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Chapter 4
Toward a Quantum Theory of Cognitive Affect From Poe to Robotic Helpers: Newton, Arousal,
and Covalent Bonding
Nancy Ann Watanabe
Professor of Comparative Literature and Pacific Rim Research Professor, University of Oklahoma,
USA, E-mail: watann@uw.edu
Abstract
This is the first article to discuss the neuroscience of facial recognition psychopathy in the context of
artificial intelligence (AI) as an efficacious way to help men, women, and children whose suffering
from this affliction is well documented. The investigation begins with my advocacy of robotic helpers
as a palliative means to alleviate the cognitive plight and behavioral problems of individuals whose
untreated facial recognition psychopathy also represents a risk to the safety and security of their social
environment. Salient examples of victims of facial recognition psychopathy include patients diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s syndrome, incarcerated offenders with a high recidivism rate, and fugitive felons who
successfully elude detection as killers because they appear to be model citizens. My textual analysis of
two hitherto undiagnosed cases of facial recognition psychopathy in two psychological tales by
legendary American author Edgar Allan Poe illuminates’ ways in which this disease affects modern
society. As a literary comparatist, I examine the thoughts, words, and actions of the husband in Poe’s
“Ligeia,” demonstrating that he bears a resemblance to serial killers of unsuspecting women. I then
analyze the narrative discourse of the gambler in Poe’s “William Wilson” to show that facial recognition
psychopathy causes the befuddled narrator to project his self-hatred and suppressed conscience on men
in his social circle. Contributing to research on facial recognition psychopathy through the textually
oriented study of literary representations of reality facilitates the in-depth understanding that may result
in helping specialists in the new field of robotics to design devices to enable otherwise handicapped
victims of facial recognition psychopathy to participate in their social milieu if they are diagnosed early
enough.
4.1 Introduction
Cyrus F. Nourani devotes Chapters 5 and 8 in Ecosystems and Technology: Idea Generation and
Content Model Processing (Innovation Management and Computing) to the healthcare domain,
providing “an overview” of “various methods” for identifying “unmet needs” and “building a successful
innovative program for affordable medical technology.“ Case studies “highlight the thought process”
in developing successful programs at Stanford Biodesign, Johns Hopkins’s innovation platform,
CAMtech’s innovation platform, InnAccel’s acceleration program, and government-run incubation
programs (xvii). Although the idea that artificial intelligence (AI) can palliate or heal illnesses is new,
considerable research suggests a widespread interest in facial recognition psychopathy, including
outstanding articles such as T. H. Pahn, and P. Philippot, “Decoding of facial expression of emotion in
criminal psychopaths” in the Journal of Personality Disorders (Pahn and Philippot, 2010). The present
study responds to a growing healthcare demand for palliative medical devices designed for patients
diagnosed for, and clients starting to suffer from, facial recognition psychopathy. The methodology of
comparative literary analysis facilitates a discussion that stresses hitherto undetected, hence virtually
untreated, signs, and symptoms of facial recognition psychopathy. My close reading of “William
Wilson” and “Ligeia,” by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), suggests the importance of understanding and
helping patients along a wide spectrum of backgrounds who suffer deficits in facial recognition, while
indicating just how their illness could adversely impact their families, friends, co-workers, and
community.
Growing numbers of persons have difficulty with facial recognition, including such diverse
categories as persons in some stage of Alzheimer’s syndrome and, at the other end of the spectrum,
male serial killers. This chapter hypothesizes that something like an Android application, which
resembles “Alexa” and “Cortana” would be helpful. It is a well-known fact that men and women who
contract Alzheimer’s survive for years after diagnosis. Recidivism among prisoners is increasing even
with intramural education and therapeutic intervention programs. A robotic or hand-held device that
prompts severely absent-minded and clinically diagnosed individuals suffering from negative ability to
recognize faces would experience an improvement in their lives if they could be trained to use a
computerized device that prompts them and lifts them out of their forgetfulness. This chapter advocates
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product development in the medical technology community of an innovative computerized device
specifically designed to help individuals who suffer from facial recognition psychopathy in one form
or another.
4.2 Two Types of Facial Recognition Psychopathy
Recent scientific research shows that deviant right hemisphere face processing is associated with two
types of psychopathy: (a) fearless dominance; and (b) impulsive antisociality. Fearless dominance is
associated with adaptive demographic and personality features, including “high social potency,
narcissistic personality features, and interpersonal features of psychopathy, such as low-stress reaction,
low harm avoidance, and reduced fears and anxiety” (Benning et al., 2005). Impulsive antisociality is
correlated with maladaptive personality traits and life outcomes manifesting in impulsive and antisocial
symptoms of psychopathy. Impulsive antisociality is selectively associated with “traits of alienation and
aggression, anger, antisocial behavior and substance abuse, low socialization. along with impulsivity,
low control, and low sociability” (Benning et al., 2005). Recent investigations are somewhat limited in
being restricted, for example, to studying reactions of subjects to viewing pictorial paradigms, which
may raise questions as to the reliability of the results (Wilson).
4.3 Facial Recognition Psychopathy in Literature: Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
My critical analysis of two texts by Edgar Allan Poe, a revered American master of psychologically
symbolic storytelling, provides an enriched context of virtual reality that tends to corroborate
experimental laboratory findings. Poe gives us two surprisingly realistic stories: “Ligeia” is an ultra-
romantic love story and “William Wilson” is a classic doppelgänger tale of mystery and imagination.
My textual analysis of “Ligeia” (1838) demonstrates pitfalls encountered by two vividly
portrayed fictional female protagonists, who may be interpreted as archetypal symbols of woman as an
(unrecognized) conscience figure or “anima” (Jung 9), with a man who presents himself as a suitable
marriage partner. Contrary to appearances, the man, whose cognition appears superior, has a virtually
undetectable, nonetheless psychopathological, disability in being unable to recognize faces. Unaware
of his facial recognition psychopathy, the women, who are pleased to be pursued by an ardent and
devoted suitor, unwittingly wed him. “Ligeia” is a first-person narrative told by a man who successfully
woos and wins the affection of two unsuspecting women. The storyteller is a two-time widower who
recounts memories he has of his first marriage to a beautiful brunette scholar, whom he profoundly
respects, and then of his second marriage to a lovely blonde with whom he falls passionately in love.
He concludes his narrative with a sensational twist, claiming that at the moment of her death, his second
wife was transformed into his first wife. This associative pattern intimates’ glimpses of moral
consciousness, but self-alienated, deeply repressed, and unacknowledged. He is cognitively impaired
by fearless dominance. His moodiness counterpoints Ligeia’s displays of emotion, which he badly
misinterprets. Initially, his impulsive antisociality manifests indirectly and imperceptibly, but then
culminates in acute episodes of violence when his facial recognition psychopathy grows so intense as
to find expression in homicidal mania that satisfies his overwhelming desire for social position and
greed for gold (cf. Whalen).
An inability to recognize faces impairs the male protagonist in Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839),
a doppelgänger tale of conscience. Wilson is a hard drinker and gambler who displays fearless
dominance as a self-indulgent gentleman of leisure who dissipates his fortune. Wilson evinces the dual
personality of a strong-willed man of action whose bravado is undermined by hallucinations. To all
appearances, he is fearless in public places where he makes a show of savoring his winnings. But he is
afflicted by hallucinations that suggest the personality of a man who suffers from paranoid
schizophrenia. Symptoms of his face recognition psychopathy propel the story’s plot, which follows a
trail of evasion as he attempts to escape from the watchful eye of his nemesis, a man who resembles
him. But, in reality, the mirror image he sees with his eyes is, in actuality, a psychological self-
projection, one that symbolizes his conscience. His suppressed feelings of guilt over his dissolute
lifestyle distort his eyesight in a morally significant way. In his devil may care abandonment of integrity,
he throws caution to the wind, and yet, he has a latent awareness of his social image as a profligate roué.
While he flaunts his willful disregard of the disapproval of his social milieu and risks being an outcast,
a pariah, he nonetheless retains a modicum of the moral sense. For these reasons, he speaks as one who
stands apart, but is surrounded by detractors. Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) observes hypothetically that “a
certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. it is not the conscious
subject but the unconscious that does the projecting. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject
from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it, there is now only an illusory one. Projections
change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face” (8). William Wilson fails to recognize
everyone he sees, because his suppressed feelings of guilt stifle his facial recognition ability,
substituting instead imagery based on his unacknowledged hostility toward himself for engaging in
questionable social behavior.
4.4 Robotic Palliative Helper for Treatment of Alzheimer’s Syndrome
Both of these imaginative literary pieces delve deeply into relationships of facial recognition to
emotional processing, neurocognition, and symptoms of perceptual malfunctioning that are associated
with medical conditions that are difficult to detect and diagnose. This article breaks new ground in its
exploration of the association between facial recognition and affective emotional processing in
conjunction with technology using, not lab experiments, but vivid examples drawn from Poe’s Tales of
Mystery and Imagination. Because of the increasing numbers of persons who have difficulty with facial
recognition, including male serial killers and persons in some stage of Alzheimer’s syndrome, an
Android application that resembles “Alexa” and “Cortana” is needed.
It is a well-known fact that men and women who contract Alzheimer’s survive for years after
diagnosis because their caregiver helps them to remember “table” “apple” and their dear friends,
neighbors, and relatives. Dimitri Ketchakmadze, in “Alzheimer’s Disease: Symptoms, Stages,
Hypotheses, Factors, Prevention, and Treatment” (2019), graphically shows the difference between
neurons in the hippocampus of the normal brain and the cortical shrinkage, neurofibrillary tangles,
severely enlarged ventricles, and beta-amyloid plaques that prevent vital neuronal interaction (brain cell
communication) in the Alzheimer’s brain (Ketchakmadze, 18). The slow encroachment of
“mitochondrial dysfunction” contributes to the process of “cognitive decline and neurodegeneration” in
the Alzheimer’s brain” (Ketchakmadze, 27, 28). Contrary to popular opinion, Alzheimer’s differs from
normal age-related memory impairment, which is caused by Tau-protein dysfunction, and also from
cognitive impairment associated with dementia, where “Tau-protein dysfunction” impacts the cortex
by cell-to-cell transmission, causing neuronal dysfunction and degeneration that leads to total system
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failure (Ketchakmadze, 30). The normal brain is robust, in striking contrast to the Alzheimer’s brain,
where the neurons gradually shrink (see illustration, Ketchakmadze, 46). As though injected with
poison, the brain loses protein, which is replaced by nitrogen, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon dioxide, thus
neurons lose their healthy shape and identity and become an amorphous mass—fragmented,
disconnected, shattered. Despite this grim scenario, the process of deterioration in Alzheimer’s is slow.
A robotic helper that prompts those individuals who are hampered by their inability to recognize faces
or names would experience an improvement in their lives if they could be trained to use a robotic helper
that compensates for their forgetfulness.
4.5 Facial Recognition Psychopathy in Prisoner Populations
I have spent a lot of time locked up, but. I have never served time. because I have made that time
serve me, and I have never been able to find enough of it to do all the things that I wanted to do.
—Robert Stroud, Lifer Number 594 (qtd., Gaddis 264)
Theoretically, I postulate that serial killers, including Ted Bundy (1946–1989) and the Green River
Killer, in effect, keep slaying the same woman over and over again and that they obsessively and
compulsively murder girls and women because they bear some resemblance to a girl or woman who
traumatized them. They exhibit traits of paranoid schizophrenia, because they appear to be above
average in intelligence and appear to be living normal lives, except for this perplexing flaw in their
personality. In fact, I actually (unknowingly) met the Green River Killer at a bus stop where I was
carrying a dozen books to return to the library. He said, “Would you like to go for a ride in my car, or
rather, my automobile,” because, he mumbled, “You look like Mary Jane
(https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6893247/mary_jane-m_-malvar), or Kimi-Kai
(https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6893275/kimi_kai-pitsor), and Pammy
(https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6892528/pammy-annette-avent). You sorta look like Lisa (7
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6892576/lisa-lorraine-yates), but she was blonde. Mostly, you
remind me of Opal (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6892606/opal-charmaine-mills) because
you are carrying all of those books.” Disappointed, he kept talking until a detective, who was observing
from across the street in front of Macy’s, peacefully took him into custody, saying “I just want to talk
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to you.” Much later, I read the front-page stories in the local newspapers, one of which eventually
printed little photographs of all of the women for whom he had shown the police the burial sites. His
victims did indeed resemble me. I know nothing of his background, but I would not be surprised if he
had experienced a traumatizing situation somewhere in his past that caused him to continue to kill
virtually the same person repeatedly. He told me and the detective as he walked away from me that he
did not mind going to prison because he had thought of a goal: to be like the Birdman of Alcatraz.
Robert Stroud (January, 1890; Seattle, 1963), convicted of homicide in 1909, was “a scientist and an
international authority on bird diseases” (Gaddis 249; also see Stroud). Later, I understood, when I read
front-page news stories, that the soft-spoken, polite gentleman was Gary Ridgway, whom I watched,
without knowing his identity, as he was led away by the plainclothes detective, who acquiesced to his
request not to use handcuffs, that he would walk peaceably with him on the crowded sidewalk.
