I need a summary on the short story Legeia as soon as possible!!! pleas help me my life dependes on it!!!!!

-- Anonymous, August 29, 2002

Answers

Please try to post as soon as possible. I know the stories and style might seem a little dense by today's blunt standards, but try to read them keeping in mind the long sections on philosophy and atmosphere can be separated temporarily from the barebones plot which embodies the ideas anyway. Thanks to Poe's unity of effect you need not worry overmuch about getting every single reference, idea or detail.

Simply put, as in Wuthering Heights, you have two fated lovers. His first wife dies, one whose will and memory denies death and separation. Possessed by her undying memory he marries a second wife in a new lugubrious place, not out of love but rather as a ritual reenactment for which the new wife will be sacrificed to bring Ligeia back.(See "Morella"). The unholy, cultic process, the madness and horror of the possession swallow up the narrator as well.

Poe considered it as perhaps his best story, possibly for its language and artistry, possibly because it embodied his own experience(none too happy)with death and the haunting return of the deceased.

-- Anonymous, September 05, 2002

here we are 2 years later, tell us (the world) how things went.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 2004