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Essay on Analysis the end of Ligeia
From the time that Ligeia was written, critics have searched for meaning within Poe's story of a beautiful woman who died and returned in another's body. Many critics have looked to Poe's relationship with women for understanding, combining biographical and feminist theory, while other critics use a variety of approaches, such as formalism and psychoanalysis, to develop their own understanding of what they believe to be an allegory. Ligeia, who seems so perfectly constructed, so delightfully real in force and power, is thus revealed as a construct of the narrator's mind.
From the very beginning, he was making her up as he went along, forming her out of bits and pieces of idealized Woman. Just as his abbey is the physical collection of the artifacts of many cultures, a room made up of disparate elements representing his fractured psyche, Ligeia is a mental collection of the beauties and ideals of those same cultures.
Stop for a moment and try to imagine Oriental eyes and a Hebraic nose. Like many other things in Ligeia, it is a strange mixture. Ligeia could not have been a real woman she could only be the symbol of idealized Woman, serving as the phantom inspiration who hovers over the narrator's shoulder in the dead of night, whispering his madness in recital lines of poetry and perfect art. We can see that power flows both ways between Ligeia and the narrator between the male artist seeking escape into the dream world of creativity and his female muse, who provides just the required opening.
The narrator, a double of both Ligeia and Rowena, has for most of the narrative been a double-sided mirror caught between two distinct mirrors. One facet of his life has to die to give the other free reign. As the narrator is quite unable, or unwilling, to join the ranks of the real, he murders the physical representation of that world, thus killing that part of himself......