4.6 Superposition and Entanglement in Poe’s Mystery Stories
Facial recognition psychopathy is characterized by a marked inability to express observable emotion
(affect), and concomitantly, to recognize genuine emotion (cognition). Fearless dominance psychopathy
is epitomized in Poe’s depiction of the widower protagonist in “Ligeia,” who gives a detailed account
of his two marriages. Impulsive antisociality psychopathy is exemplified in Poe’s portrayal of the
gentleman gambler protagonist in “William Wilson,” who feels he is being followed everywhere he
goes by a man who looks just like him. Fearless dominance is indicated by “social dominance, stress
resiliency, and thrill-seeking” and correlates positively with socioeconomic status and verbal
intelligence” (Benning et al., 2005). The disconsolate widower in “Ligeia” is an upper-class social
climber who exhibits fearless dominance psychopathy as he successfully wins the hearts and minds of
two aristocratic women, who, in turn, consent to becoming his wife. Typically, “unrelated to child
antisocial behavior and substance abuse,” fearlessly dominant behavior is associated with “adult
antisocial deviance” (Benning et al., 2005). In a clever attempt to excuse his unacknowledged
desecration of the institution of marriage, the well-spoken monologist in “Ligeia” insinuates that he
might have benefitted from Freudian psychoanalysis of his childhood when it all began; later, he brags
about indulging in mind-altering drugs. His total failure to mention that he has defiled the sacrament of
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holy matrimony exemplifies adult antisocial deviance. The compulsive gambler in “William Wilson”
typifies impulsive antisociality associated with “rebelliousness, impulsivity, aggression, and alienation”
and correlates negatively with socioeconomic status and verbal intelligence and is positively related to
“child antisocial deviance and substance abuse as well as adult antisociality” (Benning et al., 2005).
Vaguely aware of his deficit in facial recognition, he recounts his childhood, adolescence, and early
adulthood, making an effort to account for his unorthodox lifestyle.
The narrating protagonists in both “Ligeia” and “William Wilson epitomize “successful
psychopaths,” defined by an American pioneer in the field of psychopathy, H. M. Cleckley, who served
as the psychiatrist for the prosecution at the trial of serial killer Ted Bundy in 1979, as individuals who
“possess features of psychopathy, but are able to function adaptively in society and avoid negative
encounters with law enforcement” (Cleckley, see Wilson 3). My focus in the present study is on male
protagonists, but the psychopathy of deviant behavior based on psychological face recognition deficit
is a rapidly growing research area not only in studies of men, but also of women (see Dolan and Völlm;
Eisenbarth, Alpers, Segrè, Calogero, and Angrilli; Lehmann and Ittel; and Verona and Vitale), as well
as of children (see Jones et al., 2009; Marsh et al., 2008; McCown, Johnson, and Austin, 1986; Stevens,
Charman, and Blair, 2001; Walker and Leister, 1994; Zabel, 1979).
4.7 Facial Recognition and Emotion Processing in Poe’s “Ligeia”
Significantly, we observe Lady Ligeia (LL) through the utterly romantic vision of the enthralled
narrator. His description of Ligeia, cast in emotional language reflective of passionate devotion,
indicates a great deal about his personality and character. Ligeia remains an ethereal figure, almost a
product of his imagination. It is important, therefore, to notice the qualities he attributes to Ligeia and
also the way he describes those qualities.
Although he does not rigidly compartmentalize her traits of character, he does present Ligeia
as a paragon of perfection. His ideal image of Ligeia’s “gigantic volition” (Poe, Complete Works II,
253) and her “infinite supremacy” in “all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science”
(CW II, 254) contrasts sharply with his misguided will, intellect, and moral sense, particularly as
exhibited by him in the second half of his narrative. Though he seems, for the most part, incapable of
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sound judgment, he possesses a kinetic, volatile, even a morally inspired imagination, which is,
however, eclipsed by his countermanding will. On her death, Ligeia becomes, in his account of the
heightened atmosphere during his deathwatch, an omnipresent force, whose moral purpose, however,
he disregards. Conversely, despite his failure to discuss with any degree of insight his perceptual and
moral shortcomings, he evinces, but bizarrely, latent awareness of his moral accountability, when he,
in his bedside vigil, attempts by sheer power of his will to disinter angelic Ligeia by methodical
displacement of Rowena.
“Ligeia” begins with the narrator traveling into the past to recollect when and how he met his
first wife. Searching his memory in tones of mild perplexity and frustration, he confesses his inability
to remember something very important to him, thus creating at the outset a sense of mystery, but also
of uncertainty and confusion. His psychological state of temporal suspension having formed an
atmospheric backdrop, he introduces his main object of concern, Ligeia, the gravitational center of his
story. He can recall neither her family name nor the exact circumstances of how he met her. Ligeia
exists as a real person, but she is also an idealized image of an archetypal woman and he prefers to think
of her as a dream creature who made a mysterious and lasting impression on his mind: “She came and
departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear
music of her low voice as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder” (CW II, 249). His description
of Ligeia foreshadows that of Lenore in Poe’s celebrated poem “The Raven,” in which the narrator is
similarly located in a closed study where the dream-like encounter takes place, between idealized
beauty, but juxtaposed with the concrete reality of death, evoked in the psychologically symbolic image
of a raven perched upon the sculpted bust of Pallas Athena, Greek goddess of beauty and justice
(Watanabe in Inhabited by Stories, 277–88). What remains vivid in the mind of Ligeia’s widower
husband is womanly personhood. Ligeia is tall, somewhat slender, and majestic in bearing. The details
of her personal appearance, numerous, and scrupulously enumerated, are rendered not graphically with
an eye to producing a photographic likeness, but poetically and impressionistically, to stress her
otherworldly, rather than her physical, presence. Her invisible magnetism reminds him of “the radiance
of an opium dream—an airy and spirit-lifting vision” (CW II, 249), which suggests mystical
transcendentalism partially concretized in his comparison of her to a delicate ivory or marble art object.
Worthy of special note is his description of her face, which he discusses in the manner of an
appreciative architect observing the structural design of a building. Poe’s handling of this device is
brought to its fullest development in work published the year after “Ligeia.” Poe, in “The Fall of the
House of Usher” (1840), depicts a sentient house that suffers under the same sort of deleterious
atmospheric oppression as the melancholy narrator who, unknowingly, sees the process of his internal
deterioration when he becomes lost in his contemplation of the stagnant tarn surrounding the house.
The narrator in “Ligeia” compares the elegant, expansive features of Ligeia’s face to the smooth, hard
planes and surfaces of a chamber of classic architectural design: “I examined the contour of the lofty
and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—
the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the
regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling
tresses” (CW II, 250). If Ligeia’s forehead is flawless, majestic, and natural, how different from the
decaying house of Usher, yet how similar the way in which Ligeia and the house of Usher—Roderick,
Madeline, and the ancestral line of Ushers—are perceived by the narrators in both stories. In these two
tales of terror, the narrating protagonists reveal in their descriptions of their societal environments
projected facets of their own psyches. For instance, Ligeia’s profile reminds the narrator of the “graceful
medallions of the Hebrews” (II, 250) and perhaps also of wealth and power of the tribes of Israel which
attributed their deliverance out of bondage as slaves to the Egyptian pharaoh to designation of them as
the chosen people of God (Yahweh; also, Elohim). In Poe’s “Ligeia,” the narrator scrutinizes the
formation of his wife’s chin and finds the fullness and spirituality of divine beauty. Hers is “the beauty
of beings either above or apart from the earth” (II, 251). His relegation of her to a supernatural realm
from the time he first laid eyes on her is a symptom of his facial recognition psychopathy. His
excessively exalted opinion of her assuages his guilt complex, for it relieves him of the burden of ethical
and moral responsibility he would assume if he were to see her as a normal woman. But, instead, he
elevates Ligeia above the norms of an average wife, thus obviating the necessity to respect her
womanhood. His facial recognition deficit puts her into the domain of archetypal idealism so that he
feels no obligation to treat her humanely. Thus, he robs his wife of her personhood.
Ligeia’s husband shows that he is morally conscious of his reductive reclassification of his wife
into a reified object, placing her on a pedestal of idolatrous worship, substituting spiritually generated
adoration for respect as a valued human being. By far her most remarkable feature, the eyes of Ligeia
are inaccessible, inscrutable, and even foreboding. It is the “expression” (II, 251) of her eyes that he is
most anxious, but least able to describe precisely. He has pondered endlessly, struggling to fathom the
depths of her eyes, but, as with certain facts pertaining to her life, his memory fails him. He reports that
he is often “upon the very verge” (II, 252), but full knowledge of their expression eludes his grasp: “Ah,
word of no meaning! Behind whose vast latitude of mere sound, we entrench our ignorance of so much
of the spiritual” (II, 251). After Ligeia has died, he seeks expression of such spirituality in the material
world. He resorts, however, to a poetical enumeration of natural objects to construct “a circle of
analogies to that expression”: “Subsequently to the period when Ligeia’s beauty passed into my spirit,
there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such
as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. I recognized it. in the survey of a
rapidly-growing vine—in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running
water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged
people. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not infrequently by
passages from books” (II, 252). Unable to recognize the emotions reflected in Ligeia’s eyes, he provides
an index of symbols which suggest that he glimpses a life-force that is discernible in the world of nature,
yet resides in a spiritual domain. Circumventing specific reference to the cause of his wife’s death, he
enshrouds Ligeia in an aura of mystery. As Roy P. Basler observes, “Final knowledge of the secret of
Ligeia’s eyes is blocked by an obstacle deep within the hero’s own psyche, and the insatiable
imagination seeks for a realm of experience not sensual and moral and identifies Ligeia with the
dynamic power and mystery of the entire universe” (Basler 54). In a skillful evasion of statements that
may be self-incriminating, he places Ligeia on a scale of cosmic magnitude, elevating her out of
consideration as a mortal being.
Having contemplated further guidance from Ligeia “through the chaotic world of metaphysical
investigation” with the feeling that he “might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely
precious not to be forbidden” he observes, “How poignant, then must have been the grief with which,
after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings of themselves and fly away!” (II,
254). His aesthetic distancing, employment of the subjunctive mood, and flight imagery subtly reflect
self-division, vagueness, and subterfuge. His reference to “a wisdom too divinely precious not to be
forbidden” is a sinister paradox, which suggests his melodramatically heightened, hence distorted, sense
of good and evil. By his use of a poetic language of evasion, he unintentionally suggests a link between
Ligeia’s death and motives of which he is only partially aware.
His insensitive treatment of Ligeia and motive for murder are intensified by his facial
recognition psychopathy, which is the causative factor behind his inability to respond to Ligeia when
her face expresses fear and then sadness during her struggle for life. Studies show that psychopathic
individuals with facial recognition deficiencies lack sensitivity to other people’s fearful expressions
(Blair et al., 2004). Neuroscientists find evidence, not limited to fear and sadness, but of pervasive
emotion recognition deficits for facial and emotional expressions in psychopathy (Dawel et al., 2012).
Ligeia’s husband shows genuine respect, meandering between admiration and callousness; indeed, he
straddles a line between non-criminal thoughtlessness and criminal cold-heartedness (C. Iria, and F.
Barbosa).
Practically speaking, all that we learn of Ligeia’s death is that Ligeia “grew ill” (II, 254) and
that he “saw that she must die” (II, 255). Preoccupied with discovering the secret contained in the
expression of her eyes, he claims the insight given by “length of years, and subsequent reflection” (II,
253) and reveals that the source of both his fascination and his frustration was in Ligeia’s will to live,
which was most evident when Ligeia was dying, breathing her last breaths: “Words are impotent to
convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned
in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have soothed—I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity
of her wild desire for life,—for life—but for life—solace and reason were alike the uttermost of folly.
Yet not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the
external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew gentler—grew lower—yet I would not wish to dwell
upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a
melody more than mortal—to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known”
(II, 255). Similarly, it is in Ligeia’s dying that Ligeia’s husband appears to gain a full appreciation of
her love; again, he marvels at Ligeia’s tenacious determination to live: “But in death only, was I fully
impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out
before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How
had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the
removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate”
(II, 255–56).
The image of Ligeia detaining her husband just prior to her death appears in a faint though
evocative echo in their last meeting. By the use of “blessed” and “cursed,” the narrator means to suggest
that these events, in particular Ligeia’s death, were determined by the impassive whims of chance. A
parallel juxtaposition of polar opposites, his rhetorical questions are important in that he refrains from
pursuing the subject of his worthiness, or culpability, while insinuating that he is aware that he was in
a grotesquely paradoxical, even a false, situation, and is either unable or unwilling to delve further.
