Gender Myths in the Southern Literary Messenger and Edgar Allan Poe’s Subversive Responses in “Morella” and “Ligeia”

This article argues that Edgar Allan Poe’s “Morella” and “Ligeia” are critical responses to material published in the Southern Literary Messenger, a journal for which Poe served a short term as editorial assistant. These pieces stressed the presumed superiority of men while drawing attention to feminine fragility, but in “Morella” and “Ligeia,” Poe makes the title characters extremely learned and shows that they teach their husbands, who become mentally dependent on their wives. In addition, Poe applies the language of invalidism to these male figures, destabilizing patriarchal power in the process. During the nineteenth century, “invalid,” a term denoting an individual with an intellectual and physical debility, was used to characterize women as fragile and to promote their dependency on men. In “Morella” and “Ligeia,” Poe thus offers a two-pronged attack on the patriarchal pretension displayed in at least two essays published in the SLM.