Contradicting Eyes

Comparing the Eyes of Emerson to those of Ligeia

The similarities between writers of Gothic horror and Transcendentalism are few.  However, there is a correspondence; both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe address the concept of “eyes” in their writings.  The authors seem to view eyes differently for they allow them to symbolize dissimilar things.  Perhaps by reviewing the eyes of Emerson and those of Ligeia, both will be appreciated more.

Taken from: eyecarecenters.org

To begin with, Emerson considers eyes as the filter in which man views the world around him.  At the end of his work Nature, he concludes, “[s]o shall we come to look at the world with new eyes” (Perkins 1309).  Emerson additionally establishes man, or his soul, as an all-seeing eye.  On page 1284, he writes that “[s]tanding on bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball.  I am nothing.  I see all.”  Some of his statements about eyes appear contradictory though.  In one of my favorite passages, Emerson pens,

“Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping.  This seems partly owing to the eye itself.  The eye is the best of artists” (1286).

Yet, a few pages later, he writes that the eyes are a negative or bad part of life by saying, “[t]he ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye” (1308).

Taken from: show10.gdnm.org

                To compare, the eyes of Ligeia symbolize everything good and wonderful in the universe.  The eyes themselves are large and beautiful, in the odd way that Ligeia was fashioned, and they both “delighted and appalled” the narrator (Perkins 864).  In a way, these eyes illustrate the obsession of the narrator and Ligeia’s perhaps more divine, sagacious character.  Poe writes,

“The expression of the eyes of Ligeia!  How for long hours I pondered upon it!  How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it!  What was it—that something more profound than the well of Democritus—which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?  What was it?  I was possessed with a passion to discover.  Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers” (863).

They do not stand as filters or windows to the world around like the eyes of Emerson.  Indeed, they are the very opposite as Ligeia’s eyes are all while Emerson believed that his eyes led to everything else.

Taken from: sessionmagazine.com

Cite:

Perkins, George B., and Barbara Perkins. The American Tradition in Literature. 12th ed. Vol. 1. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.

Further Reading:

Edgar Allen Poe: The Domain of Artifice. Geneva: University of Geneva, 22 Nov. 2002. PDF. pp. 4-7.  http://www.unige.ch/lettres/framo/articles/pdf/pl_cities1.pdf