Edgar Allan Poe’s feelings of abandonment is a theme that he visits often in his poetry and stories because he is unable to reconcile feelings of loss after losing his mother, his adopted mother, and his young wife. The image of his maternal loss is represented in the story “Ligeia” and the poem “The Raven.” Poe also lacked a strong paternal influence because his father left him and his adopted father was emotionally distant. Poe’s psychological tale of guilt “The Tell-Tale Heart,” addressed these father issues, as Poe kills off the father-figure as a means of dealing with his feelings of inadequacy. Throughout his literary career, Poe incorporated elements of his own life as a means of dealing with his own pain and abandonment issues.
Edgar Allan Poe’s mother died of consumption, when he was just three years old. In Daniel Hoffman’s Poe, Poe, Poe…, he writes that Poe actually was lying next to his mother when she died. Poe’s father abandoned the family, so losing his mother meant he was all alone in the world. All he was given from his mother was some of her letters and some sketches (Silverman 9). He was split up from his older brother and younger sister and sent to live with a rich couple in Richmond, Virginia.
One story that reflects the feelings of abandonment that plagued Poe is the story “Ligeia.” Kenneth Silverman in Edgar Allan Poe Mournful Never-ending Remembrance, notes that this is a psychologically complex tale and that Poe is unable to put the past to rest, which is a reoccurring plot Poe uses in his work (Silverman 140). In the story “Ligeia, the main character is obsessed with his first wife and places her on a pedestal. When she dies he remarries but resents his new wife Rowena. His discontent may have caused Rowena to become deathly ill and it his through Rowena’s death that he is haunted and then visited by his real love Lady Ligeia.
When the narrator introduces Ligeia he recalled that he could not remember her last name. Silverman called this a superficial amnesia because he goes onto recall and repeat many details of their shared life. Other critics like Hoffman think this amnesia is not an inability to remember, but an unwillingness to remember. “You knew the name well, too well for remembrance. You caused yourself to pretend it was forgotten” (Hoffman 247). His memory lapse is symbolic of repression. The narrator is only remembering the good parts of his marriage because the intensity of his love is blocking out all other details.
A feature in a lot of Poe’s work is the division of a story or poem into two distinct parts. The first part sets up the introduction of Ligeia. In recalling his love, the narrator used words such as “pure, perfection, exquisite beauty and faultless” (Poe 120). There is also a great deal of attention paid to Ligeia’s eyes. “Those eyes! Those large, those shining, those divine orbs!” (Poe 121). Poe is a little obsessed with eyes. We see it in other works like “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In this description, the narrator appears to be recalling her eyes while tripping out on opium. There is a reference to him using opium in the story, “I had become a boundless slave to the trammels of opium” (Poe 126). For the narrator to see eyes as giant orbs, comes across like he is in an altered state, perhaps a hallucination (Byers 43). Poe was known to be an alcoholic and addicted to drugs, so in his writing his female characters could be a manifestation of these hallucinogenic images he has stored away in his mind.
Once the narrator in “Ligeia” describes her physical beauty, he details her vast intellect. “I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense—such as I have never known in a woman” (Poe 122). She is the perfect woman in mind, body, and soul. She also adores her husband and bestows upon him an intense love.
For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the
overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confession? (Poe 124).
This recollection satisfied the narrator’s own ego of needing to be idolized by his one true love. The narrator has created a world where he is the king to his lady and that their love is exceptional.
His every thought seems consumed by remembering every line, detail, conversation the two shared as a married couple. His recalling of their life together starts to read as obsessive. According to a dictionary definition, obsession is “the domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, and desire” (www.dictionary.com). He is never able to forget Ligeia. She remains part of his waking soul, even after her death. “My memory flew back to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I reveled in recollection of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty ethereal nature, of her passionate idolatrous love” (Poe 127-128). He is unable to escape his own memory of her and of her love for him. For in the narrator’s mind nobody will be able to “idolize” him the way Ligeia did. It is as this point that his obsession takes on a new direction. According to critic Roy Basler, “Following her death, however, his obsession becomes an intense megalomania motivated by his will to restore her life to another body through a process of metempsychosis” (Basler 367).
After Ligeia passes away, the narrator remarries a woman named Rowena and even though he created a spectacular room for her, he slowly begins to resent her. “That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper—that she shunned me and loved me but little” (Poe 127). The narrator blamed his new wife for not loving him, yet he clearly does not love her. It’s not her fault, but his own guilt over losing the love of his life that prevents him from moving on. Consequently, Rowena became ill and started hearing things and seeing things in the chamber.
She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of which she then hard, but which I could not hear—of motions, which she then saw, but which I could not perceive (Poe 128).
Rowena becomes haunted by the memory and ghost of Ligeia. It’s not until Rowena is on the brink of death does the narrator see “ghostly” hints arise in the room. In the end, Rowena’s corpse becomes a vessel for Ligeia to return to her love. The narrator exclaims, “..can I never—can I never be mistaken these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the lady—of the Lady Ligeia” (Poe 134).
This last passage not only represents a wish fulfillment, but the repetition also symbolizes how scared the narrator is by the reemergence of Ligeia. He appears to be stammering, as one would by seeing a ghost. He gets what he wants in her return. Critics like Schroeter and Basler argue about the nature of the narrator’s mind in this final passage. Seeing a dead woman’s eyes in the corpse of your second wife is not normal. It does show the psychological breakdown of the narrator and clearly symbolizes his guilt for remarrying and trying to distance himself from his first love.
