“Not a Woman”: The Murdered Muse in “Ligeia”

Cathm’neCurter “Nota Woman”: The Murdered Muse in “Ligeia” In her valuablereviewof feministreadingsof Poe’s works,Paula Kot refers toJoan Dayan’sdiscussion of “the question that tantalizes many critics: Was Poe a feminist?”’Kot is correct in her assessment of how many criticsthis question has “tantalized”; many of us seem to find it central as we consider tales in which women and death so often seem to be wedded in an indissoluble embrace-as if we are not sure whether it is safe to enjoy Poe until we have an answer one way or the other. I have doubtsasto the appropriatenessof the question.Nonetheless,Kot’sreview demonstrates that quite a number of latter-dayfeministsanswer in the affirmative. These include Dayan herself, who believes that Poe’s “superlatives”concerning “idealizedwomen” undo themselves, becoming “tautologicalcirclingsaround the overplayedidea” and thussubvertinggenderidentityjustwherethey seem to accept it most unquestioningly? Further examplesof specificallyfeministreadings that assert or imply Poe’s feminism include Judith Fetterley’sessay “Readingabout Reading: ‘AJury of Her Peers,’‘TheMurdersin the Rue Morgue,’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,”’which argues that “TheMurdersin the Rue Morgue”u‘facilitates asit exposes the mechanisms of masculinist reading.’” Elisabeth Bronfen, in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, suggests that “Poe invertsthe F‘ygmalion myth [in “TheOvalPortrait”] by depicting the artist as transforminglivingmaterial into art-and that Poe does so in order to exposethe dangersassociatedwith masculinecreation .” Likewise, CynthiaJordan takes the viewpoint that Poe’sworks attempt to bring women’s stones to light rather than suppress them. She is persuaded, with Leland S. PersonJr. andJoseph Andriano, that Poe’s stance is nothing less than antipatriarchal-as isJacqueline Doyle in her essay “(Dis)FiguringWoman: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Berenice,”’which argues that Egaeus is shown makingBereniceover in his own image to the extent , finally,of defacingher bodyand stealingher teeth.While there remainsuchcriticsasBethAnn Bassein, who, according to Kot’s summary, “believes that Poe should have known better than to reinscribemisogynisticattitudestowardwomenin hisfiction,”by and largethe recuperation of Poe’s tales of women and death and dead women is a fuit accompli that I have no desire to dispute.3 The terms, however, under which recuperation has been achieved remain a matter for continued discussion. “Was Poe a feminist?”Dayan asks,and then provides a complex answer in the affirmative.Leavingasidethe question ofwhether anyonecan be considereda feminist,at leastaswe understand the concept, more than a decade before Seneca Falls, there remains the issue of whether in using female charucters Poe was really writing about women. D. H. Lawrence once reminded us of the possibility that Poe was not; we have also Patrick Quinn’s quotation from Baudelaire:“‘[TlhePoe character. ..is Poe himself .And his women ...they too are PO^.'"^ In his introduction to A CompaniontoPoe Studies,EricW. Carlson critiquesfeministreadings of the taleson the grounds that they fail to recognize “[Poe’s] use of Gothic symbolism”:that is, Carlson argues that even figurative readingsare occasionallytoo literal.5Nor is this a problem for feministanalyses alone.Whilepsychologicaltreatmentshave largely overcomeliteralones, the legacyof literalismpersists to the degree that we still tend to believe a femalecharactermustindicatesomethingparticular about women or the feminine. Thisisnot necessarilyso.Ligeia,for example, representingthecreativeaspectof themind,is con- 46 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism structed as feminine both because Poe worked within a long-standing tradition of such constructions and because he viewed this part of himself as so Other to “himself“ that he cast it in the most Other terms that a gentleman of his day could conceive: those of gender. I believe that Ligeia is not Other because “she”is necessarily and inherentlyfemale ;she is constructed as female because whatshe represents is sovery Other-and (inPoe’s word) strangelyso. In short, I concur with MauriceJ. Bennett that Ligeia represents something more specific than anima, more specific than “the feminine”: she is the embodiment of the narrator’s creative muse. This assertion should be no surprise, coming as it does after Person’s affiliation of Poe’s (and Hawthorne’s and Melville’s)women with creative energy, and coming after Bennett’s article “‘The Madness of Art.””’What is startling in the story, though, is that the narrator’s muse-perhaps like Poe’sown-is not alwaysa benevolent figure but a willful,even violent, onewith which the artist...