As the story progresses, Ligeia’s amorphousness becomes another amorphous figure of death-in-life, a malignantly corporeal ghost whose possession of Rowena collapses the matter-spirit distinction. The parasitic Ligeia becomes one with Rowena, body and mind melting together in a Schellingian dissolution into Absolute unity. Ligeia’s incorporeal soul takes on hideously material form, undermining substance dualism and producing a ‘tumult unappeasable’ in the mind of the narrator: not only do two people fuse into one, undermining the idea of a coherent, individualised subject, Ligeia casts off ‘the fetters of death’ to become an enshrouded ‘thing’, performing a ‘hideous drama of revivification’ filled with ‘unspeakable horrors’ (p. 134). So horrific and yet repetitious are the changes undergone by Rowena’s corpse as it incubates its monstrously material parasite that Poe’s narrator ultimately elides the details in order to ‘hurry to a conclusion’ (p. 134), leaving segments of the text literally unspeakable and lending Ligeia’s strange performance a hysterical, macabre element of farce, mocking the normally sacrosanct border of death.
Though silent throughout the story, Ligeia achieves a kind of agency by its end. By violating the fair-haired, angelically submissive Lady Rowena, Ligeia exhibits a will to live and a ‘passionate… idolatrous love’ (p. 131) that reveals itself as an all-consuming and irrepressible force, the very ‘extremity of horror’ (p. 134). While this horror depends in part on a patriarchal system that imagines femininity and female desire as Other and even inhuman, the contaminating quality of Ligeia’s manifestation hints at the primordial, metamorphic unity Poe suggests in Eureka that the cosmos will disintegrate into, a unity in which all individuality, all distinctions, are lost. Once again, our glimpse of this unity is provided through the vexed, putrefying body of Ligeia and later Rowena through a panoply of symptoms – first of disease, then of Ligeia’s demoniac possession of her husband’s new bride.
‘Ligeia’ does more than simply reiterate the same ideas as ‘Morella’. First, the story is longer, allowing Poe to better develop a sense of suspense and dizzying downward progression, what – to utilise terms put forth by Kelly Hurley – could be termed an ‘entropic’ plot. For Hurley ‘entropic plotting – which bears rough similarities to tragic plotting’ concerns the breakdown of complexity and the undoing of forward-moving concepts of progress, a narrative unravelling linked to sensations of nausea.53 ‘Ligeia’ is structured around a series of breakdowns and resuscitations, the narrator obsessively charting the decay first of Ligeia and then of Rowena, noting with increasing density and intensity of description every shrivelling or tremor of the lips and each paling or flush of the cheeks with mounting disgust. He observes with nauseated fascination as ‘a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of [Rowena’s] body’ (p. 134), death-in-life made flesh as Ligeia’s vampiric spirit materialises. The story devolves into a series of symptoms, shudders and paroxysms intermingling with morbidly detailed descriptions of body parts and subtle changes and fluctuations, breaking into a kind of narrative hysteria. In this way, Poe’s narrative strategy mirrors the content of ‘Ligeia’, conventional narration decaying into indifferentiation in a giddy onrush towards the churning ontological chaos of the Absolute.
‘Ligeia’ also includes representations of aesthetic objects – the elaborately refurbished abbey the narrator purchases following Ligeia’s death, and the embedded poem ‘The Conqueror Worm’, originally published independently by Poe in Graham’s Magazine in 1843 but later added to the text of ‘Ligeia’ in 1845. The poem, which in the story is penned by Ligeia herself and constitutes the only words of her own that we read, wildly raves of ‘vast formless things’ acting as puppeteers of mimes performing a play on stage set to ‘the music of the spheres’, and above all of ‘a blood-red thing’ writhing forth to devour the players. At the poem’s end the play is described as a ‘tragedy, “Man”’, and the Conqueror Worm deemed its only hero (p. 130). Elena Anastasaki has recently argued that while embedded poems like the one used in ‘Ligeia’ might seem to threaten the much vaunted unity of effect so prized by Poe, in fact ‘The Conqueror Worm’ is invested with a crucial aesthetic and narrative significance. She points out that the poem allows Poe to communicate to the reader more than prose can accommodate, noting that poetry ‘is presented as conveying a higher form of Truth, one that bypasses both the unreliability of the narrator and the limitations of the rationality of prose’.54 In this sense the relationship between ‘The Conqueror Worm’ and ‘Ligeia’ mimics the relationship between philosophy and art described by Schelling.
‘The Conqueror Worm’ begins when the narrator, his brain reeling from the ‘wild meaning’ of Ligeia’s words (p. 129), claims himself unable to continue his account, insisting that he has ‘no utterance capable of expressing’ Ligeia’s strange suggestions (p. 130): we have approached a limit of thought and articulation, a limit that ‘The Conqueror Worm’ is about to transgress. The poem is remote from the narrative and even from linear time; it turns our mind to the scale of the universe, its beginning and ending, and our place within it. The ‘vast, formless things’ that lurk behind the shifting scenery suggest a hidden world beyond ordinary comprehension, obfuscated from our sight, which the irruption of the worm unveils. In addition to foreshadowing Ligeia’s now imminent death and eventual revivification, the poem’s deployment of disgust through the figure of the gore-smeared, vermin-fanged worm, a revolting ‘thing’ that transforms the stage curtain into ‘a funeral pall’ that ‘comes down with the rush of a storm’ (p. 130), serves as another instance of death infecting life, of inevitable putrefaction and the triumph of indifferentiation. The worm, ‘a crawling shape’ which intrudes into the ‘motley drama’ and transforms it into a tragedy ‘of Madness’, ‘Sin’ and ‘Horror, the soul of the plot’ (p. 130), bursts into the angelic theatre of the poem’s beginning, a symbol of victorious decay.
In this sense the poem functions as a microcosmic example of Schellingian tragedy. Schelling singles out tragic drama as particularly well suited to approach the Absolute, for tragedy produces a kind of sublime experience in which collisions between freedom (the power of the subject) and fate (the power of nature, the world-without-us) are dramatised. For Schelling, ‘the view of the universe as chaos… is the basic view of the sublime to the extent that within it everything is comprehended as unity in Absolute identity’. Schelling writes that the mythology revealed by tragedy, and some forms of poetry, ‘is nothing other than the universe in its higher manifestation, in its absolute form, the true universe in itself, image or symbol of life and of wondrous chaos in the divine imagination’.55 Like a profane but all-powerful divine being, the worm disrupts the world of appearances and presentation, the phenomenal world, and, with totalising power, consumes the ‘mimes’ who cavort on the stage. After hearing the poem recited aloud, Ligeia recoils in horror, wondering whether human beings are ‘not part and parcel in [God]’ and pondering ‘the mysteries of the will’ (p. 130), perceiving, in a flash of poetic insight imbued with horror and revulsion, a pantheistic oneness encompassing all things.
Thacker notes that usually when we think of the world, we think of it as the ‘world-for-us’, an anthropocentric