Blocking paths to further disclosure by creating new avenues through obfuscating clouds of
inspiration, the speaker directs our attention away from the concrete and material. He discovers the
secret of Ligeia’s eyes, paying humble tribute to the strength of her love, especially her love of life: “In
Ligeia’s more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! All unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at
length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for life which was now
fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing—it is this eager vehemence of desire for life——that I
have no power to portray—no utterance capable of expressing” (II, 256). His wonderment at Ligeia’s
struggle to live is more than praise of her will; it is a prefiguration of the revivification at the end of his
narrative. A eulogy for Ligeia, his protracted monologue is also an atonement and a justification for
unacknowledged guilt.
The look in her eyes mirrors the force of her will to live during her struggle to fend off her
husband’s stranglehold, which is calculated to deprive her of the breath of life. He discloses that “she
died” (II, 258). He renders Ligeia’s death poetically, almost as a literary event. With her last breath,
Ligeia reiterated the ominous formula: “Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly,
save only through the weakness of his feeble will” (II, 258). This enigmatic final pronouncement
indicates that Ligeia saw in the intent gaze of her husband his ulterior motive; his determination to see
her breathe her last breath is motivated by his desire to possess her material fortune. Thus, having given
copious praise to Ligeia’s attributes of love, beauty, knowledge, and spirituality, he, in a casual aside,
discloses, “I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more
than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals” (II, 258). He intends to imply that his grief was compensated
for. Here, Poe plays upon the word “will,” which Ligeia’s husband repeatedly observed in his wife’s
eyes as the will to live. Ligeia’s will to live only serves to redouble his efforts to do away with his wife
so that he will receive the proceeds as the sole beneficiary named in Ligeia’s will, i.e., last will and
testament.
Since facial recognition psychopathy causes him to fail to speak about Ligeia’s look of wild
longing to live, so, too, he is unable and unwilling to acknowledge his role in Ligeia’s death. His
narrative discourse segues immediately from the death scene to recounting how his life changed after
Ligeia died.
A rich widower, he purchases an old abbey in England. As literary critic Daniel Hoffman
ironically states, “Although prostrate with grief he somehow finds the energy completely to redecorate
the interior of this capacious structure” (250). Now that Ligeia is deceased, he moves perceptibly closer
to expressing himself with unconscious reference to the kind of psychosymbolic correspondences that
are salient features in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with its mirror imagery (Timmerman). Hoffman
notes the structural design of “Ligeia,” in which mind becomes identified with matter: “The exterior of
the abbey and its situation are described with almost every adjective in the Gothic repertoire: wildest,
least frequented, gloomy, and dreary grandeur, savage aspect, melancholy, and time-honored memories,
utter abandonment, remote, and unsocial region, verdant decay. To this diction of the decadence
wrought by ruin and time is joined the diction of decadence wrought by the human will” (Hoffman
250).
The narrator in “Ligeia” alleges that his confused state of mind after Ligeia died led him to
enter rather suddenly into his marriage to Lady Rowena (LR). He reports that it was “as if in the dotage
of grief” that he left the “dim and decaying city by the Rhine” and became “a bounden slave in the
trammels of opium” (II, 258). He represses his guilty conscience and attributes his mental distress to
being grief-stricken and addicted to opium, which are falsehoods, an integrated strategy symptomatic
of his fearless dominance psychopathy.
Poe prepares readers for the climactic facial recognition scene, setting up a psychologically
symbolic parallelism. While Poe’s primary concern is to portray Rowena as a “vehicle,” a
foreshadowing of the revivification scene at the tale’s conclusion, the widowed newlywed husband
wants to reify Rowena similarly to the way he manipulated Ligeia. Prone to make false confessions of
memory failure, confusion, reverie, and melancholy, he divulges that his wedding to Rowena occurred
in “a moment of mental alienation” (II, 259). Moreover, he harbors a vague suspicion that Rowena’s
family permitted the marriage “through thirst of gold” (II, 259). He implies that Rowena married him
for his money, but he fails to realize that his accusation is a projection of his own thirst for gold. Poe’s
subtext subtly suggests that the narrator in “Ligeia” is a serial uxoricide, a compulsive talker who
inadvertently betrays his motive for murdering his two beautiful wives.
Apologetic for his slippery hold on important facts, he proudly displays his ability to provide a
detailed description of Rowena’s bridal chamber. The vivid picture he paints is not, however, merely
descriptive. Nor is it vague and impressionistic. His account of the room he selected and designed is at
once objective and subjective. Formerly an abandoned monastic retreat where men clad in black
gathered together in mystical communion and religious worship, the bridal suite symbolically mirrors
the groom’s psychic struggle. In preparing the bridal suite, Rowena’s husband exactingly and
unconsciously arranged the color scheme to correspond with his remembered image of Ligeia.
Unwittingly, he reveals subconscious motives both malevolent and benevolent in nature. The color
black, associated traditionally with mourning and reverence, also invokes evil. Poe weaves the
widower-bridegroom’s unreliability as a storyteller into the narrative discourse as a conspicuous thread
of sinister innuendo held taut by Poe, who probes the narrator’s facial recognition psychopathy. When
we analyze the subtext, we will discover an intricate form of duplicity. The narrator fails to respond to
his revered image of goodness, Ligeia, in whose name he does away with Rowena.
His self-incrimination as a seriously flawed reflector of reality is complex. His monologue is
charged with a peculiar ambivalence that may be traced to his equivocal status as an unreliable narrator
who is “frustrated by a psychic flaw which he is aware of but does not understand” (Basler 56).
Preferring to live amid a world of opium-engendered shadows and visions to the exclusion of existential
reality, he attempts to appease his conscience and attends dutifully to Rowena’s needs. He evinces latent
awareness of his psychological dilemma with its inherent moral implications, but he fails to respond to
cautionary signs which are filtered through a double screen of obsessive delusion and willful self-
deception, which he perceives only vaguely as indications of Ligeia’s presence and collusion.
Although Ligeia and Rowena represent opposing forces in his mind, including the ideal versus
the real, the desirable versus the contemptible, the positive versus the negative, and the spiritual versus
the material, both of these two women may be viewed as disguised conscience figures who are presented
unwittingly by the narrator as projections reflecting his fractured moral sense. His duplicitous story also
contains poetical evocations of Poe’s criticism of the mentally disturbed, criminally insane narrator.
Indeed, like the narrator in Poe’s tale “The Sphinx” (1846), whose lack of perspective causes him to see
an insect as a gigantic monster, the narrator in “Ligeia” suffers from a visual impairment traceable to
the psychic disturbance known as facial recognition psychopathy. Ironically, the twice-widowed
narrator portrays Ligeia as an indelible image of absolute goodness and he uses idolatrous imagery
willfully as a barrier that prevents him from facing his wrongdoing.
While he readily admits that he is “sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment” (II, 259), he
remembers perfectly the “architecture and decoration” of the bridal suite he shared with Rowena. He
asserts that “there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory”;
the disposition of the room is, in fact, determined by a psychologically regulated organizing principle.
His description of the suite reflects his subconscious image of Ligeia and his relationships to his two
wives. He unwittingly patterns his description to exhibit what he fails to confess. Ligeia’s presence
remains in his mind, not merely as a mournful memory but in a way similar to that in which the
conscience figure pursues the narrator, an inveterate gambler, in Poe’s doppelgänger tale “William
Wilson.” As the differing forms of projection suggest, the extent of his awareness in “Ligeia” is, if not
significantly less, qualitatively different from that of Wilson, who at least feels he is being admonished
by someone who resembles him in practically every way. Unlike Wilson’s double, Ligeia is seen by her
husband as neither conscience figure nor nemesis. Nevertheless, as in “William Wilson,” the protagonist
in “Ligeia” claims to encounter a supernatural being, which confirms a semiconsciously plotted passage
into madness, hence moral darkness, motivated, in part, by a fractured moral sense. Its psychodramatic
properties revelatory of the narrator’s tormenting preoccupation with Ligeia, the bridal death chamber
is located in “a high turret of the castellated abbey,” and like Ligeia’s forehead, is “of capacious size.”
Like the narrator, the room has only one view: “Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon
was the sole window—an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice—a single pane, and tinted of
a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly luster on
the objects within” (II, 259).
The beautiful eyes of Ligeia, now dead of some unnamed disease, have, in the narrator’s mind,
been reduced to the ominous number, one, just as the narrator in “The Black Cat” (1843) tears out
Pluto’s eye, which forecasts the hideous murder of his wife. Above this one, a large unbroken window
is “the trellice-work of an aged vine” (II, 259). In his attempt to approximate the expression in Ligeia’s
eyes, the narrator began with “the survey of a rapidly-growing vine” (II, 252). Commensurate with the
“immense” (II, 253) learning of Ligeia is the ceiling, which is “excessively lofty, vaulted,” but also
“elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidal
device” (II, 259). From the central and innermost recess of the vaulting “depended. a huge censer” of
gold “with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a
serpent vitality, a continual succession of particolored fires” (II, 259–60). Consumed by his passionate
longing for Ligeia, the narrator fashioned a room-sized arabesque, an expressionistic embroidery where
ornate and emphatic forms trace the contorted movements of his self-deception and evil-minded guilt.
Jung observes that a lowly swineherd vainly tries to reach a “high-born princess” that represents
“higher consciousness” yet fails because her image is the “feminine counterpart” to his “masculine
consciousness”; thus, she represents both his “subconscious” and “superconscious,” and when he
reaches her, he “stands as high above the ‘subconscious’ as above the earth’s surface” (Jung 96). Jung
concludes that the swineherd gets “caught in the upper world” and “remains lost in paradise,” which
shows he has a malfunctioning moral sense, too weak to override his malevolence, yet strong enough
to trigger his being spellbound [as] a punishment for his transgression” (Jung 97). In “Ligeia,” the
narrating widower hovers in a netherworld where he is held spellbound by the projected anima image;
he loves but eradicates.
In her death-bed recital, Ligeia prophetically announced the theme for the involuted,
monodramatic, psychomimetic design: “That motley drama!—oh, be sure/It shall not be forgot!/With
its Phantom chased forever more, By a crowd that seize it not,/Through a circle that ever returneth in/To
the self-same spot,/And much of Madness and more of Sin/And Horror the soul of the plot” (II, 256–
57). Woven into the story’s texture are grotesque and distorted images, arising, though not recognized
by the narrator, from the depths of his unconscious mind, eccentric imagery harkening back to the
biblical garden of Eden and the tempting of Adam and Eve by an eloquent and malevolent serpent.
Framing this vivid, dramatic, contrived picture of the bridal chamber, replete with oblique
allusions to Ligeia, are a canopied couch “sculptured of solid ebony,” “black granite” in every corner
and heavy gold drapery “spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in
diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black” (II, 260). The narrator reveals
that to anyone who enters the room, the arabesque figures “bore the appearance of simple monstrosities;
but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed.” Upon penetrating the chamber, a
visitor, simply as a result of the change in viewpoint, “saw himself surrounded by an endless succession
of the ghastly forms which. arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk” (II, 260). The display is made
even more striking by the showmanship of the narrator: “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” (II, 260–61). Basler observes, “Although his
narrative avoids anything which suggests a physical attempt at murder, there are unintentional
confessions of deliberate psychological cruelty in the macabre furnishings of the apartment and in the
weird sounds and movements designed to produce ghostly effects” (58–59). But the chamber is also a
fascinating expressionistic display of the narrator’s uneasy remembrance of Ligeia, her sudden death,
and her husband’s deeply buried feelings of guilt. It is within the realm of possibility that the narrator
suspects that Ligeia died by reason of his own considerably less perfect nature. For example, he admits
that he “should not have doubted” her love (II, 255). In any case, after her death, his baser instincts
seem to overpower all that Ligeia stands for. Nonetheless, his description of the bridal chamber and the
final scene indicate that he, like the adventuresome gamester in “William Wilson,” subconsciously plots
the return of his dream vision, of his conscience. That his willful neglect of Rowena subverts the very
ideal he seeks is a consideration he is unable, certainly unwilling, to face. He declares that in this bridal
chamber, he passed “unhallowed hours” with Rowena, whom he “loathed. with a hatred belonging more
to demon than to man” (II, 261). Cowed by this unpleasant feeling, he abruptly changes the subject:
“My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the
beautiful, the entombed” (II 261). Instead of exerting a benevolent influence, his idealization works in
him a macabre metaphysical death-wish, a compulsion to startle himself to oblivion with an imagery of
pure, white nothingness, a blinding image he names “Ligeia.”
In the final episode, he obsessively recounts with precision and apparent lucidity his progressive
movement toward madness. His is a rapt, almost blissful retreat from reality. In moments of brief
hesitation, however, the increasingly insistent tone and rhythm of the narrative turn back upon
themselves, thus marking his profound confusion, his interior oscillation between falsehood and
forgotten truth, false happiness and unbearable woe.
