Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
William Crisman
Poe Studies, Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, 2005, pp. 64-75 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/poe.2005.0004
Access provided by University of Athens (or National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) (9 Apr 2015 08:30 GMT)
William Crisman
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herself is simply a visual aid to confirm the deduction. The pride of natures work is a taxonomic
type specimen that has worth and majesty,
but no particular beauty or brains described in
human terms.
As in Ligeia,the result of this overanalysis is
to turn Helen into a scatter of references in which
she herself gets lost, during her second appearance in act 5:
0,thou art fairer than the evenings air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flamingJupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
in wanton Arethusas azure arms.
(5.1.109-1 4)
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Notes
James W. Gargano takes the speaker as a straightforward Faust, like many other romantic heroes . . .
in his agonized search for an ideal fulfillment (Poes
Ligeia: Dream and Destruction, Colkge English 23
[1962]: 338). Jules Zanger emphasizes the anti-Faust
aspect: the speaker is essentiallypassive rather than active (Poe and the Theme of Forbidden Knowledge,
Ammcan Literature 49 [1978]: 534-35; also see Grace
McEntee, Remembering Ligeia, Studies in Ammcan
Fiction 20 [ 19921: 79). Difficult as well to reconcile with
a positive Faust figure are the phases of numbness or
paralysis that readers detect, which seem counter to
the general expansiveness of desires in Fausts from the
chapbooks to Goethe. See Terry Heller, The Delights of
T m w : An Aesthetics ofthe Tate of Terror (Urbana: Univ. of
Illinois Press, 1987), 122; and G. R. Thompson, Poei
Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (Madison: Univ.
of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 104.
The derivation of Ligeias name from that of a
siren putatively in The odyssey (through Virgil to Milton)
has been proposed so many times as to make Kent P.
Ljungquist weary (Poe,in A m c a n Literary Scholarship:
An Annual, 1995 [Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997],41).
In addition to the sources Ljungquist cites, see Richard
C. Frushell, PoesName Ligeiaand Milton,American
Notes and Qumies 11 (1998): 18-20; for an extensive attempt to understand Ligeia as a siren, see Daryl E.Jones,
PoesSiren: Character and Meaning in Ligeia,Studies
in ShortFictirm20 (1983): 33-37. Frushell iswise to assign
Poes awareness of the names classical provenance to
Poes reading of Milton-the classical references themselves, consisting as they do of a roundabout through the
twelfthtentury commentator Bishop Eustathius, are too
hard for Poe (and perhaps Frushell). On other derivations of Ligeiasname from the ancients, see the case for
Lilith in LindaJ. Holland-Toll,Ligeia:The Facts in the
Case, Studies in Weird Fiction 21 (1997): 14; and Beverly
A. Hume, The Madness of Art and Science in Poes
Ligeia, Essays in Arts and Sciences24 (1995): 23. And see
the case for Lazarus in Paul John Eakin, PoesSense of
an Ending, A m c a n Literature45 (1973): 1213.
Beyond Homer, classical sources for Helen,
such as Euripides eponymous play or his many other
plays that refer to Helen, appear very unlikely. Donald
B. Stauffers essay The Classical Erudition of Edgar
Allan Poe, in Perspectives on P o , ed. D. Ramakrishna
(New Delhi: AFC Publications, 1996), 203-12, contains
no reference to any such source. To the extent that
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l2 Much of the interest in Poes significant numbers comes from his devotion to cryptography, on which
John T.Irwin has written extensively. See, for instance,
Reading Poes Mind: Politics, Mathematics, and the
Association of Ideas in Murders in the Rue Morgue,
A m c a n Literary History 4 (1992): 187-206.
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Romontu Faily T&: seedc of Sumalism, trans. Mary B. Corc o r n (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1964). Many
of the speech-interdiction tales Thalmann discussesare
translated in Thomas Carlyle's Getmun Romanu (1827),
which critics almost universally agree Poe had read.
26 Intended isJones,
"Poe's Siren."