Remembering Ligeia

REMEMBERING LIGEIA Grace McEntee Appalachian State University To begin discussion of "Ligeia" with the narrator's remarkable first sentence, "I cannot, for my soul, remember . . ." is at once to be at both the beginning and the end of his story.1 For this tale has its origins in old memories that the narrator decides to resurrect after the "long years . . . [of] suffering" following his horrific experience (p. 248). It is wise to keep this double perspective in mind—that here we are simultaneously reading of the past and of an attempted resurrection of that past in the present. The first sentence of that resurrected past also reveals to the reader the economics of the narrator's tale, letting us know just what is at stake in his assembling (and perhaps dissembling) these memories: nothing less, he says, than his soul (p. 248). Remembering wholly, or correctly, or in some particular way, he implies, could save his (now presumably lost) soul. Yet the word "soul" does not take on a religious coloring as the tale unfolds; rather, it seems more and more that the narrator is an artist and that it is his artistic soul at stake. If the narrator is an artist, then Ligeia was surely his muse, a muse who initially leads the narrator along transcendental ways. In the narrator's memories, the marriage of muse and artist for several years was idyllic (his declaring it "ill-omened" [p. 249] is a judgment from his current perspective). For the first, happy years of the union, the narrator abandoned himself with "childlike confidence" to Ligeia's guidance of his metaphysical studies, and he maintained a hopeful optimism about eventually reaching the goal of their intellectual pursuits —that "wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!", as he describes it from his present perspective (p. 254). Yet his former optimism shows that he once perceived his intellectual quest to be possible; in those days, the realm of divine knowledge was not deemed necessarily forbidden to a student blessed with a muse of Ligeia's vast learning. The narrator's pursuit of divine knowledge, we are told, was paralleled by his quest to unlock the secret of Ligeia's "exquisite beauty" (p. 250), a beauty whose secret, he comes to believe, resides in the expression of her eyes. His dedication to his metaphysical studies and his obsession with fathoming the expression in Ligeia's eyes seem, in his narrative, to occupy equal weight; likewise, they seem in some obscure way intricately bound with one another: it is Ligeia's gaze that illuminates, but never fully explicates, the texts he pores 76Grace McEntee over, and it is gazing into her eyes that makes him time and again feel on the verge of discovering the secret to that strange beauty he finally never quite fathoms. Only after impressing upon us the importance of these dual quests in his life does the narrator begin his story proper. The plot of his tale starts, significantly, with his awareness that Ligeia is dying. His initial grief is not for Ligeia herself, but for the loss of her guidance in his studies, for he finds that without her strangely beautiful and expressive eyes illuminating his texts, their letters turn as leaden as the window which will soon grace his bridal chamber.2 The loss of Ligeia's support in his studies is more than a loss of her superior learning, though, for Ligeia's struggles against death reveal the inadequacy of the transcendental texts they have spent years poring over. These texts are plainly no comfort to Ligeia on her deathbed. Confronted with her mortality, Ligeia does not face death fearlessly as the narrator expected; rather, she replaces all interest in the metaphysical with a clinging concentration on the physical. Her impending death reveals in her a "wild desire for life,—for life—but for life"—a "pitiable spectacle," the narrator tells us (p. 255). The narrator 's shock at Ligeia's abandonment of her metaphysical commitment and her yearning for mere life are eloquently revealed in his repetition of her dying plea "for life—but for life," its italicized but emphasizing the compromising nature of Ligeia's...