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The human mind is immensely powerful.
When alive, Ligeia is preoccupied with the idea of the will—that is, with her inner strength or strength of mind and spirit. She is incensed by the reality of human mortality, believing that it is unfair that creatures made in the image of God should have to die. She consistently states, “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will,” a quote attributed to the philosopher Joseph Glanvill, though likely invented by Poe himself. This mantra means that Ligeia believes that a powerful-enough mind with a powerful-enough will could defy even death. With this idea in mind, it seems possible that Ligeia brings herself back to life in Rowena through sheer strength of will. Several times Rowena appears to stir back to life then revert to death, indicating a struggle of Ligeia’s will against Rowena’s, in which Ligeia ultimately triumphs through the strength of her desire to thwart death.
Additionally, we can find this idea of the power of the mind in the narrator’s memorialization of Ligeia. He describes himself calling Ligeia’s name as if his longing for her could resurrect her. In his narration of the story, he describes Ligeia’s physical appearance and voice as if trying to resurrect her through his words. When he describes her voice as musical, he uses pairs of words that have a musical quality, such as “thrilling and enthralling” and “steadily and stealthily,” as if making her voice audible to the reader. In this light, it’s possible to interpret the narrator as asserting the power of his mind to bring Ligeia back. While it’s impossible to know whether Ligeia has truly returned through Rowena, what matters is that the narrator believes Ligeia has returned. If what he sees is a hallucination, his mind has become more powerful than reality. A resurrected Ligeia has become real to him, if only through the power of his memorialization.
Grief can be a kind of death.
Throughout the story, the narrator is mired in so much grief that it consumes his entire being. His obsession with Ligeia, with the dead, overtakes his life so that he can no longer truly live it. The narrator spends far more of the story describing Ligeia and her final days than reflecting on his more recent experience with Rowena. Even when describing Rowena, he immediately compares her to Ligeia. Her death never leaves his mind for a moment. After Ligeia dies, he uproots his life in Germany and moves to an abandoned abbey in England. The building’s religious origin infuses it with a sense of solemnity, and its state of disrepair implicitly links it to death. Furthermore, the narrator decorates the bridal chamber, which should be a site of rebirth and new life, in a way more akin to a tomb. It has sarcophagi, which are literal coffins, while the high vaulted ceilings, drapery, and censer seem like the decor of a memorial vault. The narrator’s world has become infused with death, which makes Rowena’s death seem almost as inevitable as their stillborn love. The narrator’s grief-induced addiction to opium also traps him in a kind of hallucinogenic dream, which, though not a literal death, does cause him to be dead to reality. With all this in mind, it’s clear that the narrator’s grief renders him powerless to move forward with his life.
The unknown and esoteric is more alluring than the conventional.
The narrator’s obsession with Ligeia and disdain for Rowena can be read as a comparison between two different types of beauty: one mysterious and one typical. The narrator’s clear preference for Ligeia thus proclaims the superiority of the unusual and esoteric. In addition to her study of the occult, Ligeia herself is a kind of puzzle. Her background is a complete mystery, with no clear family origins. The narrator evokes an exoticized and eroticized idea of the Middle East when discussing Ligeia’s beauty, comparing her profile to Ancient Judean medallions and describing her eyes as “gazelle eyes,” a phrase attributed to Arabic poetry. Because the European gaze on Asia tends to paint the diverse people, art, and cultures there as inscrutable and mysterious, these descriptions cast Ligeia in the same light. The narrator himself emphasizes the “strangeness” of Ligeia’s beauty, which makes it impossible to understand. This strangeness is epitomized by Ligeia’s eyes, which for the narrator are an unsolved riddle. He cannot fully understand Ligeia, which drives him mad with desire to understand her. His desire is piqued by this quest to unravel her.
Thus, despite Lady Rowena fulfilling a more conventional feminine ideal, the narrator has no love for her in part because there is no mystery to her. From the moment Rowena is introduced as the Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine, we see her lineage laid bare before us. She has not only a patronymic, Trevanion, but also her title and place of birth signal an established noble lineage and family. Although the narrator understands that she doesn’t love him and even fears him, he states that he “perceives” these attitudes, implying that Rowena attempts to suppress her disdain for him as opposed to acting in open rebellion or complaining. The implication is that Rowena is submissive and quiet, both of which were idealized feminine traits in the nineteenth century. Finally, her blonde hair and blue eyes embody the contemporary beauty standards. Everything about Rowena is typical and expected. With nothing to inspire his curiosity, the narrator considers her boring, an unsatisfactory replacement for his beloved Ligeia.
