31 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Oval Portrait
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1842A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Oval Portrait and the Golden Frame
The story’s title and the focus of its action and imagery all point to the symbolic significance of the eponymous oval portrait. The description of the portrait’s remarkably lifelike expression is a clue to what the portrait represents: the attempt of art to capture life “realistically.” The frame narrator’s reaction to the painting demonstrates that this attempt is unsuccessful; his discomfort may contribute to an “uncanny valley” effect. Rather than capturing the spark of his wife’s life to create an immortal version of her beauty, the painter has created an off-putting near-copy that disturbs instead of uplifts the viewer.
The painting is a vignette—a portrait painted without a border. Since the image of the painter’s wife is borderless, the gold frame that houses the painting functions as its border, much as the frame narrative “houses” the story of the painter and his wife. This points out the symbolic significance of the gold border—and thus of the frame narrative—as well. The effects of both the portrait and the story depend upon the presence of an audience, something outside of the painting and the story that can contain their meanings. The symbolic meanings of the portrait, its frame, and their relationship to one another function as important supports for the text’s consideration of The Relationship Between Art and Life.
The Small Book
From its first introduction, there are indications that the small tome of stories about the turret’s art is more than just an ordinary book. The use of the passive voice to describe how it “had been found upon the pillow” eliminates the frame narrator as an active agent and hints that the appearance of the “small volume” was arranged by some unknown hand (481). The book’s symbolic value is linked to its function as the container of the story of the oval portrait’s creation and the vehicle for the frame narrator to learn that story. Just as “The Oval Portrait” contains the story of the frame narrator and what he learns and depends for its meaning on the interpretation of Poe’s reader, the small book contains the story of the painter and his wife and depends for its meaning on the interpretation of the frame narrator, supporting the story’s thematic interest in The Relationship Between Art and Life.
Light and Dark
Many of the story’s descriptive passages focus on the symbolic contrast between light and darkness. Early in the story, the frame narrator asks Pedro to light the candelabrum because it is already dark; the narrator reads until “deep midnight” arrives, and then repositions the candles “to throw [their] rays more fully upon the book” he is reading (481). These early scenes repeatedly contrast light with dark; the significance of this contrast is clarified soon afterward, when the frame narrator first encounters the oval portrait.
This picture suddenly emerges when the candlelight shifts to illuminate the nook the picture hangs in. In other words, the portrait seems to emerge into the light from the darkness. The portrait itself is a study in light and dark: The center of the portrait is a “radiant” woman whose image seems to “[melt] imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which [forms] the back-ground” (482). In a ring around this “deep shadow” is the bright gold of the portrait’s frame. This associates the painter’s wife with light but hints that she is surrounded by a “darkness” that she is slowly dissolving into. This idea is echoed in the story-within-the-story, when the artist’s canvas receives the only source of light in the turret and the dying painter’s wife, who was once “all light” is relegated to the turret’s shadows (483). The “light” that is symbolically associated with her life, in this scene, is diverted into the painter’s art, and the painter’s wife is swallowed by the darkness of death.
Lack of Agency
A motif of characters lacking agency over their own lives runs throughout “The Oval Portrait.” The frame narrator encounters the oval portrait in the first place because he has been badly injured and, as a result, is forced to spend the night in the abandoned chateau, unable to get himself to sleep. His discovery of the portrait is not even volitional—he simply happens to move the candelabrum and the portrait is revealed by chance. Once he sees the painting, he is enthralled by it, almost incapable of turning away or thinking about anything else. In the story-within-the-story, the painter is depicted as being virtually a captive to his own art, helplessly focused on it to the exclusion of all else, highlighting The Dangers of Obsession. And the painter’s wife, a meek and obedient wife who is described in terms more appropriate for an animal or an object, is powerless to contradict or change the husband she is so devoted to. She is actually so passive that she sits patiently having her portrait painted until she withers away and dies.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
