Dreams and Time Imagery in Ligeia by Poe (Essay Sample)

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English 3210
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Dreams and time imagery in "Ligeia" by Poe
Poe was born on the 19th of January in 1809 in Massachusetts state, United States of America and grew to be a critic, short-story writer, editor and renowned poet whose mystery as well as horror instigated the current detective narration besides the unrivaled horror atmosphere in American fiction tales. His one of the best poems is The Raven in the year 1845 and still stands as among the best in nationwide literature. Imagery refers to the creation of mental pictures in a piece of literature art to help readers’ involvement in a given literature passage. This usually connotes all the sensory acuities denoted in a given literally work like literal description, metaphors, allusion and similes. It is not limited to only visual imagery but also includes sound, touch as well as movement sensations (Osowski and Judy, 1976).
In Ligeia, the tale has strange Gothic fiction hallmarks of death, hallucinations, romance, haunted locations and supernatural phenomena besides horror. For example, Ligeia manages via the force of will to occupy the dead Rowena’s body and transforming it into her own copy hence revealing herself to the storyteller who was her lover before she died. However, no logical elucidation on how Ligeia possesses the body of Rowena or perhaps how the ‘brilliant-ruby colored fluid’ that pours into Rowena's wine does. May our narrator under the influence of excessive opium dose all the time and that he has built a funhouse of his bedroom for his new love Rowena. Maybe, the narrator stares into … the full, and the black, and the wild eyes … of his late Ligeia or perhaps out of obsession and desire to have her back leads him to hallucinating the whole of the strange scene of resurrection (Artač et al., 2008).
Ligeia setting is described as a world that is gray where almost everything seems old and decaying hence the aspect of imagery and time (old) is created here. The way the storyteller describes the wedding space window as a one pane which is colored with a leaden color so as the sun or moon rays going through it gave a ghastly shine on objects that were within further denotes imagery. This almost ‘ghastly’ attractiveness is displayed all over the story starting from her home town, in Ligeia, the monastery as well as the bridal chamber. This creates a vivid picture of the scene and Ligeia’s beauty further explaining why perhaps the narrator is anable to get her off his mind even when she dies and he has the new love Rowena (Artač et al., 2008).
Poe has successful merged the Gothic incongruous with this traditional (aspect of time) love story and intentionally gives this tale its name ‘Ligeia’ where every plot aspect detail draws its tenacity from Ligeia’s character since she’s the purpose of the storyteller’s love further heightening the imagery hue. For example, despite of her obstacles, she preserves that Poe as the storyteller places in Ligeia’s way. She dies but her memory sticks in the narrator’s mind. When she dies, the Rowena the blonde-haired lades replaces her place as the storyteller’s wife, but unfortunately the marriage bedroom darkness (imagery) suffocates and steals the blonde as Ligeia comes back in her body, permeating it with her own darker tones. A vivid image is again created here as darkness may signify the hopeless or sadness in the Rowena-narrator union. The narrator never loved Rowena (Benton and Richard P, 1971).
In essence, Poe compares light and darkness to give a symbol of the conflict existing between two philosophical backgrounds hence denoting time difference. As Ligeia mysteriously appears from Rhine, which is essentially a southwest Germany a river. Therefore, being German she signifies symbolically the Germanic Romantic ritual an aspect of time and in close relationship with Gothic which encompassed the fleshly as well as the ghostly. Ligeia’s cognizance is the pivot between irrational versus mystical and not actually the rational. As for Rowena, the cold lady is in essence an ice queen coming from the North therefore representing rationality. She symbolizes the soberness as well is coldness of the English empiricism which is a theoretical tradition founded on rational analysis, observation as well as calculation approaches.
As for Rowena, she suffers from the incarceration inside the Gothic nuptial chamber which appears dark besides being filled with many unusual beautifications. On the other hand, the storyteller conserves artificially Ligeia’s sensuality plus romanticism in the decorations and architecture of the chamber. Consequentially, Rowena is fearing both the wall hangings and red drops since they appear so imaginary. Symbolically, Rowena has died since she has been underprivileged of daylight and nature and in this case if the incongruous chamber is part of Rowena’s death we consider Ligeia as a symbolic coconspirator (Artač et al., 2008; Benton and Richard P, 1971).
Ligeia’s eventual triumph is her resurrection from her dead confirming that the storyteller has actually lost his rationality powers as well as touch with the reality. Critically, emphasis is laid on the untrustworthiness of the storyteller since he is under the influence of opium abuse. Edgar is laying less emphasis on the narrator’s senses quality as compared to the power of his hallucinations and not how he sees it in real sense. However, this may not mean that Poe underestimates the storyteller or maybe means for us to forthrightly trust his inexplicable and inconsistent concessions. Although, the reappearance of the narrator’s love at the end of the story be it opium induced or delusions or actually her real physical appearance indactes that she has transformed to be real in the narrator than just a reminiscence (Benton and Richard P, 1971).
The storyteller is actually under obsession of lost love, love which awakens contradictions. For example, the narrator is passionately in love with a woman minus knowing her surname even in marriage. But Poe perhaps intends this contradictions are just signs of love offering further the likelihood that it is love that brings back Ligeia if it means only in the narrator’s eyes. The strangeness of Ligeia’s eyes feasts figuratively to the storyteller’s eyes and if in any case Ligeia hides enormous knowledge behind these eyes we assume then that our narrator to some extent has inherited her eyes’ influence to conceive unnatural knowledge in seeing the dead. Through imagery however, the narrator is able to express his knowledge to us as his audience thus letting us be eye witness watching in our minds and judge the return of his love Ligeia from death (Gupta and Suman, 2012).
While the storyteller in ‘Ligeia battles to make it a love, the sort of Gothic imagery in which Poe is famous on shades ...