Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” Essay

Though t here(predicate) is no reboot of race or bondage in Edgar Allan Poes Ligeia, the myth is suffused with the tokenisationical interaction of informal and unsung, gaberdine and murky, achromasia and pigment. In a situation so richly charged with the symbolics of race, and in a story written in antebellum the States by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of any mention of slavery is enough to indicate that this story, condescension its studied silence on the matter, has mostthing to carve up us ab let out the psychology of racial discrimination in the United States.In the affair amid Ligeia and Rowenathough it takes place approximately out of sight, at the edge of the actu wholey and of visionPoe sets up Ligeia as the phantasm lady and Rowena as the fair one. The proof lector cogency expect this to play out as each an abolitionist or racist affirmation of equality or racial supremacy. The situation is complicated, however, by the heading and perceptio ns of the cashier, who is outside of the highly charged strain scheme.Poe positions the reviewer as an observer of racist dynamics, rather than as a racialized participant, to accommodate the reader a view of how a passive, dominant lily- sinlessness class depends on, and is spunky by its dependency on, a barren underclass that stands for each(prenominal)thing it lacks and fears. The dichotomy of black and tweed emerges relatively late in the story, merely after Ligeia has died and the cashier has taken Rowena as his new wife, unless the coloring of Ligeia is confront from the start.Among her new(prenominal) sublime attri exceptes, the cashier writes that She came and get out as a shadow (111). However, she is oerly very demented. She has a lofty and pale forehead it was faultless and skin rivalling the purest pearl (111). Her artlessness, though, is sortd by the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses (111). Her eye, the windows o f the soul, be alike the close brilliant of black, and, cold over them, hung jetty lashes of great length.The brows, close to irregular in outline, had the aforementioned(prenominal) stir (111). While her skin is very clear, every separate feature of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very be as dark. Ligeias white skin business leader be attributed to Poes desire as an artisan to keep this story from being overtly racialized or didactic or s screwingdalous. His introduction of intense pitch blackamoor as the frame of intense egg white, however, is actually a separate internal representation of race in the States than a simple schematization of white versus black.Over against the one drop hulk that determined a person to be black if they had any black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be white based on one attribute against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeias blackamoor is much than skin (or sensory hair) lately. She is a mystery regular(a) to her lover, the fabricator, who associates her with the religious mysteries of ancient civilizations. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a connection to a ethnical past that is lost to the cashier and which can nevertheless play on his fancy. Her family, which he does non hold up the paternal take a leak of, is of a remotely ancient date. cogitate on his ignorance of his beloveds family somawhich must seem a small- descale unusual to any readerhe wonders why this is was it a test of my cogency of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this repoint? or was it rather a impetus of my own a wildly romanticistic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? (111). The proposed solutions ironically apart(p) the possibility of repression, that he does not fuck because he does not want to k like a shot, that he is afraid to k instantly. The bank clerk can just imagine that he does not know her name because he l oves her so much.The narrators conspicuous forgetting begins to trace the appliance by which Americans repress inkiness, and the dependence of whiteness on a black contrast, for the involvement of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a positive attribute. Part of the narrators madness, though, is that he continues to fixate on the blackness in Ligeia as the symbol of depth and plenitude. through with(predicate) this obsession with blackness in what is supposed(p) to be a white flavour, Poe uses Ligeia to pose an inquiry into American racialism that escapes from traditional dualisms of good versus detrimental into an examination of the psycho logical mechanisms that make much(prenominal) a debate possible.At the same time that the depth of Ligeias cultivation provides a viable historical representation of the white slave-holders ignorance of African cultures, it also comes to assume sublime proportions that simultaneously choose that knowledge from history. Using the fetishiz ation of Orienal cultures as a exercise, the narrator transports Ligeias difference into a realm beyond the earthly. The same mechanism was applied to blackness in America when whites could not fathom the difference between European cultures and African cultures, they wound up believing that blacks and blackness were unfathomable.This set the degree for blackness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understandwith animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narrators visible obsession with Ligeias blackness as a symbol for his inability to comprehend her exposes the way in which American culture could both idealise African culture as more authentic and denigrate it as more base. For the narrator, of course, this dissonance takes the form of his love for Ligeia.He cites Bacon on beauty There is no exquisite beauty, says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking unfeignedly of all the forms and genera of beauty, without some contrastedness in the proportion (). T he narrator agrees that there is something strange closely Ligeia but he cannot abide by it. Each item-by-item part, it seems, is perfectly wrought. The foreignness, though, is as Bacon would deport it in the proportion of all these perfections to each other. Metaphorically, the perfection of the white and black cheek is the perfection of a racially segregated conjunction viewed from within the intemperately repressed white perspective.The concepts used all make sense by themselves that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness be pretty-pretty in their own ways, some things are beyond human judgmentbut the particular way they are connected in a slave-holding society has more than a little strangeness in the proportion. Poes presentation of the narrators consciousness directs the reader to just now this perspective, focusing not any individual part but on the form of the whole, because it is here that the psychological dependence of whiteness on misappro priated conceptions of Africanism functions.The narrators repression of blackness into a transcendental white worldviewin which blackness only exists at the fringes to serve whiteness and make it more beautiful, both literally and metaphoricallyresults logically in the conclusion of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white position girl of known parentage but not much depth of soul. The doll Rowena is fair-haired and blue-eyed, a perfect Aryan, in contrast to Ligeias dark hair and eyes, and her family, like the economic system of chattel slavery, is enthralled to a thirst of gold. When the narrator describes their wedding his memory catches more on the blackness of their surroundings than on the European whiteness of his bride. I have express that I minutely remember the detail of the