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POE'S ETHEREAL LIGEIA Jack L. Davis and June H. Davis Although numerous literary critics have examined Poe's "Ligeia," some at considerable lengths, no single scholar has yet presented an interpretation which does justice to its complexity of technique and meaning. Poe himself once observed in a letter to Griswold that "Ligeia" was the "loftiest" of his tales, requiring for its composition the "highest imagination."1 Criticism of "Ligeia" can be roughly grouped into two categories: the traditional view which interprets the story as a literal tale of the supernatural, and the psychological view which interprets the story as happening on both the literal and psychological level. D. H. Lawrence, for example, took "Ligeia" to be a presentation of Ligeia's remcarnation in Rowena, whose body she obtains by supernatural murder.2 Of the more recent critics, James Schroeter perhaps best represents those who continue to take the traditional literal view that "Ligeia" is intended to be no more than a simple tale of supernatural reincarnation.3 Schroeter remarks that if Poe had intended it to be something more, he would have presented a factual story simultaneously with the supernatural one. What Schroeter fails to understand is that Poe does precisely that. Apparently Schroeter has been misled by the deceptively simple Surface of a highly structured story which functions on both an imagined and a factual level. Schroeter's misreading is understandable because in a number of other stories, for example, "The Sphinx" and "The Premature Burial", Poe directly demarcates the imaginary level from the real. But in "Ligeia" Poe's approach is sophisticated; he leaves the reader to differentiate between imagined and factual events on the basis of clues subtly disclosed throughout the story. In contrast, in stories of ratiocination such as "The Purloined Letter," Poe not only discloses the clues, he divulges their meaning. In "Ligeia," however, the reader is on his own. Since the clues in "Ligeia" are revealed unobtrusively, it is not surprising that many readers continue to interpret the story simply as a literal account of supernatural events; such a reading, however, is particularly difficult to justify because Poe has indicated in "The Philosophy of Composition" that he attempts to remain "within the limits of the accountable -of the real."* On the other hand, some critics have perceived the multilevel structure 1ThC Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe, XVII, James A. Harrison (New York, 1965), p. 228. 2D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923). 3James Schroeter, "A Misreading of Poe's Ligesia'," PMLA, LXXVI (September 1961), 397-406. *See Poe's "Philosophy of Composition, " Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe (Lincoln , Nebraska, 1965), p. 31. We are indebted to Professor G. R. Thompson for calling our attention to this observation. 170 Poe's Ethereal Ligeia171 of "Ligeia," although few of them have offered systematic support for their readings. Of these critics, Roy P. Basier, although too often sidetracked on irrelevant psychological considerations, comes the closest to an adequate explanation .5 He argues that Poe constructed "Ligeia" in a Jamesian fashion as a two-level story composed of the invented account with which the narrator intends to deceive us and the actual story that he inadvertently reveals. Although Basier thus comes close to uncovering the real meaning of "Ligeia," he misses the crucial significance of Ligeia's dream-like character in the first half of the story, which concerns the narrator's hallucinated vision of his "life" with Ligeia. Basler, in interpreting the second half of the story, which treats the narrator's life with Rowena and Ligeia's apparent reincarnation in Rowena, does suggest correctly that the narrator unconsciously discloses his murder of Rowena.6 Basier recognizes that the narrator's account of Ligeia's reincarnation is actually a description of his own opium-induced hallucination. Thus, Basler righüy asserts that Poe intends us to understand that Ligeia's revivification exists only in the mind of the narrator . On the literal level, the story reveals the murder of Rowena by the deluded narrator in order to provide a body for his departed first wife. But because Basier has ignored the first half of "Ligeia," he fails to see that...

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