Although he presents the deathwatch as a successful attempt to transcend the bounds of reality,
it culminates in the supposed revivification of Ligeia, at the same time it obliquely offers clues,
unobtrusively woven into his discourse by Poe, who remains aloof and refrains from making editorial
comments. These clues illuminate the narrators almost completely suppressed moral sense. With
Rowena’s apparent transformation, Ligeia’s prophecy is fulfilled: “Out—out are the lights—out
all!/And over each quivering form,/The curtain, a funeral pall,/Comes down with the rush of a
storm,/And the angels, all pallid and wan,/Uprising, unveiling, affirm/That the play is the tragedy,
‘Man,’/And its hero the Conqueror Worm” (II, 257). The preset stage seems to take on a life of its own.
The eerie shadows and menacing whispers of the wind terrorize Rowena, but the writhing forms act as
accomplices to her husband, who is intent upon seeing Ligeia. He becomes aware of a presence, “a
faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect,” then he hears a “gentle foot-fall upon the carpet.” In the next
moment, he reports, “I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of
the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid” (II, 263). Since Rowena
obediently swallowed the wine, the narrator states reassuringly that he probably imagined something
was amiss. He does, however, venture a confession: “Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception
that, immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worst took place in the
disorder of my wife” (II, 264). It is certainly possible, as Basler argues, that “This is the wish-illusion
that not he but the ghost of Ligeia. is preying upon the distraught and febrile body of Rowena” (59).
However, the presence of this shadow, unquestionably an allusion to Ligeia, may also indicate his vague
awareness that he is engaged in wrongdoing.
The remarkable presence may very well indicate that Ligeia is there, much in the same way that
Wilson’s double is always there, to administer a warning to the narrator. Thus, the projected shadow
symbolizes evil intent—to poison Rowena—but also partial moral consciousness. At the core of his
being reside both awareness and will to self-deception. Tipping the balance is his disordered
imagination. At “midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later” (II, 264), he imagines he hears a “sob, low,
gentle, but very distinct. from the bed of ebony—the bed of death” (II, 264) and supposes this to be a
sign that, he surmises, “My soul was awakened within me” (II, 265). In this instance, “soul” means
“imagination,” and his statement indicates a psychic recession as he continues to seal himself off from
the real world.
Despite ostensible attempts to show a concern for Rowena, he becomes increasingly distressed
and fearful when Rowena, still as Rowena, seems to regain her strength. To give the impression that he
is fully aware of a moral obligation to Rowena, he reports that on two occasions, duty impelled him to
care for her, but his manner of expression betrays his actual wish: “Yet a sense of duty finally operated
to restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in our preparations—
that Rowena still lived” (II, 265). Periodically disappointed in his wish to see Ligeia alive, and
concomitantly Rowena dead, he is, in effect, content when Rowena seems to collude with him and
lapses into “a wanness even more than that of marble” (II, 265), for she now bears a closer resemblance
to Ligeia, whom he wishes to will back to life. Signs of warmth in Rowena result in an abatement in his
“passionate waking visions of Ligeia” (II, 265) and seem to spark a sense of responsibility in him: “I
listened—in extremity of horror. The sound came again—it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw—
distinctly saw—a tremor upon the lips. I felt that my vision grew dim, that my reason wandered; and it
was only by a violent effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus
once more had pointed out” (II, 266). He summarizes, or foreshortens, subsequent steps in the “hideous
drama of revivification” in which he, strategically stationed in the midst of wind-blown drapes and
dancing arabesque figures, but also rigid with fear, is “a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions”
(II, 267). When the enshrouded figure finally arises, her husband, whose real concern is that he has gone
through the ordeal of surveillance over a woman who refuses to die, questions his own sanity, protesting
that he is caught in a “mad disorder” of thoughts and is, outwardly, “paralyzed” and “chilled. into stone”
(II, 267–68). As the tottering figure approaches, he, apparently to demonstrate his feeble hold upon
reason, but in a tone at once triumphant and hysterical, dramatically repeats a series of rhetorical
questions designed to elicit belief in the supernatural.
If his sinuous sentences writhe like the “crawling shape” of the Conqueror Worm, they also
subtly announce his sin and the inevitability of death. The appearance of Ligeia as a supernatural being
signals his loss of existential consciousness, hence of conscience. The concluding scene in the story
shows by indirect implication that he represents not an Adamic man, but a “Man” who falls into the
darkness of his obsessive-compulsive delusions. Like the “mimes, in the form of God on high,” of
whom he speaks, the narrator is a puppet who acts “At bidding of vast formless things/That shift the
scenery to and fro, /Flapping from out their Condor wings/Invisible Wo!” (II, 256). In the end, the stage
set in an arabesque design of black and gold, arranged in apparent confusion, the monologist sees, in
his fantastical imaginings, the wind-blown raven-black hair of Ligeia merge with and displace the
golden tresses of Rowena. Hideously interwoven into the narrative, the black and the gold represent,
then, the warring factions in the narrator’s muddled mind. In the final moment of the fable, the
storyteller, his mind effectively torn asunder from his existential body, sees, in the etherized
atmosphere, Spirit individualized: “There streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber
huge masses of long and disheveled hair; it was blacker than the wings of the midnight!” (II, 268). His
comparison may come closer to describing what he actually saw than he realizes. He thinks he willed
Ligeia back into existence or that she willed herself back to life. But either way, it is self-delusion, belief
in a wish-fantasy. Yet, he feels exposed, as a mad scientist realizing he is a two-timing scoundrel. His
claim of an apocalyptic vision may well be authentic; in conceiving it, he momentarily shatters his
connection to his insane and evil scheme.
Subtly, Poe strikes a satirical blow against extravagant retreats into realms of abstraction,
fashioned in accordance with the prescriptions of Romanticism, including the supernatural,
transcendentalism, and Gothicism, which are forms of romantic excess. At the same time, Poe conveys
a vivid impression of his sense of a perilous encounter with death. This is one of Poe’s most intensely
rendered themes. Daniel Hoffman declares that “Death is personal extinction, the obliteration of this
particular bundle of sensations and memories, and therefore terrifying. Death is also deliverance from
the memories and sensations in which this particular person, this particular combination of atoms
divided from the unity whence they came, is imprisoned—and thus death is welcome” (258).
But in “Ligeia,” the widower’s death-defying attitude constitutes a rather different kind of
personal extinction and deliverance. The revivification of Ligeia, contingent upon Rowena’s death, is a
partial obliteration of existential limits and a welcome deliverance from moral responsibility. “Ligeia,”
which Poe considered “his finest tale” (Fisher 5), is more than a sensational tale of the supernatural told
by a madman. It is a profession of belief in the supernatural that originates not in opium, the miraculous,
or insanity, but in willful, yet cowardly self-deception. Psychoethically, the narrator conjures a death-
in-life condition. His isolation and imprisonment are both symptoms, and an image, of self-delusion.
Terror, perhaps augmented by a repelling sense of guilt, and sublimity, ironically presented by Poe as
an exaggerated sense of the ideal, are intertangled. Not quite blinded by his romantic idealism, the
narrator, insinuating that Ligeia’s ghost poisoned Rowena, and presenting the made-up or imaginary
transformation of Rowena as a triumph of the supernatural, finds deliverance in the willful, though not
necessarily conscious, perhaps the semi-conscious superposition of guilt and innocence, of death and
life. Ligeia’s startling appearance at the end of the story, as with that of Wilson’s double, not only
confirms the widower’s evident deterioration into madness, but also evokes the moral conflict, the
duplicity that is at the heart of the monologue. For the morally confused narrator, Ligeia is a kind of
flawed talisman. She represents at once a vaguely perceived moral imperative and a supernatural license
to poison Rowena. Paradoxically, his rigid allegiance to Ligeia seems to prevent him from acting upon
the ideals he says she inspires in him. Thwarted by fears and obsessions, the narrator in “Ligeia” fails
to appreciate fully the goodness he is only too certain he sees in Ligeia. His facial recognition
psychopathy extends beyond any visual impairment to his eyesight and is a pervasive aspect of his
personality and character. Poe’s literary artistry veils the serial wife killer’s guilt, paradoxically, in
words spoken by a male protagonist who feels compelled to speak. Goaded by unacknowledged guilt,
he glimpses the truth, but he supplants his own self-image as a killer who stalks wealthy women
motivated by covetousness. An atavistic avatar of Faust, the widower, symbolizes insatiable lust for
upward mobility. But the higher the ruthless social climber rises, the greater his facial recognition
psychopathy because he no longer has personhood as a sustainable member of human society.
4.8 Neurocognitive Perception and decision Making in Poe’s “William Wilson”
In “William Wilson,” Poe ironically shows that a concept of conscience and a belief in conscience do
not perforce lead one to act or speak in good faith. In a death-bed confession, the narrator presents
himself as “the slave of circumstances beyond human control” and “a victim to the horror and the
mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions” (Poe, Complete Works III, 300). Narrated in the past
tense, the story is told from the perspective of a self-styled tragic hero whose “present purpose” is “to
assign” the “origin” of “the sudden elevation in turpitude” that marked the beginning of the unfortunate
“epoch” in his life, his “later years” (CW III, 299). If his melodramatic monologue is taken at face
value, the monologist appears to have been forced to murder his conscience, precipitating a life of
“unspeakable misery” and “unpardonable crime” (CW III, 299). In the course of the narrative, the
narrator unwittingly reveals how he has, through willfulness and self-delusion, perpetrated the
“temptation” (CW III, 300) and fall he imputes to his “tormentor” (CW III, 322, 323), the “accursed
villain” (CW III, 324), William Wilson. In his consistent denial of identification with the alienated
portion of his selfhood, namely conscience (perceived vaguely, incompletely, yet intensely by the
narrator as superposed moral imperatives and ethical duties and obligations), he betrays his conscience
(evocatively defined by Poe’s subtext as full moral consciousness). Conscience is not only an alter ego
but also to be understood according to the French meaning of la conscience, to include consciousness,
moral sense, scrupulousness, and sincerity.
The first-person narrator in “William Wilson” proves to be a model of facial recognition
psychopathy as it manifests predominantly as impulsive antisociality. His dominant personality traits
include rebelliousness, impulsivity, aggression, and alienation, which correlate negatively with his
socioeconomic status and verbal intelligence, and found to be positively related to childhood antisocial
deviance that led to substance abuse and antisociality during his adulthood. By his admission an attempt
to elicit “the sympathy” of his “fellow men” (CW III, 299–300), his narrative, told in the form of a self-
centered monologue, is, ironically, a self-betrayal. With each word he utters, he unintentionally mocks
the self-image he proffers. Ultimately, the narrator-monologist is the victim of his blighted awareness.
Despite his claim to moral hindsight, he construes an excursion into the supernatural as a tragic moment
of moral insight. His deficient facial recognition psychopathy, which affects his observable behavior,
prevents him from seeing himself as he is. Thus, impulsive antisociality and self-alienation are
inextricably intertwined. He projects his inability to understand himself emotionally as he adopts a
rebellious attitude toward his social milieu. His defensive impulse to protect his fragile sense of selfhood
is observable as aggression. His profession of gentleman gambler empowers him to exact a toll
calculated to compensate him for being victimized by society. He is a more sophisticated model of
facial recognition psychopathy than the serial uxoricide in “Ligeia” because he consciously and
intentionally seeks to take revenge against society for failing to prevent him from becoming a social
pariah. As the author of “William Wilson,” Poe obliquely shows a sympathetic understanding of the
protagonist, who provides factual data to construct a medical history. All that remains is diagnosis and
treatment that will be appropriate to the needs of this gentleman gambler who is disturbed by his
symptoms without having access to medical and public health professionals to provide him with
palliative care to alleviate his distress as a patient with facial recognition psychopathy whose reportage
reveals him to be a victim of impulsive antisociality syndrome.
Weighted down by despair, yet at pains to describe in detail the sequence of events that led to
his collapse, the narrating monologist does not appear to be aware of the significance of his story. Thus,
he portrays himself as a fun-loving rake who was goaded by Wilson into killing Wilson, who turns out
to be, paradoxically, both conscience and the cause of the narrating monologist’s subsequent
criminality. Viewed by the narrating monologist as a persecutory and ubiquitous phantom that
incessantly betrayed him, Wilson seems to have tracked the narrating monologist with the plot and
persistence of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the amateur sleuth in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
(1841), who uses scientific methodology to solve the murders of two women in Paris by an orangutan
captured by a British sailor in Borneo (Indonesia), the largest island in Asia. Even as he reviews his
experience in retrospect, Wilson fails to consider fully his namesake’s motives and ultimate purpose.
Not realizing that his repudiation of moral authority is based on an exaggerated, distorting,
hence false respect, the unreliable narrator does not resolve a fundamental issue, his double’s raison
d’être. It is Poe who reveals indirectly, through psychologically symbolic evocation, the answer to the
narrating monologist’s rhetorical question, “But who and what was this Wilson?—and whence came
he?—and what were his purposes?” (CW III, 315, 321). Obliquely, Poe implies that Wilson’s double
owes his existence to the narrating monologist’s compelling, though suppressed, moral awareness,
which is paired with a psychological need for a scapegoat to be credited with the guilt, and
concomitantly, the sense of responsibility, the narrating monologist disclaims in his petulant assertion
of his “natural rights of self-agency” (CW III, 322).
