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POE’S VAMPIRE-LIKE WOMEN
Mariana Fagundes de Freitas
Abstract: In “Ligeia,” “Morella,” and “Berenice,” Poe presents three women that undergo mortal
deaths and supernatural rebirths. For that reason, they are considered vampires. This article aims to
discuss not these supernatural rebirths, but the vampire status of these three women, through different interpretations of the their death process and rebirth.
Keywords: death · rebirth · vampire
Resumo: Este artigo analisa os contos Ligeia, Morella e Berenice considerando a possibilidade de que
as figuras femininas apresentadas por Poe não são vampiras, apesar de sua experiência sobrenatural.
O propósito é investigar como os aspectos vampirescos que elas apresentam não as tornam vampiras, mas uma espécie sobrenatural de mortas.
Palavras-chave: morte · renascimento · vampira
Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella are three of Edgar Allan Poe’s horrific characters; they
have vampire-like traits that increase the supernatural tone in their respective tales. In the
eponymous tales, “Berenice,” “Morella,” and “Ligeia,” Poe is able to incorporate elements of
an emerging literary vampire tradition and foreshadow the birth of a type of female vampire that is both powerful and feminine. Besides incorporating some traditionally recognizable vampire traits, such as immortal charm, high level of attractiveness, and sex appeal,
these female figures are extremely well rounded women; they are brilliant, light spirited,
adventurous, possessing knowledge of all fields, and a peculiar interest in the occult and
the metaphysical world. As vampiric and scary as they might sound, Berenice, Ligeia, and
Morella are not vampires; they are actually victims of vampirism performed by their innocent-sounding male counterparts.
In “Berenice,” the narrator Egaeus describes Berenice as “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy”; he also says that in health she possessed unparalleled beauty. But he
only develops a desire for her when she becomes ill. He seems jealous of her health and
cheery disposition, as he is sickly and disturbed. He suffers from a malady that makes him
strangely distracted by everyday objects; they seem to put him in a state of trance. One of
these episodes happens when he glances at Berenice’s teeth after she has fallen ill. He sees
her as a changed being and her teeth set him in a state of trance and horror. Though, he
does not identify the reason why he is fascinated with her change or her teeth, it is indicated that he is repelled and attracted to her at the same time, however, this may simply be
one aspect of his strange disease.
As in “Berenice,” in “Ligeia,” the narrator makes a long, detailed description of her attributes. The narrator, Ligeia’s husband, describes her as beautiful. Her face has “the radiance of an opium-dream,” her exquisite beauty has some strangeness in its proportion, her
“raven-black hair” with “glossy,” “luxuriant” and “naturally-curling tresses,” her “sweet
mouth,” and “teeth glancing, with brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light
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which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of smiles.” He
says sometimes that her beauty appears to be beyond this world. She is either calm or in
tempestuous passion. She possesses knowledge of all fields. She guides him in the studies
of the metaphysical. He grows more engrossed in his studies and less involved with her
and she begins to wither away. She tried to resist her illness, “she wrestled with the
Shadow,” all in vain: she died a painful death. Before she passed, she had him utter some
verses she had composed that sound like a conjuring, or a spell, to come back in form of
“worm” and eat the flesh and blood of men. The husband is involved in her anguishing last
breaths and does not notice the contents of the verses. The second wife, Rowena, is as
beautiful and intellectually accomplished as Ligeia; however, they are physically different:
Rowena is blond, Ligeia a brown-haired woman. The husband knows he does not harvest
for Rowena the same affection he had for his first wife and he makes sure that she knows
it, which seems strange and cruel. She also becomes suddenly ill and begins to wither
away; but this turn of events does not distract him. The rebirth of the first wife through the
death of the second is to him unbelievable and frightening. And the first wife’s deathrebirth seems her deceptive resort to make her husband miss her and love her again. The
same theme is explored in “Morella.” This death-rebirth is described as a sneaky, obviously
feminine ploy. The women are described at the same time as a male fantasy, and as a threat
to the male ego, attractive because of their physical attributes and obvious beauty, threatening because of their remarkable intellectual capacities and supernatural abilities. Their
femininity is obscured by their uncommon, “male” brilliance, and that is in turn, seen as
one of their supernatural, evil traits.
