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Study Notes and Summary: Poe's Vampire Story "Ligeia"
Preliminary Ligeia Study notes - Note the resemblance of parts of this to Teick’s earlier story – the man who can’t accept the death of his wife and yet remarries someone he doesn’t care for who knows that she is unloved.
- Setting: large, old, decaying city on Rhine and the action occurs, for the most part, in an abandoned abbey in the wilds of English, a “gloomy and dreary building, melancholy and abandoned in an unsocial region of the country.” He fills it with wonderful old stuff, in the Orientalism way – gold tufted carpets, fantastic draperies, solemn carvings from Egypt.
The bridal chamber is a Pentagon shaped room high in the turret of the abbey. It has one window paned with one piece of Venetian glass – tinted gray. The room is described in all the gothic detail. The bridal bed is very coffin-like, a low piece sculpted of black ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. ”In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite.” In halls such as these --in a bridal chamber such as this --I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage --passed them with but little disquietude. - Ligeia’s characteristics are gone over in loving (one could say overwhelmingly padded) detail throughout the first five paragraphs of the story:
she has: rare learning, singular yet placid cast of beauty, and a thrilling, enthralling and eloquent low musical voice and word choice,(p2) she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated; the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall; She comes and departs as a shadow. Has a sweet voice, marble hand. Is radiant (as an opium-dream) – airy and spirit-lifting and divine. Yet her features were not of the regular sort that people were taught to desire. She further has a lofty and pale forehead;skin rivaling the purest ivory;gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses; teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling (can we say Crest White Strips?) every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles;short upper lip, full lower lip; dimples; huge eyes brilliant black, long jetty lashes, slightly irregular eyebrows She is extremely learned: (4) in classical tongues, moral, physical, mathematical science, includes also “metaphysical investigation” she is from an ancient family – which she doesn’t speak about, a thing he doesn’t realize until after she is dead: “while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her” (para 2) - Speaker’s characteristics:
He is so overwhelmed with his desire for her that he doesn’t exercise even the due caution of checking out her lineage. After she is dead, when it is too late, he asks himself, “Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or 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 --a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself --what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it?” He attempts to spend himself out of his heartbreak over Ligeia’s death. He is an opium addict. For an unspecified reason, he marries a new wife after Ligeia has died, and he doesn’t love her, although he does right by her when she is dying, sitting by her bed and attempting to resuscitates her when she appears dead. (The Bastard!) while his new wife is dying of an unspecified illness, he wanders the hallways calling his first wife’s name. - Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine’s characteristics: she is fair-haired, and blue-eyed; and she is basically sold to him, when, “through thirst of gold, they (her family) permitted …[the marriage] of a daughter so beloved?”
By the second month of marriage, Lady Rowena is ill, and she recovers slowly before once again descending into illness. - Vamp stuff:
Ligeia is tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated
She came and departed as a shadow. (2) Her loveliness was indeed "exquisite," yet he felt that there was much of "strangeness" pervading it, teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. Strangeness is behind her eyes”(P 3). - Vampire TransitionHe gives her wine into which a phantom has dropped three drops of blood, and immediately she takes a turn for the worse, and soon is dead. They prepare her for burial, and while he is sitting with the corpse and thinking about/longing for Ligeia, the corpse begins to sob. He rushes to check, but it stops. This pattern repeats throughout the night, until finally the body returns and stumbles from its bed, and as the funeral cerements fall away, the Lady Ligeia is revealed – long black hair, wild eyes and all.
- Plot
Unnamed narrator meets Ligeia and falls in love with her (she is the vampire) Ligeia dies He goes crazy and gets hooked on opium He remarries a woman he doesn’t love She gets ill He wanders around lamenting his lost love She dies and is reborn as the Lady Ligeia The story ends.
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