A literal reading of the shadow in “Ligeia:” Coleridge’s remarks on Ghosts and Poe’s poetics of misdirection

Abstract

The reader of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838) is called upon to decide whether the purported resurrection of the title-character is a bona fide miracle or a delusion. Before answering this question, however, one must first tackle the more fundamental challenge of establishing what the first-person narrator, the sole witness of these events, thinks happened. Given the lack of clear, unambiguous statements of fact in his report, this is no easy task. He suggests that his dead first wife Ligeia came back as a ghost to kill, or perhaps hasten the death, of her already debilitated successor, Rowena, maybe by dropping some mysterious fluid, which he is not sure he saw, in her wine. Four nights later, during Rowena’s wake, which was held in the same room, her corpse seems to be gradually replaced by Ligeia’s body throughout a weird succession of incomplete reanimations. Finally, the narrator tells us, Ligeia “advanced bodily and palpably” from Rowena’s bed of death, although he admits she shrunk “from my touch” before he could quite get a hold of her (Poe 329, 330). Yet, despite all these inconsistencies, the narrator’s supernatural explanation remained virtually unchallenged until 1944, when Roy P. Basler contended that the wonders he mentions “must be understood as (...) hallucinations” (368). In 1973, however, G. R. Thompson argued that it was impossible to “know anything the narrator has told us is ‘real,’” and that therefore, in order to appreciate the full effect of the tale, the reader was required to “think one theory and feel the other” (97, 103). This matched that writer’s overall assessment of Poe, who he thought had attempted to convey a sense of “despair over the ability of the mind to know anything,” thereby taking the Romantic distrust of rationality to new and unheard-of extremes (69). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2164167