The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe (NEB XI)

The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe

Author’s Bio

Name: Edgar Allen Poe

Nationality: American

Date of Birth: January 19, 1809

Death: October 7, 1849 (At the age of 40)

He was a writer, poet, editor, and Literary Critic best known for his poetry and short stories.

Original Title of the Story: Life in Death

Genre: Gothic Horror

Publisher: Graham’s Magazine

Publication Date: April 1842.

Gothic: Gothic is a style that incorporates certain spooky ideas. The broadest definition of Gothic literature is writing that makes use of stunning and dramatic narrative tactics, dark and spectacular landscape, and a general sense of exoticism, mystery, horror, seduction, as well as horror. The first reference to Gothic as it relates to literature can be found in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765 story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story," which was allegedly intended as a subtle joke by the author. He discovered a venue in Gothic literature to investigate psychological trauma, human ills, and mental sickness. Although successful Gothic authors existed both before and after him, no one fully polished the genre like Poe.

Gothic components: Taking place in a castle and a mystifying and tense atmosphere. There is a connection between the castle and its occupants and old prophecy warnings, visions, omens, and supernatural or other enigmatic occurrences. A subtype of metaphor called a metaphor is when one phenomenon (such as rain) is used to represent another like sorrow. Special vocabularies like Mystery (diabolical, enchantment, ghost, goblins, haunted, infernal, magic, magician, prophecy, secret, sorcerer, spirits, strangeness, talisman, vision ) Surprise (alarm, amazement, astonished, astonishment, shocking, staring, surprise, .. Blackness (dark, darkness, dreary, shadowed, black, night), Largeness, and Gothic (enormous, gigantic, giant, large, tremendous, vast, etc., are in use.

CHARACTERS:

Narrator: Wounded man who takes refuge with his valet in an abandoned chateau

Pedro: Narrators valet

Women in the painting: a maiden of rarest beauty

Painter: a passionate, wild, moody man

THEME:

Relations between love and art

How art and life can lead anyone towards perfection but they can also bring destructive results.

Obsession

How the painter was so immersed in his painting that couldn't see his wife slowly falling into death and how she who was so in love with him withstood all the paint with a smile on her face while slowly giving away her life.

Climax: The narrator came to the realization that the painting “sucked” the life out of the young girl. With every brush stroke, a portion of her life was taken away.

About the story: One of Edgar Allan Poe's shorter stories, The Oval Portrait, explores the relationship between art and life through the narrator's encounter with an oval portrait of a young woman in an Apennine chateau. The young bride and the oval painting of her that her artist-husband painted can be seen as symbiotic, though the story hasn't given us any background information regarding the narrator's incidents. The story could be read as a straightforward declaration about the nature of creativity, namely that no truly great work of art has ever been created for free, rather than a warning about the dangers of putting art before life. The oval portrait is the first painting to strike the narrator's attention among the others since it is so lifelike and the artist has been able to capture the vital essence of his subject. The conclusion of the novel lacks a moral compass, and there is no concluding line alerting us that the story is a cautionary tale about the perils of creativity. In his account of an artist who eventually grew to prioritize his craft over real life, Poe foreshadows the later aestheticism or writing for the sake of writing, that occurs among authors.

ASSIMILATION: The Oval Portrait” relies on and, arguably, critiques the traditional pairing of male artist and female model, where masculinity tends to be associated with inspired creativity, activity and seeing, and femininity with creative inspiration, passivity, and being seen. It is still seen in the present patriarchal society where women are considered to be the source of amusement for some men. On the other hand, it’s also possible to read “The Oval Portrait” as Poe’s subtle and indirect critique of female objectification and the denial of female agency. This story is also highly relevant to the present love life of many youths filled with toxicity and egoism. Obsession with people work or things lead them to suffer from many mental illnesses. These days there are also many cases of lovers being so obsessed with love that acid attacks, murders, and other such inhumane acts take place.