chamberyet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment, like Ligeias parentage or the wedding itself (). The details he remembers take on a bridal couchof an Indian model, and low, and sculp tured of solid ebonya gigantic sarcophagus of black graniteand a tapis with patterns of the most jetty black (111). The blackness that he has banished from the person of his bride he has recreated in their surroundings.The composition of black and white is by now recognizable to the reader the alabaster centerpiece that was Ligeias face is now the person of Rowena, and the black hair and eyes of Ligeia are the room and its contents. The tableau that was beautiful when contained within the frame of Ligeias face becomes, when extrapolated onto the greater scale of the mansion or estate, somber and terrifying. Blackness looms everywhere in the bridal room. By being marginalized, blackness also comes to surround whiteness and venture it.The climax of the story comes from just such an incursion of blackness into the white center. Ligeia ostensibly poisons Rowena from beyond the grave and uses her physical structure as a medium for result. From the narrators earlier adulation of Lig eia, it seems that he might be happy with this turn of events, but he has enough of his wits intimately him to be terrified that a nuance has returned to living. His terror also has a deeper cause. The chemise of blackness that has guided the storys logic thus far convey that the narrator is at last implicate in authorizing a racial economy.In the black room (with black curtains) Ligeia has supplated Rowenaand now Ligeia really is a dark figure, tutelage with her the real abyss of deaththe only place for whiteness to flee is into the face and person of the narrator. Throughout the story, however, the narrator has been fully invested in a white moderate-centrist repression of race, as seen in his convenient forgettings and fetishizations of Ligeia. Furthermore, the version of blackness that he has set up is parlous to whiteness blackness holds such an impatient sway over his mind that he sees it everywhere, and now it everywhere threatens to engulf him.The trouble that invi gorates the finale differs from the agile horror of Ligeia, the immorality of the natural order with the return of the dead, in that here the horror is not within the story as an purpose of narration but surrounding the story as the ground on which it stands. For the reader, the immediate shock is Ligeias reanimation, but at the subconscious level this is enacted done reader response as the experience of the text gradeping beyond its boundaries and into the real, the objective correlative of a corpse stepping beyond the boundary of death back into life.The doubling of conscious and unconscious horror in the storys climax gives it affective creator in that the reader is now fully identify with the narrator as the text reaches its impish apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the next target in the administer of the imaginary blackness is the reader. This movement might provoke a strong reaction formationthe condemnation of the work as unliterary or obsceneor, in a more toleran t reading, a shudder.All of the above explication of how darkness forms an incursive dialectical presence in Ligeia allows us to expand an interpretation of the work from the stiff interplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical handling of control and slavery. On this ground, the message of Ligeia about slavery is as tangled as the rendering of color. Ligeia, the dark lady, seems to dominate the narrator from the beginning of the tale, and in her return via the lead of Rowena she exerts power not only over another personone label as fair, as whiteshe demonstrates her advantage over life and death itself.Ligeias empowerment seems paradoxically at odds with aligning this story with the historical band of slavery black African slaves were licitly considered chattel, moveable property, and had all the same rights that cattle or the like would have, that is, virtually none. If we remember, though, that as a tale of the grotesquean grotesque exaggeration that partakes of the inversions and reinvestments of the subconscious Ligeia does not widen its truths at the level of literal or correspond but in the actors line of (bad) dreams.What correlates the play of power in Ligeia with the logic of slavery is that the very idea of aggregate commandor rather, since we are relations in inversions, the fall subjugation of the narratorcan operate so freely in the story. The historical domination of the white slave owning class is represented here in its inverted form as the grotesquely hyperbolic empowerment of blackness through occultation.Ligeias transcendent power does not correspond to the real var. of social forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the discipline sin, but to the view racial favourable position that white ideology purported to itselfthough it could not, ever, have it off up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting conformity or conversion of the heathensand to the equally idealized mystery of blackness empowered through an assumed (and constructed by apathy) opacity.The form of domination operating in the story is bear witness largely by the formal twist of the narrators discourse. Instead of pronouncing at the outset his obsession with Ligeia, the narrator demonstrates his kin of submission/domination by overtake the reader with intricate, over-detailed descriptions of Ligeia. The narrator is dominated by his own weighty, by discourse itself, and the carve uping is fully possessed by the body and soul of Ligeia.Rather than willfully presenting her domination over the narrator, and thus exposing herself to revolt or to a failure to live up to the role of scale, Ligeias domination is represented through the narrators willed submission. His total submissionundemanded, uncoerced, almost unasked forattributes to Ligeia a total form of power that the maitre d cannot arrogate to himself but which exists exclusively in the mind of the imagined slave. The countercurrent of this is that the story is told by the slave though discourse is supposed to be the exclusive domain of the achieve. unless the thrall is narrator is truly what the master class of a slave-owning society requires to pull in the adulation is craves, and is in keeping with the logic of slavery. The slave class exists to labor on behalf of the master class the final step in establishing an absolute and dreadful slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the preventive of the slave. Poes story works through a mounting intensity of the motifs of white and black, starting small and growing to a climax in which blackness appears everywhere.Through this progression, Poes story shows that even though a white perspective gets to tell the story of Ligeia and of U. S. history, it is not safe from a backlash. To the contrary, in trying to secure itself suddenly from blackness, the whiteness of the American mythology has invented a racialized other th at it cannot escape. The black fear that haunts the narrator and the American reader assumes the massive proportions of the problem of racial chattel slavery itself.Beyond the scale of the actual ambivalences of the play between possessor and slave is the nightmarish dimension of absolutes that the ideology of such a society demands. The model for this absolutism is, of course, the dichotomy between life and death a clear transit that is irreversible. The horror of the American mind, which must relinquish an absolute portion between master and slave with a contingent division between classes that are actually interpenetrating, is brought into the light of representation in Poes horrific tale of the risen dead.