Mirroring in Edgar AIlan Poe's Ligeia

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Mirroring in Edgar AIlan Poe's Ligeia

The mirroring, or doubling, of Ligeia and Rowena in Edgar AIlan Poe's "Ligeia" is more than a technique used to give symmetry and balance to a horror story about the dying who refuse to stay dead. The two women also become emblems of the "real" world and the "dream" world, serving as emissaries and guides to the narrator and reader who mirror both worlds and must choose one. Thus, Ligeia is the dark dream-world personified, a gate to the opium-laden existence the narrator craves, just as Rowena is the fair epitome of the bland, light-infused world of reality, an anchor to the mundane world the narrator literally goes insane to avoid. In order to illustrate the ethereal gating quality of Ligeia and the deadly anchoring quality of Rowena, I will first establish them firmly within their respective realms of fiction and fact. In order to illustrate the "double doubling" of the narrator, I will explore how Ligeia and Rowena interact with him, pushing him to extremes of dreaming and reality, and the deadly choice he must make.

I begin with Ligeia, emblem of the dream world, for she is the driving force of the story. She is the very stuff phantoms and dreams are made of: a dark, madly beautiful woman with a keenly piercing intensity and intelligence framed by an unforgettable mass of black hair, and an indomitable will shining through the microcosm of her black eyes. The first indication that she is more than a lovely, inspiring companion for the narrator comes in the first sentence of "Ligeia" as the narrator admits, "I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia" (1499). This is a strange way to begin a story, for it immed...

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...ssarily the beautiful thing we might expect it to be, and the choice that he makes is not necessarily the one that will lead to a happy ending. After all, his beauty is reborn only through the horror of Rowena's murder and subsequent monstrous transformation, and his genius is only reborn through his direct descent into madness. The narrator describes Ligeia's return in terms of shrieking madness and throbbing veins; obviously, the return of Ligeia is not the return of Romance, and the narrator seems sunk in horror rather than exultation. For good or ill, whether Ligeia is a returning or destroying angel, he makes his choice, and thus he is delivered to the realm of his choosing. It must be admitted that, by virtue of that choice, he is a broken man, left gibbering in the comer of his abbey, but he is also a man with no further restraints on his dark and mad vision.

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