Edgar Allan Poe's short story "Ligeia" contains many of the tropes that define Poe as a master of the macabre: the story focuses on a man's reflection on his mysterious, frail wife Ligeia and her tragic death. After she passes, the narrator marries Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine. They coexist in a loveless marriage until she too falls ill and dies. The narrator prepares her body, but witnesses a miraculous transformation as she comes back to life as Lady Ligeia.
This work has much in common with "Morella," another Poe short story. Both stories have an unreliable narrator discussing his fixation on a beautiful, frail, brilliant, and ultimately supernatural woman. Many critics attribute this archetypal female figure in Poe's fiction to his relationships with his mother and his wife. Both women died young, and this had an obvious impact on the writer. Critic Alvaro Salas Chacón aptly characterizes this archetypal figure in Poe's fiction:
"An intelligent, sickly, young wife—an idealized asexual type of woman.... Women in Poe's life and fiction reveal a fixation on the figure of his dead mother" (76).
Another key aspect of the story is Poe's emphasis on liminality throughout the tale. The story has a dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality; Poe uses this to reinforce the liminal nature of the titular character. Ligeia is a woman between life and death, between fantasy and reality. Indeed, the narrator struggles to recall the first time he met her:
"I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering."
Moreover, this establishes the narrator as a typical unreliable narrator. Readers are expected to take his tale as the truth, but there are obvious gaps in his story, and he reveals more about himself and his various flaws than he intends to.
Another scene that reinforces Poe's use of liminality is Rowena's decline, death, and eventual resurrection as Ligeia. The following passage is told almost through an opium fog:
"She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by the hour."
Thus, "Ligeia" is a prime example of Poe's various tropes. It has the morbid trademarks of the author, including an unreliable narrator, a hauntingly beautiful supernatural woman, and a chilling ending.
I pulled my textual evidence from:
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/ligeiag.htm
Chacón, Alvaro Salas. "Allusions to the Virgin Mary in Edgar A. Poe and Robert Lowell: An Unconscious Oedipal Process." Káñina: Revista de Artes y Letras. 22.2 (1998): 73-8.
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