As in “Ligeia,” intellectual prowess is also the bonding aspect in the relationship of
husband and wife in “Morella.” Morella has profound erudition, and becomes her husband’s tutor in studies of “forbidden pages,” as was Ligeia. She is beautiful and intelligent
and he longs for her to “place her cold hand upon” his. Among their subjects is the study
of the “principium individuationis,” the survival of identity after death. He quickly grows
tired of his bride and seemingly falls out of love for her, and after that, she begins to
wither. Before her death, she professes strange, revealing words: “I am dying, yet I shall
live.” (…) “The days have never been when thou couldst love me – but her whom in life
thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.” (…) “And when my spirit departs shall the
child live – thy child and mine, Morella’s.” In a strange reversal of events, Morella, while
dying, curses her husband’s future life with their child that is to be born in the moment of
her death. Her husband’s mention of her name brings her back. It seems that through will,
through her wish of fulfilling her “prophecy,” she is revived, becoming a horrific creature,
going against nature. Her spirit is passed on to her child, who he will love, and as the child
will somehow be her (or part of her), he will be forced to love her.
The narration in these three tales has a tone pertinent to its eerie theme, which is well
conveyed by the desperate, emotional, seemingly insane male narrator. Donald Barlow
Stauffer talks about the “half-hysterical, highly emotional style” Poe uses in “Ligeia” to create the instances of despair (maybe insanity) and rationality in the tone of the narrator,
lending him reliability and depth. The narrator gives a “naturalistic” sense to the rebirth in
his description, but according to Stauffer, that last paragraph has a style noticeably differ-
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ent from the other ones. It sounds like he just ends the story, and there is no intention at
all to maintain the fluency and the tone of the story. 1
The “hysterical” and “emotional” tone is especially felt in Egaeus’ account of Berenice’s
ailment and demise. In his essay “Poe and the Gothic”, Clark Griffith says that Poe’s take
on the dark, interiors of eighteenth-century fiction, suggests the interiors of the human
mind. “Berenice” is Poe’s first work in what Griffith calls “genuine new Gothic”. 2 Egaeus’
“mind’s eye” observes objects until they acquire “momentous significance,” this significance that Griffith speaks of, however, is only perceptible to Egaeus. This might indicate
that there is nothing peculiar with Berenice’s teeth, illness, or final rest.
The fact that there is some sense of hysteria and some sense of unreliability in these
narrators is commonly agreed upon, that they are victims of a female vampire, however, is
somewhat debatable. There is no mention of the word “vampire” within the story, and
there are no clear signs of this particular unnatural occurrence as there is no loss of energy
or life on the part of the male narrators being caused by these vampire-like women. Unlike
in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”, in which there is transference of vital energy to the painting
through the painter’s attempt to capture the woman’s essence, in these three stories the
women do not sustain their life, mortal or otherwise, through the consumption of energy or
blood of their supposed victims. The teeth are mentioned in “Berenice” and “Ligeia”, the
cold hands in “Morella” and “Ligeia”. Piercing eyes appear in all three stories, but that does
not put these three in the “living dead” category. In his discussion of Poe’s influence on
surrealist artists’ “images of women”. Robert J. Belton analyses Max Ernst’s 1935 “Berenice”. 3 Ernst’s oil on canvas can be considered an interpretation of Poe’s “Berenice”, it resembles another of his paintings, “Hunger Feast”, which, according to Belton, like Ernst’s
“Berenice”, presents a female praying mantis feasting on her male. The praying mantis is a
representation of the “ever-present danger in … relationships with women”. Belton, however, sees Ernst’s interpretation of Poe as a reversal, as in the painting a longhaired Berenice looks down on the corpse of her helpless male. In Poe’s tale, Egaeus looks down on
Berenice’s corpse, and in his last sickly act steels her teeth. In all three tales, it is the
woman who has the life sucked out of her; be it by grief, envy or want of affection, they all
succumb, while their male counterparts flourish.
