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There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors;—but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow.
The narrator makes this comment not long after explaining how Ligeia falls ill. He’s impressed that despite Ligeia’s strong nature, she seems incredibly terrified of death. In describing her attitude toward death as fiercely resisting, and even saying that she wrestles with death, the narrator portrays Ligeia as treating death as an adversary to overcome. Her steeliness and strength, instead of insulating her from terror over mortality, seem instead to make her more frightened because it is a struggle she will ultimately lose.
O God! O Divine Father!—shall these things be undeviatingly so?—shall this Conqueror be not once unconquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee?
Ligeia shrieks these words after having the narrator read “The Conqueror Worm” aloud. She dies almost immediately after. Here, Ligeia complains of the unfairness that humankind, despite being created in the image of God according to Christian doctrine, is nevertheless doomed to die and become food for worms. Ligeia rails against the injustice she believes is part of death: the fact that creatures apparently closer to God in form are nonetheless conquered by worms and decay. Her sense that death is an injustice appears to fuel her anger and fear even more.
