Saturday, August 31, 2019
Edgar Allan Poeââ¬â¢s ââ¬ÅLigeiaââ¬Â Essay
Though there is no mention of race or slavery in Edgar Allan Poeââ¬â¢s ââ¬Å"Ligeia,â⬠the story is suffused with the symbolic interaction of light and dark, white and black, pallor and pigment. In a situation so fully charged with the symbolics of race, and in a story written in antebellum America by an author raised in Virginia, the lack of any mention of slavery is enough to indicate that this story, despite its studied silence on the matter, has something to tell us about the psychology of racialism in the United States. In the conflict between Ligeia and Rowenaââ¬âthough it takes place almost out of sight, at the edge of the real and of visionââ¬âPoe sets up Ligeia as the dark lady and Rowena as the fair one. The reader might expect this to play out as either an abolitionist or racist affirmation of equality or racial supremacy. The situation is complicated, however, by the presence and perceptions of the narrator, who is outside of the highly charged color scheme. Poe positions the reader as an observer of racialist dynamics, rather than as a racialized participant, to allow the reader a view of how a passive, dominant white class depends on, and is crippled by its dependency on, a black underclass that stands for everything it lacks and fears. The dichotomy of black and white emerges relatively late in the story, only after Ligeia has died and the narrator has taken Rowena as his new wife, but the coloring of Ligeia is present from the start. Among her other sublime attributes, the narrator writes that ââ¬Å"She came and departed as a shadowâ⬠(111). However, she is also very pale. She has a ââ¬Å"lofty and pale forehead ââ¬âit was faultlessâ⬠and ââ¬Å"skin rivalling the purest ivoryâ⬠(111). Her whiteness, though, is framed by ââ¬Å"the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tressesâ⬠(111). Her eyes, the windows of the soul, are also ââ¬Å"the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tintâ⬠(111). While her skin is very white, every other feature of Ligeia is exceedingly black. In her shadowiness, Poe depicts her very being as dark. Ligeiaââ¬â¢s white skin might be attributed to Poeââ¬â¢s desire as an artist to keep this story from being overtly racialized or didactic or scandalous. His presentation of intense blackness as the frame of intense whiteness, however, is actually a better representation of race in America than a simple schematization of white versus black. Over against the ââ¬Å"one dropâ⬠rule that determined a person to be ââ¬Å"blackâ⬠if they had any black ancestors, the reader determines Ligeia to be ââ¬Å"whiteâ⬠based on one attribute against many dark ones. In fact, Ligeiaââ¬â¢s blackness is more than skin (or hair) deep. She is a mystery even to her lover, the narrator, who associates her with the religious mysteries of ancient civilizations. Like the African slaves brought to America, she has a connection to a cultural past that is lost to the narrator and which can only play on his fancy. Her family, which he does not know the paternal name of, ââ¬Å"is of a remotely ancient date. â⬠Musing on his ignorance of his belovedââ¬â¢s family nameââ¬âwhich must seem a little unusual to any readerââ¬âhe wonders why this is: ââ¬Å"was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own ââ¬âa wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? â⬠(111). The proposed solutions ironically obscure the possibility of repression, that he does not know because he does not want to know, that he is afraid to know. The narrator can only imagine that he does not know her name because he loves her so much. The narratorââ¬â¢s conspicuous forgetting begins to trace the mechanism by which Americans repress blackness, and the dependence of whiteness on a black contrast, for the sake of keeping whiteness unquestioned as a positive attribute. Part of the narratorââ¬â¢s madness, though, is that he continues to fixate on the blackness in Ligeia as the symbol of depth and plenitude. Through this obsession with blackness in what is supposed to be a white face, Poe uses ââ¬Å"Ligeiaâ⬠to pose an inquiry into American racialism that escapes from traditional dualisms of good versus bad into an examination of the psychological mechanisms that make such a debate possible. At the same time that the depth of Ligeiaââ¬â¢s learning provides a viable historical representation of the white slave-holderââ¬â¢s ignorance of African cultures, it also comes to assume sublime proportions that simultaneously remove that knowledge from history. Using the fetishization of Orienal cultures as a model, the narrator transports Ligeiaââ¬â¢s 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 stage for blackness to be aligned with other things white European culture did not understandââ¬âwith animals, for example, or sexual appetite. The narratorââ¬â¢s visible obsession with Ligeiaââ¬â¢s blackness as a symbol for his inability to comprehend her exposes the way in which American culture could both deify 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: ââ¬Å"ââ¬â¢There is no exquisite beauty,ââ¬â¢ says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, ââ¬Ëwithout some strangeness in the proportionââ¬â¢Ã¢â¬ (). The narrator agrees that there is something strange about Ligeia but he cannot find it. Each individual part, it seems, is perfectly wrought. The strangeness, though, is as Bacon would have it: in the proportion of all these perfections to each other. Metaphorically, the perfection of the white and black face is the perfection of a racially segregated society viewed from within the heavily repressed white perspective. The concepts used all make sense by themselves: that Africans have different cultures, blackness and whiteness are beautiful in their own ways, some things are beyond human understandingââ¬âbut the particular way they are connected in a slave-holding society has more than a little ââ¬Å"strangeness in the proportion. â⬠Poeââ¬â¢s presentation of the narratorââ¬â¢s consciousness directs the reader to precisely this perspective, focusing not any individual part but on the framing of the whole, because it is here that the psychological dependence of whiteness on misappropriated conceptions of Africanism functions. The narratorââ¬â¢s repression of blackness into a transcendental white worldviewââ¬âin which blackness only exists at the fringes to serve whiteness and make it more beautiful, both literally and