Comparing Ligeia 'And The Fall Of The House Of Usher'

Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”

In Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” the poet depicts his beloved as a woman who lived only for love. “And this maiden she lived with no other thought/Than to love and be loved by me.” The gender representation of a female whose only role in life is that of a male’s companion was prominent in 19th century literature but is definitely not reflective of our experiences in the 21st century. In “Annabel Lee,” whether Poe personally felt this way or not, he paints a woman as shallow, childlike, and easily breakable. Another example from the poem that shows her fragility is “A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling my beautiful Annabel Lee…chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” Poe worships
her after she dies, and even lies by her grave, making it a shrine. This is not a true reflection of gender relationships in the modern world, unless, of course, the male suitor has mental illness, or the woman in question has no life outside of him, and that would be an anomaly today. Modern science shows that women are not as fragile as Poe would have his readers believe; women statistically live longer than men. Poe’s women are as delicate and fragile as eggshells. The speaker’s same unrealistic passionate fixation on a beautiful sickly woman occurs in “Ligeia.” Ligeia is flawless and endowed with goddess-like attributes.
Her eyes, specifically, capture him. “…subsequently to the period when Ligeia’s beauty passed in to my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived from many existences in the material world, a sentiment, such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs.” He goes on to see her eyes in the “commonest objects of the universe,” such as a butterfly, a stream of water, the ocean, and the falling of a meteor. (Is she real or a goddess?) The narrator says, “I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense – such as I have never known in a woman.” This woman shocks him that she is not the normal one-dimensional ignorant female, as females were often portrayed in 19th century American literature. As in most cases with Poe, she eventually dies, and he marries again. He cannot idolize the new wife, Rowena, though, and he becomes an opium addict to forget Ligeia. When Rowena dies, he is still thinking of Ligeia, and when he finds that Rowena is not really dead, and she emerges from her coffin, he sees that she has transformed into Ligeia. Here, again, Poe worships the ideal woman, always dead and always angelic. This recurrent obsession is not a reflection of modern experience in male/female relationships. In the modern world, we take a more practical earthly approach to romantic relationships.
Men do not typically idealize women as sheer perfection. But Poe’s heroines are celestial. They are not realistic. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher buries his counterpart (twin sister), Madeline Usher while she is alive, and in the end, she emerges from her coffin to fall upon him and frighten him to death. Poe often deals with doppelgangers, or two sides of the self, and the suggestion seems to be that Roderick is struggling with his female side, and so he buries it. When it comes back, he cannot deal with it, and he collapses in death. Perhaps the modern day application is that a man might do anything to rid himself of his inferior feminine side and so he tries to bury it and hide it from the world.