Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
Download 0.58 Mb. View original pdf
|
Short Story By Flannery OConnor
| Like aflame about to go out, Ligeia’s supernatural qualities begin to wither on her deathbed and the narrator suffers a horrible realization of what he is about to lose. The loss of strength in the eyes removes Ligeia’s extraordinariness and makes her seem more human, which in turn makes her tragic refusal to accept death all the more upsetting. It is not until the last moment, that Ligeia becomes still, her voice low and soft again, and confesses the fierceness of her love for her husband. The narrator of "Ligeia" has never imagined her love to be as fierce as this, and he feels both blessed and cursed to be losing her now. Her confessions speak to him of her desire to live, and he cannot express how horrible they are to hear. In addition to Ligeia’s qualities of intelligence and beauty, the narrator finally sees evidence of her affection for him, a quality that he never expected. This show of love in the last hours of her life gives Ligeia more humanity that fills the narrator with sympathy, and with a sense of loss. At midnight, on the night of her death, Ligeia asks her husband to recite to her a particular poem that she has written herself about the Conqueror Worm about a play performed by puppets and watched by angels, in which the hero is a horrible worm, destroying the human characters. As the narrator of "Ligeia" finishes reading this morbid poem, Ligeia cries out appeals to God that the worm be conquered instead of her. She then recites the Glanville epigram. With this, she falls into her husband’s arms and repeats to him the last phrase of the Glanville quote – “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.” As we’ve heard earlier in the story, there is a special connection between Ligeia and certain volumes of literature and poetry. She shows the force of this connection on her deathbed and seems to especially embody her own words and becomes very frantic with the idea of the worm. The final quote will be instrumental in the story that follows because it alludes to her refusal to submit to death. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2017 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 20 After Ligeia dies, the narrator of "Ligeia" can’t stand to be in their city by the Rhine and, with no lack of wealth, buys an abbey in a wild, remote part of England. The devastated appearance of the old building perfectly describes how he feels, and he doesn’t want to repair it. But inside the building, he has hope of lifting the mood, and decks it outwith luxurious draperies and carvings and decorations. But the narrator doesn’t want to talk too much about these things. He goes onto the most important room of the abbey, the bridal chamber, where he married his new wife, Lady Rowena of Tremaine. He isn’t sure how it happened that the family of the bride allowed their daughter to marry him. Fitting Poe’s tendency to connect place and person, the narrator finds the old city tarnished by the memory of Ligeia. But his escape does not free him from this condition. He chooses an old, Gothic abbey, which represents the grieving, maddened state of his mind. By confining himself in this way, and surrounding himself with rich, dark decorations, the narrator only exaggerates his dark mood. But he can describe the bridal chamber perfectly. It is a pentagonal room at the top of a high turret, with a venetian glass window covering one of the five sides. This glass was such a dim color that it transformed the light that entered the room and made everything look sickly. There are vines growing over the walls and the ceiling is carved oak with many elaborate Gothic figures shaped in the wood. There’s an incense burner in the center of the ceiling and many other Eastern decorations and granite figures in the corners standing over the proceedings like tomb sculptures. Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
|