Protecting his position by giving a false impression at the very outset, the narrating monologist
strikes the pose of a Byronic hero who shows a reckless disregard for money. Forced by far-reaching
disrepute and a disinclination to sully “the fair page,” he conceals his “real appellation” under the guise
of a pseudonym, “a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real” (CW III, 299, 305). His opening line,
“Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson” (CW III, 299), may call to mind the self-
introduction and story of the narrating monologist who begins simply, “Call me Ishmael” (Melville,
Moby-Dick 1). Herman Melville’s treatment of pursuit and obsession in Moby-Dick (1851) is
comparable to Poe’s highly concentrated probing of personality in “William Wilson.” Whereas Melville
explores dramatically the metaphysical implications of an epic quest, Poe probes the psychological and
moral ramifications of a quest that culminates in unwitting self-betrayal. Melville presents the
dramatized first-person narrator Ishmael sympathetically recording the tragic quest of the obsessed hero,
Captain Ahab. Ishmael is the expressive, compassionate voice, while Ahab is all silence and
metaphysical suicide in action. By contrast, Poe’s narratological strategy enables the narrator, Wilson,
who is also a protagonist obsessed with wrongdoing, to describe unsympathetically the dogged pursuit
and silent campaign waged by a specter of his conscience, who is armed with the idea of inculcating a
sense of moral obligation.
A close comparison may nonetheless be drawn between the Ahab versus Moby Dick
relationship and that of the bad Wilson who retreats from the putatively good Wilson. Although the
pursuit patterns are antipodal, the juxtaposition of these patently different quests, the one for wrathful
vengeance, the other for the purpose of issuing a moral warning, illuminates what may be considered
the good Wilson’s flaw; his single-minded compulsion to expose the bad Wilson is not very different
in quality from the monomaniacal determination of Ahab as he seeks to punish a sperm whale for
defending itself against the death-dealing harpoons launched by the Pequod ship’s company. Although
Ahab’s quest is solipsistic, in the context of Melville’s novel, Ahab is, after all, chasing a real whale,
which may, of course, be interpreted realistically and symbolically. In contrast, the character named in
the title of Poe’s “William Wilson” is, in actuality, a compression and crystallization of inchoate
consciousness, fragments unconsciously organized not a coherent whole, a human form, perceived by
Wilson as a ghost-like presence embodying traits and principles consciously rejected by the narrating
monologist, yet most deeply ingrained deeply in his unconscious mind. Both Melville and Poe comment
poetically on the adverse results and the self-destructive effects of action that is motivated by the
irrational drive of obsession. Ahab, in effect, sacrifices himself and an entire ship’s crew, except
Ishmael. Poe’s protagonist balances precariously on the rim of a bottomless well (pit of death and the
unknown) and almost gets sliced down by an impersonal swing of the blade (pendulum of chronological
time). Like Ahab, Wilson chooses to affirm his selfhood in a self-destructive way. He appears, like
Ishmael, to be a survivor.
Moored in extravagant self-pity and self-aggrandizement, Wilson laments what he has become:
“Oh outcast of all outcasts, most abandoned!—to the earth art thou not forever dead? To its honors, to
its flowers, to its golden aspirations?—and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang
eternally between thy hopes and heaven?” (CW III, 299). Employing imagery that helps to project his
adopted pose, Wilson objectifies and depersonalizes aspects of his character that he is unwilling to
acknowledge. Ironically, this attempt to take distance from himself is self-incriminating. The imagery
comprises melodramatic displays of figurative language, but also self-revealing symbolism generated
by his facial recognition psychopathy. Aware of his impulsive antisociality, he vents his frustration by
monologizing. Thus, Poe anticipates the psychotherapeutic methodology associated with the Austrian
neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). At this point, narrating
monologist Wilson does not yet name his double; instead, he finds metaphoric expression for vague,
preconscious thought and alludes to his nemesis as a dark “cloud,” but also as a softening “shadow”
(CW III, 299). Fortifying his position through melodramatically inflected rhetoric, he implies that the
source of his moral turpitude and suffering lies outside himself. Because of this external force, he
reports, “From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the
enormities of an Elah-Gabalus” (CW III, 299). Intelligently, with strategically pitched calculation, he
uses hyperbole so that his self-comparison to a cruel and depraved Roman emperor makes his
infractions appear nonthreatening. His suggestion that he underwent a dramatic transformation is
misleading. His sententious, inflated style and expression betray a self-defeating doubleness. Though
he aspires to such ideals as honor and heaven, the narrating “I” extends his career of prankish play, card
sharper, wining, and wooing by playing the role of a tragic hero, jaded by a life of unparalleled crime
and suffering.
Donning the grotesque double mask of a self-righteous villain, he intends to show that
murdering his conscience was a justified act of self-defense, fraught with unforeseen and tragic
repercussions. Although he ascribes a conventional moral meaning to the pattern of events he recounts,
he designates as first cause the single moment wherein he was tyrannically forced to yield to temptation.
Foreshadowing the end of the tale and capitalizing on what he sees as the sudden, fatal moment, he
divests himself of all blame, observing that “Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant,
all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. What chance—what one event brought this evil thing to pass,
bear with me while I relate” (CW III, 299). He claims his innocence to anyone willing to listen. The
“one event” to which he refers reveals the extent to which he unconsciously identifies with his double.
In the last confrontation, he, enraged, stabs his double, who, for some reason, fails to resist. In an
ambivalent, patently ironic reversal, his double asserts, “‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet
henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—
and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself’” (CW
III, 325). Set in quotation marks to show that he intends to quote his double, yet echoing his own
capitulation, he dramatizes his duplicitous role-playing and intricate self-deception.
His facial recognition psychopathy boomerangs such that he perceives his alienated moral sense
as a projected mirror image. Thus, his consciousness repulses his moral sense by projecting this facet
of his ontological being in the form of a doppelganger, a double who is like a biological twin. The
psychological significance of this defense mechanism is that his character is flawed by an unwillingness
to benefit from the knowledge contained in his consciousness, yet remains unprobed. Poe invites his
readers to consider the meaning of this story about a man who claims he murdered his conscience.
Poe anticipates current research on facial recognition psychopathy in basing the central theme
in “William Wilson” on the philosophical dictum “Know thyself,” promulgated by Socrates (469 BC–
499 BC). In the twenty-first century, researchers in facial recognition psychopathy may study Poe’s
“William Wilson” as a tale of mystery and imagination that shows how knowledge and understanding
of facial recognition psychopathy illuminate the malfunctioning of a murderer’s mental processes, in
particular how the inability to recognize faces may be linked to lack of self-knowledge. Deficits in facial
recognition keep individuals from learning to behave normally in social situations. If such individuals
do not recognize the faces of persons whom they encounter in their circle of relatives, friends, and
acquaintances, they may also be unable to recognize themselves in a mirror, literally and figuratively.
Poe has the protagonist in “William Wilson” provide a biographical sketch, which makes it
easy for us to place ourselves in the position of researchers charged with the task of diagnosing the
ailment that motivates Wilson to tell his story. Whether Wilson speaks in a medical examination room
or a court of law, he pleads that he is innocent because of his genetic predisposition to be wicked. He
entreats us to “seek out. some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error” (CW III, 300). He
presents his major flaws in character as an inevitable outgrowth of his heritage: “I am the descendant
of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them
remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character.
As I advanced in years, it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious
disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest
caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions” (CW III, 300). “Steeped in misery” (CW III,
301), he finds relief in his rambling narration of apparently trivial details. There are many references to
sleep, meditation, and deeply imprinted patterns of thought and feeling. These subjective states find
objective expression in his narration of lingering impressions that transport him from stark reality to a
shadowed spiritual realm. Counterbalancing yet complementing these images evocative of a vast inner
universe are concrete images of imprisonment and enclosure. These embryonic images, suggestive of a
naive religiosity associated with a sense of personal confinement, will be individualized, to use a term
from Eureka (1849), Poe’s scientifically inspired cosmological poem, in the form of Wilson’s double.
Recalling as a lost paradise the “misty-looking village” of his boyhood, he experiences once
again the “refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues” and he thrills anew “with undefinable
delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar,
upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep”
(CW III 301). Poised against this “dream-like and spirit-soothing” image of measured stillness is an
image of imprisonment: “The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a
bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of
our domain” (CW III, 301). Already, we have, as he avers, “the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny
which afterwards so fully overshadowed me,” he says (CW III, 301).
He builds on this dramatic statement and his preceding descriptions, verbally painting a striking
picture of his school’s principal. His perception of an inconsistency in the pastor is reflective of the
schism in his character: “With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I want to regard him
from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend
man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so
minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy
habiliments, administered, ferrule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox,
too utterly monstrous for solution!” (CW III, 302). Still identifying with his adolescent perception,
indeed transforming it into melodrama, he unwittingly reveals himself. His exaggerated descriptions of
the regally attired pastor he saw from a distance and the “sour visage” he encountered at close range
indicate his inability to reconcile appearance and reality, the accouterments or outward look of authority
and the actual administration of authority. His perception of an inconsistency in the pastor, seen first as
an august spiritual representative, then as a villainous truant officer, reflects his internal discord. He
considers the pastor a “gigantic paradox,” an epithet that more fittingly describes the speaker. It is
evident that facial recognition psychopathy manifests as a self-projection of his disintegrated core, i.e.,
alienation of moral conscience from his consciousness of being a member of human society.
His double, like his image of the pastor, reflects his disproportionate sense of reverence with
its self-contradictory rebellion. He considers the pastor’s enforcement of the rules of the academy an
unwelcome interference with his will. Yet, the schoolmaster awakens his “spirit of wonder and
perplexity,” stirring his profound and confused conception of the very principles of moral action. In
describing his double, he again evinces an ambivalent attitude in an unintentional self-betrayal.
Hoffman explains Wilson’s paradoxical nature in these terms: “If Wilson’s double is his conscience, he
is also his Imp of the Perverse. Which is to say that each half of the split ego has its own Imp of the
Perverse—Wilson himself is such an Imp to Wilson2, and the first Wilson reveling in obliquity in
acquiescence to a deep impulse in himself which outrages the moral imperative represented by Wilson2“
(Hoffman 213). The projected conscience figure is flawed to the degree the projecting consciousness is
flawed. The unconscious glorification of conscience is equivocated by a passionate rejection of its too
keenly felt imposition.
Reversing Hoffman’s attribution of perversity against conscience, we observe that Wilson is
partially aware of the presence of a benevolent moral imperative: “In his rivalry he might have been
supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there
were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique,
that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and
assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to
arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of patronage and protection” (CW III,
306). He intimates that the pastor is linked to vague memories of his father, who similarly tried to teach
right from wrong, good from evil. Following a logical line of reasoning, he cannot admit that men such
as his father and the pastor were prompted by love to punish him for his bad behavior.
In his attempt to understand why he is being harassed by his double, he associates morality with
religion, and by extension, Wilson with the pastor. His double, like the pastor, whose step is “solemn
and slow” and countenance is “so demurely benign,” is imbued with “unassuming and quiet austerity”
(CW III, 307). Disturbed by his observation of praiseworthy attributes in his double, he attempts to
analyze systematically the feelings his double arouses in him: “It is difficult, indeed, to define, or even
to describe my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture;—some
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petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of
uneasy curiosity” (CW III, 307). As he considers the schoolmaster a “gigantic paradox,” so, too he
consigns to his mysterious double his own “intolerable spirit of contradiction” (CW III, 306). Flawed
conscience figure and a barrier to moral awareness, his double mirrors his unresolved internal division.
He devises a convoluted defense strategy, not fully realizing the extent to which he is his own worst
enemy.
As in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe’s “William Wilson” explores
architectural imagery that symbolically gives expression to the involuted workings of the mind of
individuals who show symptoms of facial recognition psychopathy. Poe conveys in psychologically
symbolic imagery the ambivalent responses of the protagonist to the temporal and spatial restrictions
of his boyhood world: “At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted
and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe
did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions. in every
creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery—a world of matter for solemn remark, or
for more solemn meditation” (CW III, 302). A seemingly superfluous vignette, his description of the
Elizabethan house juxtaposes imprisonment and metaphysical power. Seamlessly, he segues from the
“place of enchantment” to the convoluted mental contortions he suffered: “There was really no end to
its windings—to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with
certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were
sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were
innumerable—incomprehensible—inconceivable—and so returning in upon themselves, that our most
exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we
pondered upon infinity” (CW III, 303). His mind meanders, ascending or descending from one level of
meaning to another.