A death/rebirth cycle in these stories deems Ligeia, Morella, and Berenice “living dead”,
just not of the blood or energy consuming type. In The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire
in Romantic Literature, James B. Twitchell contends that the vampire figure is used to “explain human interactions”, and in this setting “Berenice” and “Morella” would be examples
of “avaricious love”. 4 Morella wishes to be truly loved by her husband, maybe as much as
she loves him. Egaeus, in turn, acquires newfound desire for his cousin, after she becomes
ill, perhaps because then no one else will desire her. But Twitchell does not think Ligeia or
Morella are vampires; he calls Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella, Poe’s lamias. 5 Lamia is the
1
STAUFFER. Style and meaning in Ligeia and William Wilson, p. 118-19.
GRIFFITH. Poe and the Gothic, p. 128.
3
BELTON. Edgar Allan Poe and the surrealists’ image of women, p. 8-10.
4
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p. 5.
5
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p. 65-66.
2
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Greek version of Lilith, transformed into a child-eater. Twitchell considers her “the prototype of the Romantic seductress, acquiring, as the myth developed, an appetite for young
men”. 6 As lamias, Poe’s vampiric women are meant to love and leave them, but instead,
they love them and leave them disturbed, in Egaeus’ case more insane.
The three tales are told by male narrators, and according to Twitchell, they simply cannot be trusted “to tell the truth”. 7 These narrators suffer from “economy of sight”; they are
so involved in this imaginative ploy that they hide their unseemly obsession, they fail to
see, or just retell, what, in fact, occurred to them and their loved ones. 8 One of the most
noticeable signs of that is in “Ligeia”, when the narrator admits he thought Ligeia’s rebirth
to be simply an opium delirium. For Twitchell, the real vampire in “Ligeia” is the narrator
because he drenches the life energy from both his wives causing their disease and subsequent demise, though Rowena’s death brings forth the rebirth of Ligeia, according to our
opium-addict narrator. “Morella” tells of a woman very similar to Ligeia, who makes a connection with a man, who just like Ligeia’s husband sucks the life out of her, leading her to
a “life in death”. Differently from Ligeia, Morella births a child in her dying moment.
Twitchell describes a process for which vampirism works as a metaphor: “As love gets out
of control, as the rhythm is lost, one partner metaphorically starts to consume the other”. 9
This process of consuming love is described in these three stories; this might explain why
it is frequent that these women characters are called Poe’s female vampires. This is especially surprising because they are the ones “vampirized” by the narrators.
The “living dead” motif in these stories is greatly responsible for their supernatural
tone. For Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the “concept of living burial and its corollary
notion of ‘living dead’,” both ideas encountered in “Poe’s horror stories is in tune with the
gothic and the nineteenth-century aura. 10 One could say that the disease and slow death of
Poe’s women translate a life of living burial, a non-life, which could be considered a “living
dead”, supernatural existence, like that of vampire.
Through the vampiric figures of Berenice, Ligeia, and Morella, Edgar Allan Poe was
able to add a supernatural tone to the gothic theme of the frailty of life and fear of unavoidable mortal death. These three horrific female characters possess at the same time identifiable vampiric traits, desirable feminine attributes, and astounding intellectual capacity.
They surpass well-mannered appropriateness, and appear as a glimpse of future female
vampire figures, all the while being “living dead” creatures, but not vampires themselves.
Even though Ligeia, Morella, and Berenice have a mortal death and a supernatural rebirth,
they cannot be considered vampires, as they do not feed from the energy or blood of others
to sustain there undead existence. Another reason for them not being vampires is the fact
that they are the victims of “vampires” themselves in the figures of their husbands and
cousin that appear to drain their health and will to live.
6
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p. 40.
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p. 181.
8
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p.189.
9
TWITCHELL. The living dead, p. 167.
10
GILBERT; GUBAR. The madwoman in the attic, 620.
7
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Acesso em: 28 maio 2009.
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