Deborah
ENGL 3850-02N
Supernatural Lit
Dr. Coats
27 January, 1998
Ligeia
Well, here we are again- telling you how much we liked or despised the assigned reading material. This semester may prove different, Dr. Coats, for I'm in the middle of a musical about some seriously messed-up assassins, so my responses may fluctuate wildly depending upon how closely I identify with the characters in the books.
For the record, I do like the essence of Edgar Allan Poe. By that I mean his ideas and odd angles of looking at the world. HOWEVER: The man just rambles on and on and on, rather like a literary Energizer Bunny, until you want to seize his throat and rattle his teeth shrieking "Get to the point, man!" (Which you can't because, well, he's Dead.) 12 pages of blah blah blah Ligeia Ligeia! blah blah eyes blah blah smart woman blah blah poetry blah blah dead yadda new wife blah black bedroom blah opium blah blah new wife sick blah blah new wife dead blah blah new wife rises from dead and finally new wife has Ligeia's eyes Boogie boogie!
I mean for goodness sake. The thing just oozes along. I would love to hand this story to Clive Barker or Anne Rice or even Toni Morrison and see what they could do with it. I lost interest in it several times along the way. O.K., I'll admit that maybe I'm not as intellectually enlightened as Poe's contemporaries were, but Eugh! Maybe if I listened to some Mozart or Bach while reading it, that would alleviate the sheer drudgery of this piece. Who knows? Maybe I'll read it next month and I'll just race through it and adore it.
Ligeia. Hmmm. I think I like her more than the narrator. At one point, she forces him to read out loud a poem she had written earlier. The poem is about the inevitable surrender of Man to Death. She herself is ill and close to death. As he finishes reading it aloud, she leaps up and expresses her frustrations to God. She speaks one of the most interesting lines in the story:
"O God! O Divine Father!--shall these things be undeviatingly so?--shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who-- who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, not unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." (p.7)
This really sounds like something a flesh and blood human would say while railing against a God who is allowing them to die. Ligeia is no shrinking violet who allows death to take her without a fight: she shrieks her defiance for all to hear. This mindset of Ligeia's is what allows her to conquer death and return to her husband's side. As Eric Draven says in The Crow: "Death is only death if you accept it." Ligeia didn't accept it. She found the strength of will and soul to defy death and return to a host body.