Completing its movement inward, his description concludes with the schoolroom. His objective
recall of particulars is colored by his childhood impressions. His cryptographically clear yet
indecipherable close-up view is reflective of his perceptual blindness: “The school-room was the largest
in the house—I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with
pointed Gothic windows and a ceiling of oak. Interspersed about the room, crossing, and recrossing in
endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks. so be seamed with initial letters, names at
full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little
of original form might have been their portion in days long-departed” (CW III, 303–4). Hyperaware of
the spatial and temporal limits of the school and its routine, he, “by a mental sorcery long forgotten,”
transforms his sense of containment, oppression, and restriction, creating “a wilderness of sensation, a
world of rich incident, a universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-
stirring” (CW III, 304). He is a transcendentalist manqué because his perception of his restricted
lifestyle hermetically encloses him in a state of isolation from reality.
Unable to admit his mental distress is linked to excessive regimentation, he gives free rein to
his tendency to worship his oppressive pastor and to revel in hysteria. He is as mentally disturbed as he
tells his story as he was when he felt claustrophobic as a schoolboy. His diseased mind has worsened
in that the intimidating schoolmaster’s image is so deeply imprinted in his psyche that he has
internalized the schoolmaster, which enables him to project the moral sense, attributing to his double
the moral presence of the pastor.
Because he is unable to remember the pastor’s face, a symptom of his facial recognition
psychopathy, he is likewise unable to discern the facial features of his double. His partial recognition
of his similarity to his stalker adds to his deprecation. He acknowledges his double’s moral superiority
but continues to deprecate the second Wilson. He notes that the very likeness forms a basis for his
feeling of antagonism; yet, his apparent self-alienation is linked to vague childhood memories of his
father. He confesses, “I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic. and when. a second
William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly
disguised with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition,
who would be constantly in my presence. The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with
every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself”
(CW III, 308). While he resents the resemblances, he is nonetheless fascinated by his double’s sense of
drama: “His cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in the words and in actions; and
most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner
were, without difficulty, appropriated. even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of
course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo
of my own (CW III, 308). He shuns the idea of a “resemblance, moral or physical,” but he criticizes his
double for presuming “to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will—indeed,
to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever” (CW III, 305). Nevertheless, he
concedes his twin’s moral worth: “Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to
acknowledge that his moral sense was far keener than my own; and that I might, today, have been a
better, and thus a happier man, had less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaningful
whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised” (CW III, 310). His recognition
of his double’s moral stature is consistent with his show of remorse at the beginning of his story. Indeed,
he attempts to designate in terms of time “at this distant day,” “I might, today, have been” and “whispers
which I then. hated”) that he has acquired moral sense.
In a progressive unmasking of conscience, he describes many encounters with his double,
whose purpose, moral restraint, he failed to recognize. Gradually, we begin to suspect that his
encounters with his double are full-blown symptoms of facial recognition psychopathy. Each of his
encounters with his putative stalker occurs in a different social setting, which suggests that he projects
his repressed image of himself as conscience figure outward to the point where his self-image obliterates
and displaces the faces of persons whom he encounters as he makes his way from one gambling house
to another.
This trajectory traces two paths, his actual visits, during which he feels increasingly persecuted
by persons whose gaze he misinterprets as projections of his double, but, in reality, he projects his self-
image as a morally aware dissipated gambler on individuals in his social surroundings who, he imagines,
are looking askance at him as he fritters away his fortune. In other words, his allegations get stronger,
indicating that, unwillingly, persons in his social circle are making him feel guilty about his misconduct
as a man who is addicted to gambling.
Each meeting with his double happens when his imagination is awake but his mind is half asleep
or stimulated by wine. Each confrontation results in a simultaneous victory and defeat for his double,
who conveys his disapproval of his improprieties and deceptions; however, his reception of the moral
warning results in an increment in his wickedness. The more he sees, the more he feels compelled
artfully to disguise what he sees. Motivated by self-defeating desire to assert his will, he enshrouds his
glimpses of moral truth in melodrama. Glorifying his vice to justify his wayward behavior, he veils his
encounters with “CONSCIENCE grim, /That specter in my path” (CW III, 299) in little melodramas in
which he plays the role of surprised victim. But he gets ensnared by his ruses. It is Poe who makes light
proceed from darkness.
At the heart of the tale, the wily monologist recalls how he once gazed at his sleeping double’s
face in the harsh glare of a lamp and sneaked away amazed and incredulous: “The bright rays fell vividly
upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked;—and a numbness,
an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. Were these—these the lineaments of William
Wilson?” (CW III, 312). “Awestricken” by the resemblance, he fled “at once, the halls of that old
academy, never to enter them again.” Immediately thereafter, he plunged into a “vortex of thoughtless
folly” and “miserable profligacy” at Eton. After “three years of folly,” resulting in “rooted habits of
vice,” he is interrupted one evening while “insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity” (CW
III, 314). A sophisticated rake, he finds that he is forced by willful determination to cling to a raft of
feigned ignorance, to frame his conscience in a protective curtain of shadows: “In this low and small
room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble
dawn which made its way through the semi-circular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I
became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a white kerseymere morning
frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me
to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish (CW III, 314, my italics). Readers who
are knowledgeable about facial recognition psychopathy may readily identify the narrator, who only
seems to suffer from a form of paranoia, a persecution complex, as afflicted, evidently from childhood,
with a debilitating facial recognition impairment that prevents him from enjoying normal social
relationships.
Aware his discomfiture in social situations lies in his own personality, he sought help from a
classmate, but when he approached, his misery blocked his eyesight. A projected image energized by
his conscience is a sign of his moral aim to connect with his fellow student, but this image also prevents
him from recognizing the face of a member of his peer group.
Nevertheless, he partially comprehends the significance of this incident. Without knowing the
medical terminology, he understands enough to realize he has a disability. He does not want to forget
the incident that made him realize he is deficient in his ability to recognize faces. Unfortunately, his
memory plays tricks on him, and he starts to see his projected image of a facet of his personality, i.e.,
his moral sense, in the form of spectral conscience figures emanating from the depths of his being, his
soul. Without the benefit of medical diagnosis and treatment, he obtains relief in venting his frustration
and emotional overload in telling his story. In writing “William Wilson,” Poe anticipates the therapeutic
method advocated by Freud, a physician who devoted his medical practice to providing palliative care
to patients who suffered from acute mental disturbances. He, like his colleagues in the medical
profession, prescribed drugs to alleviate pain and suffering, but the contribution to medical science for
which he was feted by his peers and acknowledged by intellectuals as the father of the psychoanalytical
school of thought, with its emphasis on interpretation of dreams (symbology) and free association
(liberating the subconscious mind through spontaneously generated word linkages).
The lamplit face imagery reappears at key moments in the narrative, confirming William
Wilson’s facial recognition psychopathy, in the form of the second Wilson, whose presence coincides
with inner promptings normally associated with twinges of conscience. Since he lacks the benefit of a
medical diagnosis, he is reduced to taking evasive action. Not surprisingly, he develops a sociopathic
antipathy to society. His double is a ghostly silhouette whispering in his ear: “It was the pregnancy of
solemn admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character, the tone,
the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables, which came with a thousand
thronging memories of by-gone days” (CW III, 314). Interpreting the utterances as the “insinuated
counsel” (CW III 315) of his double, he is not detained by a serious consideration of the implied reproof:
“Although this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanescent
as vivid. in a brief period, I ceased to think upon the subject; my attention being all absorbed in a
contemplated departure for Oxford” (CW III, 315). Suggesting that his double aroused no change in
him, he reports that his “constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor” on receipt of a
large endowment from his parents: “I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad
infatuation of my revels” (CW III, 315).
For two years, he, carefree, dashing gambler, increases his “already enormous income at the
expense of the weak-minded” (CW III, 316). Upon unintentionally causing the financial ruin of a
gentleman named Glendinning, reputedly an “immeasurably wealthy” nobleman (CW III, 318), he is
exposed as a cheat. Having maintained the appearance of a debonair gambler, he is disturbed by the
reproving looks of those who pity Glendinning for falling prey to being victimized: “The pitiable
condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom overall. I could not help but feel the
many burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party. I will even
own that an intolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden
and extraordinary interruption which ensued” (CW III, 318). Transforming guilt into wonder, he
embarks on another flight of fancy. A whispering voice exposes him; it is, at least in spirit, an oblique
confession: “The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full
extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by magic, every candle in the
room. “Their light, in dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had entered. closely muffled in
a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and we could only feel that he was standing in our
midst. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled me to
the very marrow of my bones, .’ You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person
who has to-night won at écarté. Please to examine. the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve” (CW
III, 318–319). Distracted by the auditory impression made by the words, the morally blind narrator fails
to apprehend the sense. Bridging the gap between the rapidly fading appearance of mere mischief and
the emergent reality of his deceit, his double, carrying out the joyless task of “fulfilling a duty” (CW
III, 319) informs the company of the fraudulent deception. Already aware that Glendinning was
victimized by Wilson, the room remains silent: “Any burst of indignation upon this discovery would
have affected me less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which it was received”
(CW III, 320). His mask of respectability worn thin, he is less concerned over his humiliating exposure
as a card shark than he is appalled and offended by the stranger’s temerity in thwarting him from
reaching his goal.
Accustomed to the servile obsequiousness usually bestowed on him by sycophants, he
boorishly denounces the stranger: “In no one of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed
my path, had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if
fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority
so imperiously assumed!” (CW III, 322). His growing awareness of his double as a conscience figure
increases but, so, too, is his persecution complex sharpened. Ironically, when he scornfully belittles his
double’s cloak-and-dagger approach, he unintentionally mocks himself: “I had also been forced to
notice that my tormentor, for a very long period of time. had so contrived it, in the execution of his
varied interference with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face [my italics]. Be
Wilson what he might, this [italics in text], at least, was but the verist of affectation, or of folly” (CW
III, 322).
Overarching self-pride causes him to brandish his facial recognition psychopathy as a weapon
in that he attributes his duplicity and entrapment tactics against Glendinning to the stranger who exposes
his swindle: “Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton—in the destroyer
of my honor at Oxford—in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, my passionate
love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt,—that in this, my arch-enemy and evil
genius, I could fail to recognize the Wilson of my schoolboy days? Impossible!” (CW III, 322). He
credits his double with his own failures. His references to his “honor,” “ambition,” “revenge,”
“passionate love,” and “avarice” are melodramatic and ironically reflect his lack of honor, insincerity,
excesses, and lack of self-knowledge.
As the widower in “Ligeia” claims that his first wife possesses supernatural powers, hence is
not a bona fide person, so, too, the hard-drinking gambler, who is caught in the act of cheating, alleges
that he is foiled not by a member of human society, but a mysterious phantom who wields a cosmic
force beyond his control: “The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated
character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a
feeling of even terror with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had
operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to
suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will” (CW III, 322–23).
Commented [APM11]: AU: Kindly confirm the text.
Consistent with his heightened dissipation, he distances himself from his double; and thus, he
consciously lays claim to willfully committing fraud against Glendinning and the moral standards of
society.
The setting of the final confrontation is a masquerade ball. Intoxicated, belligerent, and
confused, Wilson is held back while “anxiously seeking (let me not say with what unworthy motive)
the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting DiBroglio” (CW III, 323). Wilson claims
that he heard his double’s “ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper” and, he says, “I turned at once
upon him who had thus interrupted me” (CW III, 323–24). Having anticipated interference from his
double, he immediately affronts a man who, like himself, wears “a mask of black silk [that] entirely
covered his face” (CW III, 324). His accusations are ironic reflections of his own dishonorable
intentions: “‘Scoundrel!’ I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as
new fuel to my fury, ‘scoundrel! Accursed villain! You shall not—you shall not dog me unto death!”
(CW III, 324). He presents the dramatic closet scene as the final battle with his double, but there are
also subtle signs of unacknowledged foul play.
In my critical opinion, scholars, and critics have overlooked subtextual insinuations that the
monologist has murdered not his projected image of moral conscience but an actual person in his story,
most likely the “aged and doting” Duke DiBroglio. In describing the old-fashioned Renaissance cloak
and dagger duel, he ascribes great strength to himself, while his perceived rival, hitherto presented as
aggressor and villain, now appears weak and frail: “He staggered against the wall, while I closed the
door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh,
drew in silence and put himself upon his defense” (CW III, 324). He presents himself as a glorious
victor: “The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic within every species of wild excitement, and felt
within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by the sheer
strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity,
repeatedly through and through his bosom” (CW III, 324). He places the brutal murder in the context
of a melodrama, with himself emerging as a romantic hero. Finding refuge in confusion, the evil
gambler, anxious to impart the belief that he killed a mysterious stranger whom he would mistake for
himself, approaches the truth:
A large mirror, so at first it seemed to me in my confusion—now stood where none had been
perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features
all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.
Thus, it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist—it was Wilson, who then stood
before me in the agonies of his dissolution. Not a thread in all his raiment—not a line in all the marked
and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own! (CW
III, 325).
His claim that he has slain an imaginary conscience figure, a self-projected image, depends on
his identification of the decedent as Wilson.
