WRITING THE BODY: LITERATURE

EDGAR ALLAN POE'S "LIGEIA"

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Writing the Body in Literature

In literature, writing the body generally requires the reader to use her imagination. Indeed, drawings or pictures take away from the imaginative experience, providing the reader with someone else's conception of the word description and robbing the reader of what is otherwise a very personal relationsip with the text. Therefore, in purely textual literature, one is afforded the opportunity to experience a double form of agency. First, there is the author's written words describing a body and various readings of that body by other characters. Second, the reader, through her imagination, writes a tripartite reaction: the body being presented, the reactions by other characters, and the reader's own perceptions of what is being presented. The latter may parallel the author's intentions, or it may be the reader's own creation based on her background, experience, personal preferences, and everything else that goes into making the reader who she is and thereby causing her to write other's bodies in her own peculiar way. Edgar Allan Poe's stories provide ample opportunities for writing the literary body, notable in his story of lost love, "Ligeia."

Poe: An Example

In the second paragraph of "Ligeia," the narrator writes both the literal and the figurative body of Ligeia, providing the reader with both genetically determined physical characteristics and his impressions of those features--in other words, how the narrator writes Ligeia's body. The narrator describes Ligeia as "tall, somewhat slender," a purely physical depiction that to him represents her "majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor." These two sentences clearly present the juxtaposition between a person's physical appearance and another person's writing meaning on that appearance. The narrator relates other physical attributes, such as Ligeia's beautiful face, an observation that is once both a possible physical certainty and also very much the narrator's written meaning of her attractiveness. The narrator further writes Ligeia's looks when he says that "I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity--although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed 'exquisite.'" Obviously, this lovesick man has difficulty observing Ligeia's physical form without writing on that body his personal impressions of what he sees. He does the same thing with her forehead, mouth, and particularly her hair, the appearance of which is naturally black but to him is "hyacinthine," a summation of all he has written onto her hair.

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