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Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams.
Here the narrator begins his description of how he decided to decorate his new English abbey, which he moves into after Ligeia’s death. He has decorated the residence in an elaborate Gothic style. He describes himself as choosing the decor while under the influence of opium, giving the space a hallucinatory quality. The style of everything is elaborate and luxurious, but also discordant and irregular.
The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device.
This quotation comes from the beginning of the narrator’s description of Rowena’s bridal chamber. The lofty, high vaulted ceilings and the evocation of Gothic architecture suggests a dark, frightening church-like room. However, some scholars have read the vaulted ceiling as more reminiscent of a family vault where the dead are laid to rest. The ceiling is carved with a motif that partially evokes the Druids, pre-Roman pagan inhabitants of England who are often represented in literature as practitioners of magic. The room is not only huge, and dark, but occult references are embedded in its very ceiling.
In each of the angles of the chamber, stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.
This quotation comes from the narrator’s extended description of Rowena’s bridal chamber. On top of the already dark and frightening room, the narrator has placed multiple Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi in the corners. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans and Europeans were fascinated by Ancient Egypt, linking what they saw as a land of curses and magic to the occult. In addition to these esoteric connotations, sarcophagi are literal coffins. Thus, this detail emphasizes how unsettling and tomb-like Rowena’s room is.
The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.
This quotation comes toward the end of the narrator’s description of Rowena’s bridal chamber. Here he explains how the already ghastly golden curtains, embroidered with depictions of werewolves, are made even more terrifying by a draft blowing the curtains around. The constant movement of the ghostly curtains gives the room a nightmarish and “phantasmagoric” feel. Not only is Rowena’s room tomb-like, dark, and full of occult imagery, but it’s apparently drafty and likely cold.