But I contend that his facial recognition psychopathy prevents him from serving as a reliable
narrator. His neurological impairment blocks him from recognizing the identity of the nobleman who
whispered admonishing warnings to him when he was winning at cards by cheating. In contradistinction
to David Ketterer, who interprets the slaying of the double by Wilson as “the suicidal conclusion of
‘William Wilson’” (184), William Howarth asserts that “The double is Wilson’s diseased Self, or at
least a manifestation of that Self. Destroying the double is his ultimate act of selfishness, yet
paradoxically, that deed effects his cure” (21). As Howarth suggests, when Wilson destroys his double,
a psychological aberration, he seems to succeed in reintegrating the alienated conscience inasmuch as
the conventional moral sense implied in the word “ought” is internalized. But this means that he now
knows that he is guilty, not innocent. The act that renders him more conscious of the moral significance
of his actions is an act of murder, according to Howarth, a symbolic act, but in my view, a criminally
insane act. Wilson counteracts the gain in personality integration by at the cost of a corresponding
increase in immorality. His life of “unpardonable crime” has brought him happiness, but “unspeakable
misery” (III, 299). To compound matters, he seems to think that he now lacks a conscience, but his
tortuous monologue suggests otherwise. Ultimately, his failure lies in the direction of his lack of full
consciousness, caused by his facial recognition psychopathy.
4.9 From Representation of Reality to Robotic Recognition Helpers
Ligeia’s husband is oblivious of the way his hidden motives affect his selection, manipulation, and
perception of material objects, among which are the décor of an abbey he purchases and the architectural
features of a nuptial chamber; indeed, to his flawed perception, a wife is a material object he owns.
Although he describes Ligeia in minute detail, he nevertheless fails to recognize the role she plays in
revealing his psychic and moral nature. Virtually ignoring Ligeia as the woman she is, she appears to
his mind’s eye as a paragon of perfection. Her character is conceived and molded in his mind, like a
fictional character. As described by the narrator, she is a mentally fashioned image of his ideal woman.
Literary critics observe that Ligeia is partly a serious representation and partly a satirical treatment of
the dark romantic lady of gothic romance (Griffith, Gargano, Stovall). As the author, Poe embeds the
unconscious motives of the narrator, Ligeia’s husband, in the subtext. Poe confers on the narrator the
freedom to express conscious desires which, however, emanate from motives of which he remains
unaware. Poe weaves the narrator’s impaired facial recognition into the story such that this
psychological flaw becomes readily apparent to readers who decipher the meaning of the story by
analyzing metaphors, imagery, and symbolism contained in the narrator’s self-dramatizing narrative
discourse.
Reversing and undermining qualities of traditional romantic heroines, Poe’s tale of mystery and
imagination conveys moral and artistic purpose. Unbeknownst to the narrator, his soul is the site of a
conflict between two dynamic forces that gradually become polarized as good and evil. These polar
opposites change places in a subtle and ironic reversal at the end of the narrative. Throughout the tale,
the narrator showcases his first wife, Ligeia, who outshines Rowena, his second wife; nevertheless, his
innate tendency is toward Rowena. LL, a gorgeous brunette, represents the narrator’s idealized
knowledge of truth, beauty, and goodness. LR, the lovely blonde, actually represents material wealth,
gold, or more precisely, the narrator’s thirst for gold. The narrator downplays Rowena, reserving all his
praise for the spiritually inclined, intellectual Ligeia. Ostensibly the dark woman associated with dark
passions, Ligeia elicits not only the narrator’s feelings of romantic love; he also stands in awe of her
“stern passion” (Poe, Complete Works II, 249). The psychic transformations he undergoes, from ideality
to materialism, from the material to a final insight that coincides with his attainment of complete bliss,
commingled with woe—these internalized events are given objective expression in melodramatic
scenes of Ligeia’s death and revivification. Poe’s depiction of the narrator’s failure to attend to Rowena
and frenzied struggle to resuscitate Ligeia points to the psychic mechanism that enables a serial
murderer to break the law repeatedly without compunction. David Halliburton describes this soporific
emotional turgidity: “If Ligeia’s soul-mate shrieks when she returns, it is because that return in one
sense confirms his inferiority—makes him, in a word, a victim. This transcendent woman possesses all
life and all power; takes up all the breathing space; reduces the man to a position of despair, or adoration.
He could never, if he wanted to, be rid of her. But does he want to be? For this defeat is also a kind of
triumph. To experience the return of the other, to watch her emerge victorious, is to experience
vicariously the reality of transcendence. Woman has proved, through the force of her will, that life is
everlasting. The achieving of this complex goal, the victory which is also a defeat, is at once a tribute
to the continuity of personal identity and a bridge to eternal salvation” (Halliburton 218). But as I have
shown, the narrator suffers from facial recognition psychopathy, which results in the sort of sociopathic
transcendence of one’s fellow human beings that is associated with criminality, yet is symptomatic of
latent moral awareness.
Similarities link “Ligeia” to “William Wilson,” but the structural design of the latter is a key
that unlocks the locked room mystery of the two women who are self-projected animals, specifically,
conscience figures, in the former.
Poe, in “William Wilson,” constructs the narrative in a way that foreshadows the cosmological
scheme he presents in Eureka: A Prose Poem, which was published posthumously in 1851 with the
subtitle “An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe.” In Eureka, Poe endeavors to conceive of
matter in its simplest form and envisions “a particle of one kind—of one character—of one nature. a
particle absolutely unique, individual” (Poe, Complete Works XVI, 207). This atomic unit may be split
“because He who created it, by dint of his Will” can divide it through the “energetic exercise of the
same Will” (CW XVI, 207). The purpose of the creation of this article is the “constitution of the
Universe from it” (XVI, 207). Through the action of diffusion, a visible, material universe emanates
from the invisible “primordial Particle” (CW XVI, 207). By the double nature of this spiritual center,
which is essentially an empty core, a void, a nothingness, the diverse and multiple material particles are
made to form a unified design: “The design of variety out of unity—diversity out of sameness—
heterogeneity out of homogeneity—complexity out of simplicity—in a word, the utmost possible
multiplicity of relation out of the emphatically irrelative One” (CW XVI, 208). The first particle of
matter corresponds to the “primordial Particle,” in which reside the diametrical opposites of oneness
and endless divisibility: “The assumption of absolute Unity in the primordial Particle includes that of
infinite divisibility” (CW XVI, 207). Joseph Jean-Claude, who specializes in laser optics,
psychophysics, and cognitive science, observes symmetry’s “plurality of attributes”: “From that
vantage point, the state of symmetry immanent to a circle or a sphere (3D circle) is unitary, in the sense
that every point on the circle is interchangeable with one another in only one way, defined by the radius
of the circle, whereas the point[s] on an ellipse have two ways to interchange with one another, as
referentially defined by the major and the minor axes. Therefore, the state of symmetry immanent to an
ellipse is twice as rich as the unitary state of symmetry attributable to the circle. There is to it a binary
quality, in opposition to the unitary quality of the monolithic state of symmetry of a circle or a sphere”
(17).
In his tales of mystery and imagination, Poe selects a first-person narrator and endows this
primary narrative unit with “one nature,” making it “a particle absolutely unique, individual.” William
Wilson is also a narrative unit that is divided against itself. He has a double nature, partly creative,
partly destructive, in my view, comparable to the fusion of a photon and graviton. Poe’s narratological
strategy may be analogized such that the moral element is comparable to an electron in its elliptical
orbit about a proton (personality). It is plausible that Poe’s depiction of fictive subjects displaying
symptoms of facial recognition psychopathy may serve as blueprints helpful to workers in AI capable
of devising robotic or computerized helpers. Certainly, Poe’s “William Wilson” and Eureka are most
compatible with, and anticipatory of, contemporary scientific research. In the observable
electromagnetic realm of elementary subatomic particles, according to André Michaud, a specialist in
quantum mechanics and neurolinguistics, who in a Research Gate discussion with the author about
submicroscopic, macroscopic, and astronomical particle physics, uses “a metaphor to highlight that
within the hydrogen atom, the electron is as far from the proton as Neptune is from the Sun, if we were
to increase the measured volume of the proton to the same volume as the Sun” (Michaud, 2019), such
that if the proton of a hydrogen atom (two of which are part of a water molecule) was enlarged to
become as big as the Sun, the electron stabilized at mean distance from the proton into its least action
orbital would then be as far away from this enlarged proton as the orbit of Neptune is from the Sun in
the Solar system, meaning that the hydrogen atom would become as large as the entire Solar System”
(Michaud, 2019).
As the narrator of the story, Wilson is born with his initial utterance and he dies with the final
word in the narrative, which stops. His existence is identical with the words of his narration. As a first-
person narrator, Wilson is made to articulate the words of the narration, thus he dramatically creates, or
irradiates himself. However, there is a discrepancy between the image he thinks he is creating and the
image he unwittingly creates. Therefore, not unity, but duplicity, or difference from unity resides at the
core of his ontological being. Wilson is held within the dominion of his own will; however, his will is
divided against itself. When his double final appears to abdicate, the narrator informs the reader through
the words of the alienated portion of his psyche, his conscience, that he has just narrated an act of
metaphysical suicide. The suggestion that he has been secretly aware—though still imperfectly aware—
of the nature of his offense against self and society implicates him in a less romantic, more serious
wrongdoing than the one he describes in his melodramatic tale. His facial recognition psychopathy
mitigates the criminality of his homicidal act. More importantly, in depicting two unreliable narrators
in “Ligeia” and “William Wilson,” Poe furnishes modern social scientists with credible examples
worthy of study by health care workers, as well as friends, relatives, and family members of individuals
who experience symptoms that may be traceable to facial recognition psychopathy. Robotic recognition
helpers are needed as prompters to enable patients suffering from facial recognition psychopathy to
identify persons in their social milieu. A robotic helper programmed like a telephone to act as a
spokesperson, whenever the patient needs to interact with someone, can serve as a security guard to
mitigate the effect of affective psychosis that triggers sociopathic projection of self-hostility. Poe’s
depictions of the husband in “Ligeia” and the gambler in “William Wilson” are representations of reality
that demonstrate, in the simulated virtual reality of imaginative literary art, the need for a palliative,
artificially intelligent robotic helper to compensate for the psychopathological blindness that prevents
sufferers of facial recognition psychopathy from objectively and accurately identifying individuals in
their social environment. Poe’s fictional characters illustrate the mercurial traits of persons afflicted by
facial recognition psychopathy, whose trajectory in their social circle is elliptical and oblique, and an
essential aspect of their character remains hidden and turned away from society. A designer robotic
helper will enable individuals who are handicapped by this neurological defect to be identified
appropriately as disabled.
4.10 Newton, Bohr, Einstein, Arousal, and Covalent Bonding
In psychology, the noun “affect” [af´ekt] means the experience of feeling an emotion or a mood and
carries specialized meaning in psychopathology, in which “affect” refers primarily to the outward
expression of emotions and moods. There are three dimensions of affect:
1. Valence: It refers to the intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness of a situation, an object,
or an event. The feelings of attraction or repulsion are shaped by an individual’s
principles, standards, and judgments; hence valence reflects a person’s values
2. Arousal: It refers to the activation of an individual’s nervous system, which may be
appropriate or inappropriate. For instance, a person may experience agitation that is
caused by an abnormal mental state, characterized by a desire to take action without
knowing the reason why. This absence of cognitive awareness may be dangerous both
to the person and other people in the social environment
3. Motivational Intensity: It refers to an impulsion to act and the strength of the urge to
move toward or away from a stimulus, for example, a person’s decision whether to
interact with another person or not, or whether to get involved in a situation or not.
My application of quantum theory to cognitive affect in Poe’s psychological tale “Ligeia” focuses on
the ending, where the motivational intensity of the narrator, a remarried widower, toward his bed-ridden
second wife, LR, attains equilibrium with his previous motivational intensity relative to his deceased
first wife, LL. His multivalent emotional responses indicate that his behavior is dispersed and not well-
focused. Instead of maintaining his integrity as a husband who loves his wives, first LL, and then LR,
the narrator is physiologically aroused by two contradictory stimuli. In Newtonian terms, he is aroused
by his physical proximity to Ligeia because he is attracted by her intelligence; however, at the same
time, he is repulsed by his desire for her wealth and property. His motivational intensity is attenuated
because divided between love for his wife and lust for her material possessions. Later, he is aroused by
his physical proximity to LR, who, like her predecessor, LL, falls ill. He goes through the motions of
administering a medicinal substance to her, but this potentially positive action is tainted by his manner.
He is held in the grips of a subliminal urge to attain his objective to exchange his wedded wife for his
wife’s estate. His arousal level is divided between his need to maintain the appearance of helping LR
to be cured of her illness and his overriding desire to gain possession of her estate.
