Edgar Allan Poe Ligeia Essay

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” is a tale of mystery and supernatural elements, discussing the incidents surrounding the narrator’s relationships with the lady Ligeia and Lady Rowena Trevanion. This includes the narrator’s marriages to both women and the curious events of the ladies’ deaths. The climax of this story occurs when the narrator, under an opium-induced haze and still rife with grief over Ligeia’s passing, witnesses as Lady Rowena’s corpse seemingly returns to life and transforms into Ligeia (“Ligeia”). Based on this narrative, the implicit commentary regarding the Lacanian oedipal process becomes evident, particularly when considering opium as the device which exposes the narrator’s innermost thoughts and desires. Bearing Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theories in mind and viewing the nameless narrator as Poe’s act of self-insertion into the story, it then becomes clear that “Ligeia” is a literary representation of Poe’s personal oedipal complex.
Jacques Lacan, a French structural theorist, most notably contributed to psychoanalytic criticism through expanding upon psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s theories. Contrary to Freud’s focus on the duality of the human mind and the nature of the

In the paragraphs that follow, the narrator cites numerous mythological and religious idols to articulate the unbelievable qualities of Ligeia’s beauty and intelligence, thereby emphasizing her ethereal nature:
In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream --an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen