ABSTRACT
Controversialists in the learned journals have savaged one another over such questions as whether “Ligeia” is a tale of vampirism or a story of transmigration of souls. Deep as is his love for Ligeia, deeper still is a certain knowledge she possesses and represents to her adoring husband. Ligeia’s husband comes closer than did the mariner to defining that forbidden secret, since he has taken a cram course from his wife. Ligeia, as everyone knows, comes back to this life again, taking over—quel frisson—the body, the very corpse, of her husband’s second wife. When Rowena is on her deathbed she arises and totters into the center of the chamber, looking, breathing, seeming for the entire world like the Lady Ligeia. Erotic interest is all but completely censored, is quite subsumed in Ligeia’s metaphysics. Despite the one allusion to her “stern passion,” there is no physical contact mentioned in either of Narrator’s “marriages.”