Poe’s portrayal of the love triangle is a literary version of quantum cognition that parallels
quantum mechanics. The mystery tale “Ligeia” is an object modeled like astrophysical bodies in the
mechanical universe of Isaac Newton (1643–1727); moreover, it withstands scrutiny under the
subatomic microscopic theory of Albert Einstein. Einstein viewed his scientific achievements as
carrying forward the work of Newton. On 7 November, 1919, the London Times headlines announced
“Revolution in Science/New theory of the Universe/Newtonian ideas overthrown” (Pais, 47). While
Einstein was affiliated with Hebrew University, he visited the tomb of Newton in December 1921. The
most erudite of the French symbolist thinkers, Paul Valéry (1871–1945), recognized Poe as “a precursor
of Einstein” because Poe observes that “every natural law has a reciprocal relation to all other laws”
and “the very idea of matter is inextricably bound up with energy,” which anticipates Einstein’s
representation of the universe (“la representation de l’univers Selon Einstein”) (Watanabe, Beloved
Image, 177). Valéry observes that in Einstein’s cosmos, “Everything at a deeper level consists of
agitations, rotations, exchanges, radiations. Our own eyes, our hands, our nerves, are made of such
things” (Valéry, Collected Works, 8: 167). Poe knew the pathway from Newton to Einstein because he
read Aristotle, Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Comte, Kant, Laplace,
and others. Poe’s tale “A Descent into the Maelstrom” (1841) centers on the force of gravity visual
imagery of a vortex that forcefully ages a young man and transforms him into an old man, which
coincides with Einstein’s thought experiment in which a space traveler unburdened by gravity remains
young while an Earthbound man who is weighed down by gravity ages.
Poe applies Newton’s gravitation law pervasively in “Ligeia” and “William Wilson” and attains
parity with Einstein’s modification of F = ma, i.e., force equals mass times acceleration, as a
narratological strategy. Just as Einstein discovered that E = mc2, so Poe upgrades the mechanistic
Aristotelian dichotomy of plot and character, as well as the Newtonian First Law of inertial motion of
the plot, character, and story. As Einstein discovered the photoelectric effect, so, too, Poe tunnels past
Newton’s macrocosm. The unreliable narrators in “Ligeia” and “William Wilson” can be viewed as
personifications of a black hole, which exerts a gravitational pull that makes matter disappear into it.
Ligeia’s husband narrator omits any details about the death of LL. He simply asserts, “She died.” And
he inherits everything. Next, he weds LR and lives in a luxurious mansion. In agreement with the
philosophical idea associated with Henri Bergson (1859–1941), that repetition affects the quality of
experience, Poe differentiates the way the narrator experiences LL’s death from the way he experiences
LR’s sickness. The reason he tells his story may be traced to his puzzlement over the difference between
the way LL died and the way LR astounds him when he observes that her beautiful blonde hair
transforms into Ligeia’s raven black locks of hair. Bergson reasons that there is a difference between
the presence of an object and its representation in the mind. The immediate perception of an object is
different from the object because the representation is virtual because of image blends in one’s
consciousness with memories. The image of a material object “opposes to every action an equal and
contrary action. and [is forced to] continue itself and to lose itself in something else” (Bergson, 28).
Poe’s ambiguous, or open, endings anticipate the quantum theory interpretation proposed by
Niels Bohr (1885–1962), who demonstrated the phenomenon of superposition. According to his
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, the location and the momentum of an object in a situation
cannot be measured simultaneously. In 1935, Erwin Schrodinger discussed with Albert Einstein a
thought experiment in which a cat is enclosed in a lead box that contains a radioactive trigger and a vial
of poison. As long as the box remains closed, an observer cannot know if the cat is still alive or suffering
ill effects from irradiated poison. Theoretically, quantum superposition may be applied to Poe’s
“Ligeia” and “William Wilson” because of the way they end. The narrators have a credibility gap,
leaving readers uncertain as to whether William Wilson and LR are dead or alive. As the teller of a tale
of conscience, William Wilson maybe a would-be moralist whose lesson is the biblical Golden Rule:
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It may be that the widowed husband has had his
memory jogged so that he experiences an epiphany. In a moment of sudden insight, he recognizes that
he wishes to kill LR for the same reason as he succeeded in slaying LL. Psychologically, his love for
LR, to whom he is sexually attracted, causes his perception to be changed so as to enable his
consciousness to gain cognitive equilibrium such that LR reaches effective situational entanglement
with her husband’s marital history. He looks at LR, whose image joins in a polar covalent bond with
that of LL, whose death and gigantic intellect weigh heavily on his conscience at the other end of the
spectrum from LR. Newton’s Third Law is invoked as the narrator beholds LR and this action
precipitates an equal and opposite reaction in his consciousness.
Poe portrays the narrator’s differing affective responses to LL, whose intellect he respects, and
to LR, whose physical beauty he admires. LL stimulates his desire to expand his mental faculties, his
rational, emotional, and spiritual horizons. Unfortunately, this widening of his perceptual vistas
contaminates his single-minded dedication to his role of husband, drawing his attention away from LL
and undermining his efforts to be a happily married man. In other words, he grows less aware of his
ontological existence as a man, and concomitantly, less aware of LL as a living being. This shift from
existential awareness of himself as a body, i.e., a sensuous being, to abstract desire, i.e., obsessed
preoccupation with acquiring wealth, altered his motivational intensity. Instead of viewing LL as the
object of his love, he began to see her as an obstacle to his subconsciously plotted plan to obtain
ownership of her possessions. In marked contrast, he is motivated by a carnal desire to possess the body
and soul of LR. His physical attraction to his second wife conditions him to develop strong emotional
responses to her physical being. Her outward appearance appeals to his sense of her womanly beauty,
which arouses in him a longing to possess her as an epitomical paragon of wifely womanhood.
Whereas the intellectual and spiritual magnitude of LL inspires in her husband dark,
otherworldly imaginings, the physical beauty of LR stabilizes his mind and emotions. His marriage to
LR improves his cognition. His increased sense of masculine selfhood, including sexual attraction,
cultivates in the narrator an ethical sense of responsibility that was lacking in his sublime and awe-
inspiring relationship with LL. His married life with LL was one of transcendence beyond the confines
of reality. Since he experienced no strong physical bonding with her, his lust for material profit easily
outweighed the valence of his unworldly affection for her.
The ending of “Ligeia” anticipates the discovery of quantum entanglement, which is “one of
the strangest phenomena predicted by quantum mechanics, the theory that underlies most of modern
physics, which says that two particles can be so inextricably connected that the state of one particle can
instantly influence the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are” (“Quantum entanglement,”
Internet). LL is deceased and she is located as far away from LR as the distance that separates life from
death. Nonetheless, LL is entangled with LR.
“William Wilson” illustrates Newton’s Second Law of Motion. William Wilson’s double,
named in the title “William Wilson,” weighs the narrating gambler down, constantly bombarding him.
In accordance with Newton’s Second Law of Motion, the narrator only glimpses his conscience as a
schoolboy, but then the time rate of change in the momentum of the gambler and the magnitude of his
folly increase, relative to the psychic force his double exerts. William Wilson is, then, a molecule
comprised of two atoms: the ghostly conscience figure resembles a photon that energizes whenever the
dissipated gambler behaves unethically as his life descends into a whirlpool of crime. Gravitons and
black holes in space have no mass The narrator claims that he fell into a black hole of evil suddenly and
that his double pushed him. In the end, he disappears into the black hole like a graviton, with his double
trailing behind, like an energized photon emitted when the narrator stabbed a man. “William Wilson”
is a literary work of art that emulates covalent bonding in which William Wilson is intensely motivated
to commit metaphysical suicide. Thus, as he loses his integrity, he intentionally shapes in himself into
an archetypal dehumanized Nobody. Poe portrays a polar covalent bond in which William Wilson as
an Anti-Christ who is located at the opposite pole from Jesus, the Son of God and filled with the Holy
Spirit. “Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics. Quantum
entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of
one particle’s quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles. This
connection is not dependent on the location of the particles in space. Even when entangled particles are
separated by billions of miles, a change in one particle will induce a change in the other. Although
quantum entanglement appears to transmit information instantaneously, it does not actually violate the
classical speed of light because there is no ‘movement’ through space” (Jones, Internet). Jones observes
that “the quantum state of every particle in the universe affects the wavefunction of every other particle,
[but] it does so in a way that is only mathematical. There is really no sort of experiment which could
ever—even in principle—discover the effect in one place showing up in another place” (Internet).
People in the social environment apply quantum theory to “affect” (noun) in Poe’s
psychological tale “Ligeia” to solve the hair color transform problem. At the end of the narrative, the
motivational intensity of the narrator, a remarried widower, toward LR, and attains equilibrium with his
motivational intensity toward LL. Covalent arousal bonding: negative LL + positive LR inhibits
motivational intensity by stimuli: LR body consciousness via sexual attraction activates LL memory,
and therefore, LR = LL.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles
is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of
the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the
particles are separated by a large distance. I interpolate the disparity between quantum entanglement as
a primary feature of quantum mechanics that is lacking in classical mechanics. In contradistinction to
critical interpretations of Poe’s “Ligeia” as a supernatural tale that ends with the supposed revivification
of LL, I propose that the ending is reflective of Poe’s knowledge of scientific principles. Similarly, to
Einstein, Poe was desirous of going beyond Newton’s gravitational theory and laws of motion in the
material universe. In “Ligeia,” he applied his knowledge of Newton’s scientific research, taking it to
the next level, but in the domain of imaginative literature. Poe’s portrayal of LR’s blond hair changing
into the black hair of his deceased first wife, LL, may be interpreted as a foreshadowing of Niels Bohr’s
discovery of quantum entanglement. Bohr discovered that any given pair of electrons behave randomly
until an observer focuses on one of the two electrons, which puts the observed electron in a fixed state,
thus allowing the second electron to be observed as behaving in a manner that is opposite to the first
electron. Bohr here applies to the atomic and subatomic realm of quantum mechanics the same principle
as holds true for Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which governs the domain of such large-scale bodies
as planets in our solar system. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action there is an
equal and opposite reaction (“Lex III: Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive
corporum duorum actiones in se muto semper esse æquales et in partes contrarias dirigi” (Philosophiæ
Naturalis Mathematica Principia, 55)/”Law III: To every action there is always opposed an equal
reaction; or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary
parts” (The Principia, 439).
In Poe’s “Ligeia,” the relationship of the narrator to LL is based on his admiration of her
intellectual ability, not her physical attributes. He succeeds in carrying out his plan to commit uxoricide
because he is not physically attracted to her, even though she is sexually attracted to him. When he
makes bodily contact with her, he presses his body against her, just as she presses her body to him. But
he is motivated by murderous intent, while she is motivated by an equal and opposite desire for love-
making. It is thus easy for him to kill his wife because she welcomes his embrace, which is motivated
by an equal and opposite lust, not for her body, but, instead, for his material gains he will inherit from
her estate after she is dead.
In striking contrast, the relationship of the narrator to LR is based on his attraction to her
physical beauty; indeed, he is sexually attracted to her. Unlike the scholarly LL, who appeals to his
intellect, LR calls his attention to his epistemological identity as a man in the sense of a physical body,
to herself as a sensuous being, a sensual woman, and his lawfully wedded wife. Whereas he was
distracted away from LL’s presence as a physical being by his need to share his spouse’s intellectual
and spiritual pursuits, he is attracted to LR as a man is attracted to a woman as a member of the opposite
sex. As LR’s husband, he enjoys a normal physically intimate, mutually satisfying relationship with his
wife. Her living presence becomes part of her estate. Although he is still motivated by a desire to possess
her material wealth, she proves to become identified in his mind as synonymous with her possessions.
He identified LL as an intellectual and spiritual being set apart from the material world. He was impelled
to do away with her in order to acquire her wealth. But he learns to desire LR in the same way that he
wants her money and property. His recognition of LR as an existential body, an object among other
objects in the material world, enables him to measure her value in a substantial way. Subconsciously,
he lusts after her body just like he covets her money and property.
Poe simulates entanglement in the realm of quantum mechanics by depicting entanglement in
his putatively supernatural tale. Just as physical entanglement breaks through the barrier of Newton’s
classical mechanics, so, too, the theme of Romantic entanglement in Poe’s “Ligeia” evokes quantum
mechanics as applicable to imaginative literature. At the end of the story, the narrator achieves mental
equilibrium when the electrifying intellectual passion of LL is entangled with the charged sexual
passion of LR. Analogous to a pair of electrons located in different domains, LL in the heavenly domain
to which her husband consigns her both in life and in death, LR in the empirically observable world of
reality, the narrator’s two wives symbolize an entangled pair of electrons. Poe’s narrator in “Ligeia”
may be viewed as a Romantic love physicist à la Niels Bohr. Quantum mechanics in physics defines
entanglement such that measurement of one particle’s quantum state determines the possible quantum
states of the other particle. Poe’s depiction of the husband of the entangled wives in “Ligeia” suggests
that the supernatural tale is actually a fable, a tale of conscience in which the narrator acquires cognitive
understanding of himself as a man, widower, and husband. In the end, he understands that there is no
necessity for him to kill LR before he will gain possession of her estate.
Keywords
Alzheimer’s
cognition
conscience
disability
palliate
psychopathy
robotic helper
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