Ligeia: madness, drugs, and teen movies

“I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” is Poe’s opening line to his makeshift love story, “Ligeia” (LOA 262). After reading the text, I had built a mental analogy for the depiction Poe creates for his narrator: a pop-culture teen movie. The aforementioned line immediately reveals to the reader that the narrator is unreliable, due to his inability to remember the particulars of how he met his beloved Ligeia. The way that I connect the two, Poe’s “Ligeia” and a high school drama, is in the perspective and exaggeration used. In many teen movies, you find the common theme of: boy likes girl, girl doesn’t know boy exists; boy creates mental (imaginative) moments where he confesses his feelings; boy derives complex and completely made up personality traits about girl from her physical being (i.e. nice hair = good person), and eventually boy gets girl [boy and girl may be interchangeable at your leisure]. Although I believe that the woman Ligeia is a complete fabrication of the depressed and drugged mind of the unreliable narrator, I see a mirroring between the plot design and story layout of a teen drama.

The key element to both is the imaginary traits that one derives from the physical features of a person in an assessment of the personality. The speaker in “Ligeia” often speaks of her through physical terms “she was tall, somewhat slender” (263). “-- the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temple; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, hyacinthine” (LOA 263). Nowhere in the speaker’s recollection is a word in reference to her as an individual or to her personality. Instead, he goes to length to describe her physical attributes and to persuade the reader to see the morality of having rave-black hair.

Where the analogy begins to separate is in the examination of the state of mind of the speaker. A teen film often will depict the imagined characteristics of an individual based upon there physical appearance, but rarely is the subject of the emotion is revealed to be imaginary. I believe that Ligeia is a complete fabrication of the speaker. In a tangent about the ability of one to remember a single and important detail, our speaker reveals “in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expressions -- felt it approaching -- yet not quite be mine -- and so at length entirely depart” (LOA 265). It is my estimation that he the speaker is in capable of remembering, but has no real experience in which to draw the memory from. After the death of his beloved Ligeia, he goes on to purchase, with combination of his personal and her remaining funds, and abbey, “which I shall not name” (LOA 269). It is my estimation that he cannot name it, because it doesn’t truly exist.

Although I think that the main cause for the speaker’s delusions is some sort of chemical imbalance in his brain, he openly offers an alternate or supplementary reason for his absurdity. He exclaimed, “I had became a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my order had taken a coloring from my dreams” (LOA 270).

In my estimation “Ligeia” is the ranting of a drug addict with delusions of grandeur: love, wealth, life, and death. Such sentiments speak loudly and harmoniously with well accepted traditions in teenage cinema.