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Romanticism and "Ligeia"
One common interpretation of Poe’s “Ligeia” is as an exploration or even satire of the contrast between German Romanticism, represented by Ligeia, and two types of English Romanticism, embodied by the narrator and Rowena. Romanticism refers to a variety of different late-eighteenth– and early-nineteenth-century literary and artistic movements in Europe and North America. Although there were some regional differences, broadly speaking, Romanticism began as a reaction to philosophical and artistic movements known collectively as Neoclassicism. These movements prioritized order, logic, and structure, elements that epitomized the art and philosophy of classical Greek and Roman antiquity. Romanticism decried such elements as mechanical and stifling, focusing instead on intuition, emotion, and the natural world. They believed that art and poetry were intensely powerful, even prophetic, and the key to human freedom. Their interest in the intuitive and unconscious also led to a fascination with the supernatural and the occult, as well as all things that they considered exotic.
Mysterious Ligeia from the Rhine can be read as a representation of German Romanticism. A Proto-Romantic artistic movement, known as Sturm und Drang (or “Storm and Stress”), began in Germany in the late eighteenth century. Named after a 1776 play by Friedrich von Klinger, Sturm und Drang artists focused on the plight of the outcast against conventional society. One of the most influential novels of the Sturm und Drang was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a young man who commits suicide over unrequited love. Werther became a major influence on early German Romanticism. The first true iteration of Romanticism focused on creating a synthesis between the creative world and the scientific. They believed poets could hear the voice of nature and use it to create this unity. Later artists, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, abandoned this quest. They instead focused on the tension between the waking and the unconscious mind, the real and the supernatural, and the everyday world and the crazed projections of creativity. Critics who see Ligeia as emblematic of German Romanticism tie her to this later period, in all her emotive, philosophical, and supernaturally tinged beauty.
The narrator, who learns of the dark and occult from the German Romantic-inspired Ligeia, has a lot in common with some of the best-known writers of first generation of English Romanticism, such as Thomas de Quincey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like the German Romantics, these English Romantic writers were fascinated by the unconscious mind and the intuition. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, the collaborative volume he produced with Coleridge, Wordsworth describes creating poetry that results from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” rather than from formal, preconceived structures. Essayist Thomas de Quincey, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, developed a style he called “impassioned prose,” a prose with the intensity and music of poetry all the better to describe the emotional and visionary. Taken together, these English Romantics’ works are replete with Orientalist motifs, inspired by a romanticized and exoticized idea of the near and far East as a place of beauty and inspiration. The use of hallucinogenic opium imported from China both in and outside of their works combined these interests in the unconscious and the exotic.
However, the most popular English Romantic in Poe’s time was Sir Walter Scott, whose work is emblematic of Rowena. His fascination with Scotland’s history led to him write poetry that used Scottish regionalisms and folklore, such as in The Lady of the Lake (1810). He followed up these poetic successes by transitioning to novels, starting with Waverley (1814) and later Ivanhoe (1819). These novels made a romanticized version of Scotland and England’s past come alive. Scott transformed historical sources from his research into narratives, relying on his belief that while the times do change, humanity essentially does not. His work influenced later Romantic Nationalist artists because of the way it created a romanticized cultural memory rooted in the landscape. We can see how Rowena might reflect Scott’s work, with her clear and deeply historical Scottish lineage. In addition, her name may be a reference to a character from Ivanhoe.
