Suspense In Poe's Liigeia

Edgar Allan Poe is known for the horror in his poems and short stories due to the building of suspense. He writes so that the suspense quickly builds and then he ends his work off usually with a sudden realization. This sudden realization allows for the tension to quickly unravel and leave the reader with a sense of relief and satisfaction. Poe builds suspense in his short story Ligeia through the death of a beautiful woman, the tone of the story, and being descriptive. Most of Poe’s work involves the death of a beautiful woman. In Ligeia this helps to build suspense by expressing the narrator’s deep love for lady Ligeia. An example would be that Poe uses phrases such as “the magnificent turn of the short upper lip” and “the soft, voluptuous …show more content…
Ligeia is no exception when it comes to having a tone that speeds up. It starts with the narrator not remembering how he met Ligeia and then goes on to describe her appearance. The tone becomes faster and tension builds when Rowena’s corpse begins to twitch. He also builds tension by using key terms such as “shriveled” and “ghastly” when describing how Rowena’s corpse went back to its previously dead state (Poe 652). Although the tone is important, the most important method that Poe used to build suspense in Ligeia is his descriptiveness. The narrator starts out by describing Ligeia’s face. According to Frank Adam this is Poe’s attempt at framing relationships with his readers. This helps to express the deep depression that the narrator goes through after her death. The narrator also describes the face of Rowena’s corpse when she briefly gets the color back in her face. This is where the suspense begins to increase. The suspense climaxes when the narrator “shrieked aloud” that Ligeia was standing before him (Poe 653). In short, the death of a beautiful woman, the tone of the story, and being extremely descriptive are methods of suspense building that Edgar Allan Poe used in