With nothing to illumine, Wilson’s conscience turns tattle-tale, driving the bad Wilson on to greater sins if only to escape his own inner dullness.

The moral ambiguities of ‘William Wilson’ are illumined by Poe’s more detailed exploration of ‘will’ in ‘Ligeia’. Here too the tale’s triumph lies in neither plot nor character. As Richard Wilbur observed long ago, the story is coherent without making the least bit of sense.2 A man marries a woman; they study arcane knowledge; she dies. He marries a second, very different woman; she dies, but arises from her funeral bier in the shape of the first wife. Such a narrative is structurally balanced but devoid of incident or individuals. Rowena has no identity except as second wife, and the narrator lacks even a name. The final character, Ligeia, is explicitly defined in terms of this absence of characteristics—the narrator’s inability to remember anything about her except some vague physical features. The two death scenes and the exposition that separates them flesh out the situation without making it more comprehensible. What, after all, is the point of parallels between the two marriages, and especially of the final resurrection of Rowena as Ligeia? Why does so sketchy a plot waste time on detailed descriptions of background material, like Ligeia’s relation to astronomy, the oriental decor of Rowena’s bridal chamber, and the narrator’s fruitless ministrations to her corpse? Psychoanalytic and symbolic readings only compound the confusion by making the narrative too sensible—a lunatic’s compulsive confession of killing two wives—or senseless in a different way—a Neoplatonic allegory of cosmic reunification into the Primal One. Such readings prove that the plot does not mean what it says and that it does not mean anything else either.

By discarding characterization and narrative, this stripped-down tale, from its epigraph on, focuses exclusively on Ligeia’s stupendous will to life. This preoccupation might have made Ligeia more personable. Will is traditionally considered the quintessential human faculty, what distinguishes us from unselfconscious beasts. But Poe was not interested in anything so sentimental as volition or agency. Like the Puritans before him, he doubted humans’ ability to shape their destinies through conscious choice. People fail to get what they want in the tale. Ligeia’s will does not prevent her death, and in the farcical final scene, human intentions are treated as pointless, virtually comic. Bobbing up and down on its funeral bier, Rowena’s body responds adversely to her husband’s caretaking: only when, abandoning all will, he collapses in an unconscious stupor, can the body revive. Still, the tale’s scepticism about the efficacy of will should not obscure its recognition that conscious desire is one of the ways humans identify themselves. If will does not control the universe, it does define who we are; and whether or not wishes are fulfilled, Ligeia’s personality resides in her ‘wild’ desire to live, and the narrator’s in his ‘mad’ desire to resurrect her.

Ligeia’s will was for Poe only a specific case of a more fundamental problem—the meaning of ‘personal identity’ itself. By ‘identity’ he did not mean personal essence, some defining trait or temperament. Identity addressed not who a person really was but how a person could be a unit—how we wake up in the morning knowing ourselves to be the same consciousness that went to sleep the night before. In the early ‘Morella’, the heroine embraces the identity theory of John Locke:

That identity which is termed personal, Mr Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the sameness of a rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all to be that which we call ourselves—thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal identity.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke questioned how persons knew themselves to be the same entity from one moment to the next. The answer could not lie in bodily integrity: all living things change size and shape, constantly losing thousands of dead cells and growing thousands of new ones without any sense of discontinuity. Instead unity had to rest in consciousness itself, especially as measured in terms of memories and of striking moments of self-consciousness, such as exercises of individual will. Yet, Locke wondered, was the unity of consciousness enough to guarantee personhood? If a man were born with Socrates’ memories, would he too be Socrates? Was the stability of identity jeopardized by the radical differences of consciousness in the same individual drunk and sober?

The relation between Locke’s unifying ‘identity’ and Ligeia’s will is underscored in a companion piece, ‘The Man that was Used Up’. Cast in the journalistic form of a celebrity profile, this little-known comic sketch recounts an admirer’s attempts to know fully a famous military hero by interviewing both the general and his friends. The narrator discovers finally that the Indian fighter is nothing more than inflated reputation and artificial limbs, a triumph of publicity and prosthetics. Taken on its own, the tale is a delightful (and still timely) satire on imperialist politics and the roles of gossip and the media in popular myth-making. Yet the piece also comments explicitly on the ‘Ligeia’ narrator’s entirely more serious attempt to know his wives.