The death of Rowena is caused by the narrator’s unwillingness to let go of his first love and it’s his guilt that kills Rowena. He sacrificed Rowena in order to be reunited with his own true love. Basler also wrote that the narrator murdered Rowena because he was obsessed with his wife: “I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three, or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-coloured fluid” (Poe 131). Basler said this is evidence that the narrator poisoned Rowena in a hallucinogenic state (Basler 368). Poe does make reference to the narrator using opium; however, critics like James Schroeter reject this theory because upon a close reading of the text the narrator never states that he placed the drops in the goblet. No matter how you interpret this part of the story, it is clear that on a psychological level Rowena’s death is a wish fulfillment. The narrator wants her dead and longs for the return of his one and only true love.
There are distinct parallels between this story and the women in Poe’s life. According to Hoffman, Ligeia can be seen as the mother figure Poe had and lost at a very young age. Ligeia is an archetype for his mother. She is pure, loves passionately, and she is devoted and smart. Poe is also unable to get over his mother’s death, which is similar to the narrator in the story of “Ligeia.” “But children who lose a parent at an early age, as Edgar loses Eliza Poe, instead invest more feeling in and magnify the parents image” (Silverman 76). Silverman goes onto say that children who don’t find a replacement to transfer that parental love, don’t fully accept the parents death. Poe loved Fanny Allan, but not fully as one would a parent because she was often ill. In the story of “Ligeia,” Rowena represents Fanny Allan. He loves her, but truly wishes for his own mother’s return. Later on in his life, that guilt and inability to cope with maternal loss keeps getting transferred onto different females in his life.
But these hapless accidents of one miserable scrivener’s biography are in ‘Ligeia’ successfully mythologized, universalized, raised to the level of archetype…here he has imagined a condition of blessedness, its loss, the loser’s search for its recurrence in another love-object, the intensification of that love into hatred and longing for the lost love, and a final apotheosis in which the lost love seems to reappear. (Hoffman 261)
Poe’s time with his mother was so short, but intense enough that he feels guilty whenever he enters another relationship with another woman. His early abandonment is a theme in his writing. One can say that maybe it is a form of therapy to get his emotional grief out on paper. But it could also be a way of torturing himself, like Oedipus did when he realized he married his mother and killed his father. Oedipus blinds himself, so that he does not have to see the creature within himself. Poe keeps returning to the theme of abandonment as a way of reminding himself of what he does not have.
The narrative poem “The Raven,” is another example of Poe’s theme of abandonment, guilt and inability to forget the past. The student sits in a chamber, grieving the loss of his love Lenore. He believes he is hearing the spirit of Lenore at his window and is surprised to see a raven instead. The narrator thinks he will be reunited with his love, but the raven keeps telling him “nevermore” and thus begins the narrator’s descent into madness. The raven stays inside the room forever haunting him with the notion that he will never be reunited with his love again
The musicality to the poem is seen in a lot of repetition and alliteration, both add to the psychological tension in the poem. Some examples of the alliteration he uses are “doubting, dreaming, dreams” and repetition “nevermore, chamber door, Lenore, nothing more.” In psychoanalysis, repetition often represents an obsession. He is obsessed with the knowledge that he will no longer be reunited with his love Lenore. That’s why a lot of the repetition rhymes with “Lenore.” He cannot get that sound out of his head. “The throbbing repetition not only helps to render the student’s obsession with his loss and abandonment, and his struggle to keep sane” (Silverman 240). Silverman also points out the repetitive sounds serve as a means of self-torture, constantly reminding the student of his loss.
According to Edward Davidson in Poe: A Critical Study, the poem also shows degrees of emotion:
The poem is, therefore, a set of stages in the process of self-knowledge or the power of human consciousness to be aware not only of its being, but even of its non-being. Consciousness can be destroyed; but the destruction can itself become a deeper self-consciousness” (Davidson 89).
The narrator is already grieving and experiencing a degree of self-awareness by getting in touch with his emotions. His process is destroyed when the raven enters his consciousness and destroys his own desire to be reunited with Lenore. The raven represents his own guilt as part of his past and deeper consciousness. It is his guilt that is really speaking the word nevermore. For some reason, the narrator does not believe himself worthy of reuniting with Lenore in the after-life.
Going back to a characterization that Hoffman made in “Ligeia,” Poe once again draws on mythological imagery in describing a relationship. “..Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door” (Poe). Pallas, more commonly known as Athena, is the goddess of Wisdom. She also helped Odysseus get home in The Odyssey. It is strange that this bird who is tormenting the narrator is sitting on a statue that is supposed to guide a hero to the end of his journey. Perhaps the raven is not allowing the hero (the student) to journey after his love Lenore. He perches himself on the statue as a means of blocking his desire to be reunited with his love.
As the narrator questions the raven, he starts to take the bird more seriously and gets upset.
Wretch, I cried, they God hath lent thee-by these angels he has sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore
Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’ (Poe).
The narrator believes he is being persecuted by God and thinks that he can drink it all away. However, he cannot find solitude or comfort in alcohol. Drawing on parallels, Poe also used alcohol as a means of escaping his problems.
As the narrator slowly loses control, we see once again one of Poe’s narrators feel unworthy of the love of a woman. In the poem she is described as a “rare and radiant maiden,” and that she is “sainted.” Poe created these perfect virginal heroines and denied himself their love in a very masochistic way. In drawing parallels to Poe’s own life, “The Raven” could be about the loss of any number of the women in his life from his mother to his first wife. Silverman said that: “The Raven’ seems to illustrate Poe’s own irrepressible need to remember. There is no telling just how much Virginia’s progressive illness and his anticipation of her death figured into the poem, but the ‘bleak December’ perhaps recalls the other December when Eliza Poe dies…” (Silverman 241). Silverman states that the repetition in the poem can be seen as a means of self-torture. Perhaps, Poe constantly creating characters that lose their love is another means of self-torture. It could also be a way of dealing with the pain. Poe does not want to give up on these women, even though they have abandoned him. Also, as painful it is to remember them it is more painful to give them up