Edgar Allan Poes Personality and Inner Character Through the Revelation of His Anima - Research Paper Example

The 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe is well-known to contemporary audiences as both the master of the short story and the master of horror, but he is often studied for the psychological aspects of his writing and what it reveals about himself. His stories appeal to the reader’s psychological demons as a means of instilling a sense of terror unreachable through more mundane physical descriptions. These stories were born out of a life of repeated disconnection from his fellow man and an overriding sense of despair on his own. Most people generally aware of his life story realize that he was orphaned at a very young age and was never able to achieve any sense of connection to his foster parents, the Allans. The author is also famous for his marriage to a young girl. At the age of 27, Poe decided to marry his 13-year-old cousin Virginia, the only girl he ever truly loved and who tragically died while still considered a young girl. Contributing both to his despair and his alienation from his foster father, Poe is known to have also engaged in a number of poor personal habits such as drinking, gambling and using opium, perhaps even as an addict. Despite these issues, he was able to find early commercial success as a writer. He published his first book of poems at the age of 19 and began publishing his short stories by the age of 23. Unfortunately, though, he never achieved the kind of financial success he felt his innovation and talent were entitled to and he remained a mostly disillusioned and miserable man through most of his life. Setting the rules for the art of the short story he’d brought into popularity, Poe said “If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (Mowery, 1997). Like many writers, though, Poe wrote of what he was most intimately familiar with, in this case his own inner demons, and his stories were thus themed primarily around the concepts of sorrow and loss. By examining works such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Ligeia,” one begins to understand much about the author’s personality and inner character through the revelation of his anima. The term anima was introduced by Carl Jung’s work on dream analysis as a means of understanding the psyche on a different level than what had been proposed by Sigmund Freud. According to Neumann (1954), “the Anima is the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies within a man, the archetypal feminine symbolism within a man’s unconscious.” According to Jung, every man has within him elements of the female, often buried under varying layers of male stereotyped conceptions. In spite of how ‘male’ or ‘macho’ the individual might be, according to this theory, there is always a hint of the ‘feminine’ within him which is comprised of the ‘softer’ ideals more often associated with the stereotypical female. The anima is that internal element of the man that permits him to cry when things are bad, that finds joy in cooking for his family or is able to nurture a hurt child. The opposite of the Anima is the Animus, which can be thought of as the male inside the female. “In dreams Jung said that the Animus is more likely to be personified by multiple male figures, while the anima is frequently a single female” (Neumann, 1954). The anima and the animus are considered essential to the individual if they are ever to be able to form an understanding with the opposite sex. In other words, a man must be in touch with his anima if he is ever to be able to relate to a woman at the same time that the woman must be in touch with her animus to make a connection with the man. Within the characters of Ligeia and Madeline, among others, Poe seems to be constantly in search of this anima as the missing element in his life, preventing him from establishing meaningful connections with others. Within the short story “Ligeia,” the title character symbolizes an idolatrous love pushed into the realm of obsession and revealing Poe’s constant yet unsuccessful attempt to define himself, to find his anima. The character is established as a captivating mystery by the way in which she is described as well as the narrator’s admission that he didn’t know almost anything about his wife. “I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia … I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed” (Poe, 23). This admission of her unfamiliarity reveals a deep rift within the author that occurred when he was too small to remember the details. Poe selected the name for this character from ancient Greek myth in which it appeared as the name of one of the sirens who lured sailors to their deaths on the sharp rocks of their island by singing to them (Campbell, 2007). It is possible that Poe feared pursuing his tempting internal feminine as a course of great destruction. This interpretation of fear is reinforced by the way Poe describes Ligeia who quickly adopts almost super-human qualities. Her relationship with the Greek siren who is her namesake is made clearer by her physical description as she appears like the ancient Greek statues of the perfect female form. She has alabaster skin similar to marble, larger than ordinary eyes and the “dear music of her low, sweet voice” (Poe, 24), all of which are intended to make her seem the immortal goddess herself. The central clue that Ligeia is the representation of Poe’s anima is discovered in the depth of her education and ability to employ her intelligence. This characteristic alone places her beyond the scope of ordinary women Poe would have encountered in his lifetime to the same degree that Ligeia’s incredible inner passion is contrasted against the outward calm of a well-bred lady. “Like one of those angelic women, cut from the romantic poems, Ligeia is the epitome of physical beauty and cunning intelligence. A true ‘femme fatale’ whom Poe mystifies” (de Mancelos, 1997). Not able to fully accept her as a part of himself and yet not able to fully reject her either, Poe reveals that the love discovered in Ligeia is not the motherly love of a companion and friend but is rather a passion-filled possession. This again is a sign that she is the anima as Poe struggled to possess himself. As the storyline continues, the indestructible Ligeia dies after suffering a form of wasting illness such as that which killed Poe’s real-life wife, but Ligeia is never permitted to fully die. Poe characterizes his visions as madness as the memory of Ligeia becomes an important part of the narrator’s concept of self. This is almost a perfect representation of the concept of anima yet taken somewhat to extremes. Rather than simply being able to internalize her, the narrator worships the figure of his dead wife, which “passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine” (Poe, 26). This passionate, possessive affection between the characters is equally shared as Ligeia is described on her deathbed, “For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out her before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry” (Poe, 29). It is only when they