metaphoricallyââ¬âresults logically in the death of Ligeia and her replacement by a very white English girl of known parentage but not much depth of soul. The Lady Rowena is ââ¬Å"fair-haired and blue-eyed,â⬠a perfect Aryan, in contrast to Ligeiaââ¬â¢s dark hair and eyes, and her family, like the economic system of chattel slavery, is enthralled to a ââ¬Å"thirst of gold. â⬠When the narrator describes their wedding his memory catches more on the blackness of their surroundings than on the European whiteness of his bride. ââ¬Å"I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamberââ¬âyet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment,â⬠like Ligeiaââ¬â¢s parentage or the wedding itself (). The details he remembers include a ââ¬Å"bridal couchââ¬âof an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebonyâ⬠¦a gigantic sarcophagus of black graniteâ⬠¦[and a tapestry with] patterns of the most jetty blackâ⬠(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 Ligeiaââ¬â¢s 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 Ligeiaââ¬â¢s 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 threaten it. The climax of the story comes from just such an incursion of blackness into the white center. Ligeia seemingly poisons Rowena from beyond the grave and uses her body as a medium for return. From the narratorââ¬â¢s earlier adulation of Ligeia, it seems that he might be happy with this turn of events, but he has enough of his wits about him to be terrified that a ghost has returned to life. His terror also has a deeper cause. The displacement of blackness that has guided the storyââ¬â¢s logic thus far means that the narrator is at last implicated in authorizing a racial economy. In the black room (with black curtains) Ligeia has supplated Rowenaââ¬âand now Ligeia really is a dark figure, bearing with her the real abyss of deathââ¬âthe 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 dangerous to whiteness; blackness holds such an anxious sway over his mind that he sees it everywhere, and now it everywhere threatens to engulf him. The anxiety that invigorates the finale differs from the immediate horror of ââ¬Å"Ligeia,â⬠the transgression of the natural order through the return of the dead, in that here the horror is not within the story as an object of narration but surrounding the story as the ground on which it stands. For the reader, the immediate shock is Ligeiaââ¬â¢s reanimation, but at the subconscious level this is enacted through reader response as the experience of the text stepping 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 storyââ¬â¢s climax gives it affective power in that the reader is now fully identified with the narrator: as the text reaches its unholy apotheosis in moving beyond itself, the next target in the spread of the imaginary blackness is the reader. This movement might provoke a strong reaction formationââ¬âthe condemnation of the work as unliterary or obsceneââ¬âor, in a more tolerant reading, a shudder. All of the above explication of how darkness forms an invasive dialectical presence in ââ¬Å"Ligeiaâ⬠allows us to expand an interpretation of the work from the formal interplay of light and dark to the real, instantiated, and historical discourse of domination and slavery. On this ground, the message of ââ¬Å"Ligeiaâ⬠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 corpus of Rowena she exerts power not only over another personââ¬âone marked as fair, as whiteââ¬âshe demonstrates her mastery over life and death itself. Ligeiaââ¬â¢s empowerment seems paradoxically at odds with aligning this story with the historical circumstances of slavery: black African slaves were legally 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 grotesqueââ¬âan imaginative exaggeration that partakes of the inversions and reinvestments of the subconsciousââ¬âââ¬Å" Ligeiaâ⬠does not disclose its truths at the level of literal or represented but in the language of (bad) dreams. What correlates the play of power in ââ¬Å"Ligeiaâ⬠with the logic of slavery is that the very idea of total dominationââ¬âor rather, since we are dealing in inversions, the total subjugation of the narratorââ¬âcan 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. Ligeiaââ¬â¢s transcendent power does not correspond to the real configuration of social forces in 1830s America, which was already being marked by ambivalence toward the national sin, but to the idealized racial superiority that white ideology purported to itselfââ¬âthough it could not, ever, live up to its own fantasy of itself either in terms of exacting submission or conversion of the ââ¬Å"heathensâ⬠ââ¬âand 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 evidenced largely by the formal construction of the narratorââ¬â¢s discourse. Instead of pronouncing at the outset his obsession with Ligeia, the narrator demonstrates his relationship of submission/domination by overwhelming the reader with intricate, over-detailed descriptions of Ligeia. The narrator is dominated by his own telling, by discourse itself, and the telling 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 ââ¬Å"master,â⬠Ligeiaââ¬â¢s domination is represented through the narratorââ¬â¢s willed submission. His total submissionââ¬âundemanded, uncoerced, almost unasked forââ¬âattributes to Ligeia a total form of power that the master 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 master. Yet the thrall is narrator is truly what the master class of a slave-owning society requires to receive 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 horrific slavery is for the labor of discourse to become the burden of the slave. Poeââ¬â¢s 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, Poeââ¬â¢s story shows that even though a white perspective gets to tell the story of ââ¬Å"Ligeiaâ⬠and of U. S. history, it is not safe from a backlash. To the contrary, in trying to secure itself absolutely from blackness, the whiteness of the American mythology has invented a racialized other that 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 owner 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 transition that is irreversible. The horror of the American mind, which must reconcile an absolute division between master and slave with a contingent division between classes that are actually interpenetrating, is brought into the light of representation in Poeââ¬â¢s horrific tale of the risen dead.
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