Analysis of themes, feminism, and Gothic: The modern women's movement started in the early 18th century, and the feminist movement produced a lot of fiction in feminist versions from that point on, pushing the female, who was in the marginal and inferior status, into people's fields of view. Poe might, however, be criticizing the dehumanizing effects of the masculine gaze, which oppresses and objectifies female subjects, by creating his figures in this manner. In terms of how he depicts the dynamic interaction between the painter and his model wife, it can initially seem as though the author is adapting to his times. Poe depicts the wife as a docile "angel of the house, a one-dimensional cliché of the perfect 19th-century woman, in broad strokes. She is present solely as an object for the painter to consider, and her agency and subjectivity are virtually eliminated: "She was humble and obedient, and sat silently for several weeks in the dark lofty turret-chamber where the light dropped upon the pale canvas just from afar.

The painter sees not the wife herself but the fantasy of her that he is creating on the canvas; However, the wife sees the painter as a human being and suffers his passions out of love for him, aware that he takes a fervid and burning pleasure" in the act of painting. The reader might immediately assume that Poe is portraying this dynamic as a social given, just the way things are because the relationship between husband and wife is one of inequality, similar to the relationship between artist and model. However, "The Oval Portrait" might also be interpreted as Poe's subtly and indirectly criticizing of female objectification and the denial of female autonomy. The melancholy conclusion of the story, in which the painter eventually looks up from the finished work to discover that his wife has passed away, may cause the reader to reconsider the author's motivations. The model does actually just exist as a one-dimensional stereotype on paper.

However, that may be because the reader is effectively being led to see her via the eyes of the painter, who, ignorant of his wife's living reality, unintentionally kills her through neglect, as opposed to directly through the author's own eyes. In other words, perhaps Poe's failure to fully develop the wife's personality and make her into a three-dimensional human being is due less to his own complicity in the dehumanization of women and more to his emphasis on the ignorance of those who engage in it. The girl has become the traditional beautiful face, existing only for the satisfaction of men, as the painter has failed to depict the totality of her body, and by extension, maybe, he has failed to show her genuine nature and full personality as well.

It could be tempting to counter that all portraits only show parts of the human body and that this doesn't always mean the artist was dehumanizing or objectifying the subject. Poe uses it to examine the delicate connections between agency, gender, and artistic creations, pointing out certain social mechanisms that determine who sees and who is seen and possibly criticizing these structures subtly but powerfully. Similar to how the wife's death in "The Oval Portrait" demonstrates Poe's accusation and critique of the violent and callous patriarchal image. The narrator, who is quite bored and in need of some entertainment, and the husband of the woman in the picture, who needs to capture the woman's beauty via his art, are the only men in the story who require the woman.

Critical Analysis: Life vs. Art, The destructive power of love and art, Feelings regarded as optimistic like love can completely destroy a person if its meaning is misinterpreted, Misinterpretation of the theme of the story such that “Great art comes from great sacrifices.” Both the obsession of the painter with art and the blind devotion of the maiden toward her husband were equally surprising and toxic. The devotion and sacrifice of the woman for her husband whom she loved dearly were wonderfully portrayed and were painful and beautiful at the same time. Due to her immense devotion, it's quite frustrating while reading the story as she smiled with no regret when she was withering and drained of energy. Maybe because of the history and the sacrifice that the portrait holds the narrator was able to recognize the portrait among various paintings that piqued his deep agitation

What are the roles of men and women?

The wife is portrayed in the story as being treated more like an object than a person because her husband makes her wait without the necessities of life for weeks on end so he can paint her. During the painting, as he becomes more and more enamored with her, the woman deteriorates and ultimately dies.

Do characters adopt characteristics from the other gender? 

The wife is important for the husband, a painter, to pursue his passion for painting, therefore the woman in the painting is necessary to the men, yet they are still shown as meek and docile. The narrator is curious to discover more about the woman in the painting after he first notices it.

How does this alter how people perceive them?

The husband fails to perceive the wife's needs across the story, and by doing so, he raises more general questions about the standing of women in society.