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Essay on Analysis of the end of "Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe"
Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia (1838) is a classical example of work of the highly complex genre known as American Romanticism and it demonstrates how Poe uses supernatural themes rather than more traditional, classical themes of 18th century literature in his writing, for example to describe Ligeia’s unusual beauty for which he has no words as he believes it to be too overwhelming to define.
The ending of the narrative tells of Rowena dying and apparently being resurrected during the night as the narrator watches and finally being transformed into the narrator's true love, Ligeia. The ending of Ligeia reads like a horror thriller, the revivification is bizarre, almost as if there is an alien presence amongst the narrator and Rowena, Rowena grows more and more ill, the narrator has visions of an angelic form and of the ruby drops that fall into Rowena's medicinal wine and also gives detailed attention to his experiences withe the body during the night of the transformation.
This experience is compounded of his longing for Ligeia and his dutiful and grisly attempts to assist in what appears to be Rowena's recovery. But until the last lines of the story, all of this is a mystery and even after the conclusion critics wonder just how much of the story is hallucination and have great difficulty in determining the narrator's motives. Though at the ending such questions remain in the readers mind: Does the narrator hallucinate only Ligeia's re-carnation? Does this hallucination result from his megalomaniac desire to conquer death or does the narrator grow to hate Rowena so much that he is driven to kill her in order to bring back Ligeia?......
