Abstract
This article examines American author Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia” (first published in 1838) through the lenses of sibling and other forms of incest in the first half of the nineteenth century along with more recent knowledge regarding incest and its ramifications. Research into legal documents, newspapers and magazines, literature, and other written works from around Poe’s lifetime reveal social, scientific, and cultural tensions regarding “appropriate” levels of incest and the usage of opposite-sex siblings as templates for future erotic love. Although other works by Poe, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), have previously been evaluated for references to incest and its resultant trauma, “Ligeia” has not been considered in this manner. Despite such exclusion, the undertones of sibling incest in “Ligeia” serve to enhance Poe’s strategic development of horror in the reader by merging ambiguity with a reflection of late-eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century shifting sentiments on incest stemming from previously sanctioned familial attachments that precluded idealized romantic love.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
All following uses of Poe’s short stories “Ligeia,” “Morella,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Eleonora” will be taken from Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II edited by T. O. Mabbott, hereafter cited parenthetically as CW.
Byers, Jr. argues that Lady Rowena, the narrator’s second wife, is a figment of his opium fantasies. Conversely, Davis and Davis claim that Ligeia is the opium-engendered fantasy, and that the narrator murders his wife Lady Rowena in a delusional attempt to bring Ligeia to life. Other interpretations include Mabbott’s assertion that Poe “intended a story of real magic” and Bieganowski’s claim that “Ligeia” embodies Poe’s suggestion that words can be infinitely powerful (CW, p. 306; 1988). von Mücke (1999) interprets the story as dealing with the materiality and sensuousness of writing in relation to the newly created print technologies of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Rohy (2006) employs an interpretation of the Rowena–Ligeia transformation as a moment of queer sexuality.
Cantalupo’s argument differs from Davis and Davis’ reading in part by interpreting Lady Rowena’s death as occurring due to the narrator’s attempt to outperform his mentor Ligeia. More recently, David Greven claims that “same-sex desire informs the tale’s treatment of race,” viewing Ligeia both through the multiracial qualities of her dark, mysterious, and luxurious hair and eyes and through her defiance of repressive death by her colonization of the fair-haired Lady Rowena’s body (2014, p. 71).
P. 311. A number of critics, such as Weekes (2002), have noted several of Poe’s male narrators’ odd lapses in memory, some arguing that such gaps are due to the fact that the female characters are meant merely as props for the emotions of the male characters.
For instance, see Marsh (1972).
CW, pp. 311 and 313. See Levine and Levine’s footnotes 4 and 5 about Delos and Leda (1990).
For an important alternate interpretation of the term “race,” see Dayan’s text (1994).
CW, p. 404. It is interesting to note here that Roderick’s statement slides into the third person singular: “‘[Madeline’s] decease,’ he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, ‘would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers’” (p. 404). By using the word “him,” Roderick distances himself from the dangerously interbred line of Ushers. For one example of the widely agreed on claim that the Ushers, and even perhaps Roderick and Madeline, were products and practitioners of incest, see Allison’s “Coleridgean Self-Development: Entrapment and Incest in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’” (1988).
Heller claims that in omitting the sentence about God, Ligeia seems to wish “to place herself in that gap, to rise above humanity by achieving the immortality of her individual gigantic volition” (2018, p. 117).
p. 310. Poe writes in his letter, “One point I have not fully carried out—I should have intimated that the will did not perfect its intention—there should have been a relapse—a final one—and Ligeia (who had only succeeded in so much as to convey an idea of the truth to the narrator) should be at length entombed as Rowena—the bodily alterations having gradually faded away” (1966, p. 118, original emphasis). While this statement could be read as describing an actual relapse of Ligeia’s physical transformation, it could also be read as about events depicted through the perceived reality of the narrator, a reality affected by opium use, obsessive desire for Ligeia, and anxiety about transgressing religious, social, and legal regulations regarding incest.
The narrator states, “[we] had always dwelled together···” (CW, p. 639). Supposedly then, Eleonora and the story’s narrator grew up together since early childhood.
Virginia was nine years old when Poe came to live with her and her mother Mrs. Maria Clemm in Baltimore (Richardson 2000, p. 59).
For example, see Smith (1837).
In their study of incest as depicted in fiction versus as examined in psychological and clinical studies with living subjects, Kokkola and Valovirta note that an early study by David Finkelhor examining 796 undergraduate students at several New England universities found that “15% of females and 10% of males reported some form of sexual contact with a sibling” (2017, p. 124). These percentages are believed to be underestimations. In addition, while 25% of these reported cases involved force, “75% were mutually consensual” (pp. 124–125). Despite the lack of a representative sample of a general national population, even these percentages show that more sibling incest occurs than many may expect in the late twentieth century.
p. 317. It is here that critics such as Greven (2014) view Ligeia as desiring life rather than life with her supposedly beloved husband. Noting the reanimated Ligeia’s physical shrinking from the narrator’s touch, Greven asserts that Ligeia “is a figure of power as untouchable as she is intimidating, utterly sui generis, existing for herself alone” (p. 82, original emphasis). While such claims are valid, this section of this essay is outlining the narrator’s obsession-ruled perspective on Ligeia rather than providing a larger interpretation of the story’s climax.
