combined with an intense desire for life may have led to her revival. The opening
epigraph, which is repeated in the body of the story, is attributed to
Joseph Glanvill, though this quotation has not been found in Glanvill's extant work. Poe may have fabricated the quote and attached Glanvill's name in order to associate with Glanvill's belief in
witchcraft. Ligeia and Rowena serve as aesthetic opposites: Ligeia is raven-haired from a city by the
Rhine while Rowena (believed to be named after the character in
Ivanhoe) is a blonde
Anglo-Saxon. This symbolic opposition implies the contrast between German and English
romanticism. Exactly what Poe was trying to depict in the metamorphosis scene has been debated, fueled in part by one of Poe's personal letters in which he denies that Ligeia was reborn in Rowena's body (a statement he later retracts). If Rowena had actually transformed into the dead Ligeia, it is only evidenced in the words of the narrator, leaving room to question its validity. The narrator has already been established as an opium addict, making him an
unreliable narrator. The narrator early in the story describes Ligeia's beauty as "the radiance of an opium-dream". He also tells us that "in the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night... as if... I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned... upon the earth". This may be interpreted as evidence that Ligeia's return was nothing more than a drug-induced
hallucination. If Ligeia's return from death is literal, however, it seems to stem from her assertion that a person dies only by a weak will. This implies, then, that a strong will can keep someone alive. It is unclear, however, if it is Ligeia's will or her husband's will that brings Ligeia back from the dead. Her illness may have been
consumption. Professor
Paul Lewis notes the close parallels between "Ligeia" and
Ernst Raupach's "
Wake Not the Dead" (1823), saying that the two tales deal with "almost identical material in radically different ways". Lewis concludes that while there are no sources that confirm Poe read Raupach's story, this is not conclusive as Poe "always busy accusing others of plagiarism, was careful to conceal his own borrowings". Scholar Heide Crawford writes that Poe is likely to have borrowed, or to have been influenced by "Wake Not the Dead" as translated into English in
Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823) or
Legends of Terror! (1826), both of which published the story without attribution, which may explain why Poe does not mention anyone as an inspiration for "Ligeia". The poem within the story, "
The Conqueror Worm", also leads to some questioning of Ligeia's alleged resurrection. The poem essentially shows an admission of her own inevitable
mortality. The inclusion of the bitter poem may have been meant to be ironic or a
parody of the convention at the time, both in literature and in life. In the mid-19th century it was common to emphasize the sacredness of death and the beauty of dying (consider
Charles Dickens's Little Johnny character in
Our Mutual Friend or the death of Helen Burns in
Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre). Instead, Ligeia speaks of fear personified in the "blood-red thing". Other interpretations have been suggested however. Poe's friend and fellow Southern writer
Philip Pendleton Cooke suggested the story would have been more artistic if Rowena's possession by Ligeia had been more gradual; Poe later agreed, though he had already used a slower possession in "
Morella". Poe also wrote that he should have had the Ligeia-possessed Rowena relapse to her true self so that she could be entombed as Rowena, "the bodily alterations having gradually faded away". However, in a subsequent letter he retracted this statement.
As satire There has been some debate that Poe may have intended "Ligeia" to be a
satire of
Gothic fiction. The year that "Ligeia" was published, Poe published only two other prose pieces: "Siope—A Fable" and "
The Psyche Zenobia", both Gothic-styled satires. Supporting evidence for this theory includes the implication that Ligeia is from
Germany, a main source of Gothic fiction in the 19th century, and that the description of her hints at much but says nothing, especially in the description of her eyes. The narrator describes their "expression", which he admits is a "word of no meaning". The story also suggests Ligeia is a
transcendentalist, a group of people Poe often criticized.
Major themes • Death of a beautiful woman (see also: "
Berenice", "
The Fall of the House of Usher", "
Morella") • Resurrection (see also: "
The Fall of the House of Usher", "
Morella", "
Metzengerstein") • Substance abuse (see also: "
The Black Cat", "
Hop-Frog") ==Film, TV or theatrical adaptations==