Poe devotes a peculiar amount of time to human description in both “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (I confess I haven’t finished the rest of the reading yet, so I can’t talk about how his other stories compare). The manner in which he portrays his characters is, I believe, telling.
Both Ligeia and Roderick Usher are a strange combination of beautiful and deathly. Ligeia comes across as a living corpse even before she actually succumbs to that very transformation: Poe describes her from the start as one whose skin “[rivals] the purest ivory”– not unlike a corpse (645). He does find her “exquisite”, “faultless”, “divine” and in that sense classically beautiful, and yet “she [comes] and [departs] like a shadow” at the same time (645). She is ghostly, surreal, from the very beginning.
In Roderick Usher too, Poe finds beauty in decay. He describes his friend as one with “a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model… a finely moulded chin” (656). Here, too, Poe begins with a deathly man, and finishes with a perfectly sculptured face.
Poe gives himself away in his descriptions: his ability, or his tendency, to find beauty in death, death in beauty, extends to the other aspects of his stories as well. I would go so far as to say that the more dramatic, obvious elements of horror in his stories share their roots with his descriptions. Just as we get a jolt from Usher’s cry, “I tell you that she now stands without the door!” so Poe finds a similar excitement in the pallor of impending death (666). And are we not all curious about death, Poe included? Are we not desperate for answers about loved ones whom we've lost? Poe, subtly through his descriptions and less subtly through his climaxes, plays with the concept of an inherent attraction to death– and argues that we are not so repulsed by it as we might claim.
I'm really glad someone decided to post on Poe's physical descriptions because I found them intriguing but I couldn't piece together a coherent analysis or comment on them. I was especially interested in Poe's eye imagery, which we see in the two stories you've mentioned as well as "The Man of the Crowd" which David posted about and "The Tell-Tale Heart" with the old man's pale blue eye. I really like how you've extrapolated Poe's descriptive style into a commentary on his obsession or interest in death, and I think this can be extended to the grotesque and horrifying in general. In "The Man of the Crowd," the narrator becomes obsessed with a man who he compares to Retzch's "pictural incarnations of the fiend" (684). While I'm not sure I've found this obsession with the grotesque in all the stories, I think it's a really interesting lens through which to reread them and it might color my comments in class tomorrow.
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