The Oval Portrait

Edgar Allan Poe’s work is a part of the American Gothic Romantic tradition. Romanticism, a style of art and literature that flourished from the late 1700s well into the 1800s, was originally a European movement focused on glorifying nature, emotion, and imagination. Gothic Romanticism, which grew out of this tradition, focuses on the macabre and on the more troubling aspects of emotion and imagination. It is characterized by eerie, isolated settings, foreboding atmospheres, and morbid and sensational plots. For this reason, Gothic Romanticism is also sometimes referred to as “Dark” Romanticism. These dark elements can be clearly seen in “The Oval Portrait.” The abandoned chateau with its strange architecture and tattered decor is an isolated and unsettling environment, and the morbid story the narrator reads while he is there is touched by a hint of the supernatural. Poe even nods to one of the founders of Gothic Romanticism, English novelist Ann Radcliffe, early in “The Oval Portrait” when he has the narrator mention that the chateau resembles a setting in one of her works.

The story is part of a group of Poe’s works that Poe himself referred to as “arabesques.” Early in the 19th century, designs based on a traditional style of art from the Islamic world became very popular in Europe and America. These intricate and stylized depictions of leaves, flowers, and vines were called “arabesques.” The arabesque style was sometimes criticized as too elaborate, imaginative, and unrealistic—criticisms that were also leveled against Gothic Romantic narratives. Poe’s use of the term “arabesque” in his description of the golden frames, and his use of the same term to describe the story itself, directly compares the story to the elaborate frame around the oval portrait and serves as a winking defense of Gothic Romanticism.

“The Oval Portrait” is doubtless inspired by Poe’s taste for the Gothic and his fears for his wife Virginia’s health. However, Poe was also inspired by the work of another Romantic author whom he greatly admired, British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This is especially clear in “Life in Death,” the original, longer version of the story that would become “The Oval Portrait.” The story’s title, “Life in Death,” is an allusion both to a character in one of Coleridge’s most famous works, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), and to the epitaph that Coleridge wrote for himself, referencing his difficulty breathing toward the end of his life: “That he who many a year with toil of breath / Found death in life, may here find life in death” (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Epitaph.” Poetry Foundation). Poe’s story’s setting and structure are similar to another Coleridge work, “Allegoric Vision” (1795), in which a traveler in the Apennine Mountains relates his experience of seeking shelter from the elements in a chapel and encountering a pilgrim there who tells him the story of an allegorical vision.

Although “Life in Death” is not the final form of the story, it provides important context for “The Oval Portrait.” For instance, when Poe revised “Life in Death” into “The Oval Portrait,” he cut most of the exposition explaining the frame narrator’s situation. In “Life in Death,” the reader learns that the narrator’s injuries happened when he was attacked by highway robbers and that he has taken a significant quantity of opium to cope with his pain. Poe’s revisions concentrate the reader’s attention on the narrator’s experiences inside the chateau and make it less likely that the reader will interpret these experiences as a hallucination.

Poe’s revisions created the lean, focused story known today as “The Oval Portrait.” It is a brief text densely packed with meaning, and as a result, it has had a lasting impact. For instance, critics have pointed to “The Oval Portrait” as a key influence on The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde. “The Oval Portrait” has also been adapted into several film, play, and graphic narrative versions.