For instance, observe the first sentence of the tale: “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia” (CW, p. 310). In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator brings attention to the difference between the capitalized “Lady,” which expresses a social rank, and the simple use of “lady”: “While [Roderick Usher] spoke, the lady Madeline (for so she was called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment” (CW, p. 404).
References
Allison, J. (1988). Coleridgean self-development: Entrapment and incest in “The Fall of the House of Usher”. South Central Review, 5(1), 40–47.
Barnes, E. (Ed.). (2002). Incest and the literary imagination. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Bieganowski, R. (1988). The self-consuming narrator in Poe’s “Ligeia” and “Usher”. American Literature, 60(2), 175–187.
Bonaparte, M. (1949). The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe: A psycho-analytic interpretation. London: The Hogarth Press.
Byers, J. R., Jr. (1980). The opium chronology of Poe’s “Ligeia”. South Atlantic Bulletin, 45(1), 40–46.
Cantalupo, B. (2014). Poe and the visual arts. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Connolly, B. (2014). Domestic intimacies: Incest and the liberal subject in nineteenth-century America. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Davis, J. L., & Davis, J. H. (1970). Poe’s ethereal Ligeia. The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 24(4), 170–176.
Dayan, J. (1994). Amorous bondage: Poe, ladies, and slaves. American Literature, 66(2), 239–273.
DiPlacidi, J. (2018). Gothic incest: Gender, sexuality and transgression. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Goldman, E. (2004). Explaining mental illness: Theology and pathology in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short fiction. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 59(1), 27–52.
Greven, D. (2014). Gender protest and same-sex desire in antebellum American literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Farnham: Ashgate.
Heller, T. (2018). The delights of terror: An aesthetics of the tale of terror. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Jones, P. C. (2018). Resisting reproduction in Edgar Allan Poe’s family fictions. Studies in American Fiction, 45(2), 165–189.
Kachur, R. M. (2008). Buried in the bedroom: Bearing witness to incest in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature; Winnipeg, 41(1), 43–59.
Kokkola, L., & Valovirta, E. (2017). The disgust that fascinates: Sibling incest as a bad romance”. Sexuality and Culture, 21, 121–141.
Kuper, A. (2002). Incest, cousin marriage, and the origin of the human sciences in nineteenth-century England. Past and Present, 174, 158–183.
Livingston, J. H. (1827). A dissertation on the marriage of a man with his sister in law. The Christian Advocate, 5, 167–186.
Maeshall, R. W. (1837). Art. v. review of Dwight’s Hebrew Wife. The Literary and Theological Review, 4(14), 182–212.
Marsh, J. L. (1972). The psycho-sexual reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe Studies, 10(1), 8–9.
McKinnon, S. (2016). Temperamental differences: The shifting political implications of cousin marriage in nineteenth-century America. Social Analysis, 60(2), 31–46.
Nadal, M. (2016). Trauma and the uncanny in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 17(2), 178–192.
Poe, E. A. (1846). The philosophy of composition. Graham’s Magazine, 28(4), 163–167.
Poe, E. A. (1966). The letters of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. I (J. W. Ostrom, Ed.). New York, NY: The Gordian Press.
Poe, E. A. (1978). Collected works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II (T. O. Mabbott, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Poe, E. A. (1990). The short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (St. Levine & Su. Levine, Eds.). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Richardson, A. (2000). Rethinking romantic incest: Human universals, literary representation, and the biology of the mind. New Literary History, 31(3), 553–572.
Rohy, V. (2006). Ahistorical. GLQ, 12(1), 61–83.
Sanders, V. (2002). The brother–sister culture in nineteenth-century literature from Austen to Woolf. London: Palgrave.
Silverman, K. (1991). Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and never-ending remembrance.. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Smith, A. G. (1837). Publick lectures: Causes that vitiate the human constitution. Vegetable diet. Indian food. Fresh air, exercise and light. Agitation and over-excitement of mind. Use of spirituous liquors. Intermarriages. Attempts at amalgamation. The New-York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, 15(24), 190.
Tesone, J. E. (2005). Incest(s) and the negation of otherness. In: Ambrosio, G. (Ed.) On Incest: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (pp. 51–64). Karnac Books Ltd.
Volk, K. G. (2017). Apply liberalism liberally: Incest and the troubled American state. Reviews in American History, 45(1), 50–56.
von Mücke, D. E. (1999). The imaginary materiality of writing in Poe’s “Ligeia.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 11(2), 53–75.
Voss, J. R. (2015). Brothers and sisters: Incest as empowerment in nineteenth-century American women’s novels. Women’s Studies, 44, 499–515.
Weekes, K. (2002). Poe’s feminine ideal. In Hayes, K. J. (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (pp. 148–162). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Kim, K.J. Horrifying Obsession: Reading Incest in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia”. Sexuality & Culture 25, 960–980 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09804-7
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09804-7