are together as anima and animus that the narrator and Ligeia are able to comprise the one soul of a well-rounded person (Cummings, 2005). It is as anima that Poe allows Ligeia to circumvent death and return to her husband. After killing her off in his mind, he discovered that she still survived and must be dealt with. This strength of connection leads directly to the final scene, in which Ligeia is reanimated by transforming the body of Rowena to that of Ligeia. It is “the vengeance of the former wife over the second one. An improbable and exquisite punishment … by which Ligeia enters and possesses Rowena’s body, to impose herself on her husband” (de Mancelos, 1997). This gives the sense of the anima again as Ligeia exists within the mind rather than actually walking around in her own skin. This character is highly comparable to the female character revealed in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Like Ligeia, Madeline is described as the second half of a main character, this time the host Roderick. Although she hasn’t yet been seen in the story, Roderick indicates her importance to his being when he tells the narrator, “her decease … would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers” (Poe, 47) even as it is indicated that she has been Roderick’s only companion for years. However, like Ligeia, Madeline is also the victim of a mysterious wasting illness that is certain to end her life in a matter of days. The connection between Madeline and Roderick is made explicit in the general similarities of their features as it is revealed that the two had been twins, again suggesting the concept of anima and animus as one cannot exist without the other (Buranelli, 1977). However, Madeline dies while Roderick still lives much like the narrator in Ligeia is forced to continue living without the beloved wife that had become such an integral part of his soul. While the narrator remains largely unaware of what is occurring in the lady’s tomb during the next few days, Roderick seems to have been sharply aware that his sister, who has died in physical form, is somehow still not dead at all. As the narrator begins to hear strange noises during his final night at the house, he finally begins to hear the words that Roderick is uttering: “Not hear it? – yes, I hear it, and have heart it. Long – long – long – many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it – yet I dared not – oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! – I dared not – I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! … I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin” (Poe, 60). As Madeline finally enters into the room fully, at the same time finally entering into the story fully, she appears in the doorway with “blood upon her white robes and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame” (Poe, 60). Only after she has fallen upon her brother and “bore him to the floor a corpse” (Poe, 60) is she finally able to rest in peace, pulling the rest of the House of Usher down with her into the tarn on which it stands. It is in the nature of their relationship that Roderick and Madeline are different from the narrator and Ligeia. While both men are obsessed with their respective ladies, perfectly aware that they cannot survive without them, the narrator of Ligeia seems finally at peace thanks to his reunion with his first wife while Roderick is taken into his death. The narrator of Ligeia is able to gain sustenance and happiness from his first wife for as long as she is healthy and well, but Roderick seems to lose strength in the presence of his sister, as if she is draining the life-force from him. In fact, “The Fall of the House of Usher” has often been interpreted as a vampire story in which Madeline feeds off of her brother until he is no longer strong enough to support her need. In addition, Ligeia is a visible creature, described in all her beauty and natural graces, including her unusual features of education and willfulness while Madeline is little more than a background idea through much of the story. Her first appearance is as a ghostlike wraith moving through a distant room in the shadows upon the first night of the narrator’s arrival and then she takes to her death-bed, not to appear again until the day of her burial. Supernatural efforts are involved in both girls’ deaths as Ligeia’s seems to unleash unseen shadows through the room the narrator once shared with her that become substantial enough to drop some liquid into Rowena’s drink that presumably enables Ligeia to return. Madeline is entombed within an unusually fortified resting place and, although she was buried following a wasting disease and, according to Roderick, begins with feeble movements inside her coffin, she somehow gains the necessary strength to throw off her encasements and come after her brother without having received any sustenance or even air in the intervening days since she was buried. In both cases, neither the supernatural female nor the man with whom she is most closely associated is able to find any peace until they are reunited in some way – one for life and the other in death. In both of these female characters, Poe reveals his anima. She is obsessive and relentless in her pursuit of knowledge and a sense of connection. When denied, she is angry and vengeful, such as Madeline who was denied her masculine side, but cannot be denied. This is exactly what Jung indicated was the tendency of the anima/animus. When it is denied, it manages to express itself in unexpected and sometimes unpleasant ways that can be frightening or can serve to devour the soul in its unfulfilled desires. Yet when she is permitted to integrate, Poe illustrates his fear that she will completely overcome as Ligeia is first named for the Greek sirens that purposely lured sailors to their doom and then proves to be more intelligent and to have higher education than the narrator himself. In this, she is just as threatening as the mysterious Madeline. Through these characters, Poe also acknowledges that the anima is supernatural in that it cannot be killed unless her death is also accompanied with the death of the man. His pursuit of the anima is thus his pursuit of these women as he attempts to find a deeper understanding of himself and a sense of fulfillment and connection to the world that had somehow evaded him. References Buranelli, Vincent. (1977). Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Campbell, Mike. (2008). “Ligeia.” Behind the Name. Available October 22, 2009 from Cummings, Michael J. (2005). “Ligeia: A Study Guide.” Cummings’ Study Guides. Available October 22, 2009 from de Mancelos, Joao. (1997). “How to Murder a Young and Beautiful Woman: Death in Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Tales.” Alfarrabio. Mowery, Carl. (1997). “An Overview to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Short Stories for Students. Gale Research. Available October 22, 2009 from Neumann, Erich. (1954). The Origins and History of Consciousness. Princeton University Press. Poe, Edgar Allan. (2003). Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Aerie Books. Read More