Ligeia

3 Pages 777 Words

A short story written by Edgar Allan Poe which fuses the themes of transcendence and lost love is "Ligeia,”. The narrator of this story meets and marries a woman of exquisite beauty--a woman named Ligeia. To the narrator, she is the perfect woman. She possesses classical beauty, expanded intellect, and spiritual purity. The narrator describes at length the strange attributes of this woman Ligeia--her raven-black hair; her low, musical voice; her ivory skin, lofty forehead; her delicate nose and radiant smile. However, Ligeia's most striking feature was the presence of her dark, large eyes, which the narrator is obsessed with. He seems to exert quite a bit of emotion when describing her eyes. By reading this story, you would realize that her eyes were the things that fascinated the narrator the most about Ligeia. The narrator describes his beautiful spouse almost like a ghost: "She came and departed as a shadow." He also thinks her beauty, more specifically her eyes, as a "!
strange mystery." Her eyes make her seem unreal or superhuman because of her large "expressive" eyes that the narrator cannot explain except that they are "far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race."
Ligeia's unusual beauty represents a reoccurring theme throughout the story. The text portrays a rejection of the features that society would call "ordinary" beauty. One example of this is how Poe repeatedly points out how flaws in the classical appearance of Rowena, "the fair-haired, the blue-eyed," by comparing her to Ligeia whose "features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen." Poe explains through the narrator how more exalted and meaningful Ligeia's beauty is specifically because she exhibits more natural features instead of the classical features. The rejection of the classical beauty and the welcoming of the unusual, mysterious beauty indicates Poe's bias towards Romanti...