#getting indignant on behalf of a man who's been dead since 1849

[somethingsupwithdrac]

No letters from Jonathan, Mina, or Lucy today. :(

Poe Daily number three is here, though, and it’s another of my favourites!

The Oval Portrait is short but decidedly not sweet, although quite effective. It’s another of Poe’s “death of a beautiful woman” themed works, which pops up a lot because he thought that it was the most poetical topic in the world. We stan a gothic king.

This one inspired elements of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (if you have not read it, go read it, please I love it), but they’re used in a different way. You have the supernatural portrait there, but it reveals something about the subject and not the artist. Buuut I’m not here to talk about Dorian Gray, so.

I like how this is framed as an unnamed narrator who, having been injured in some way (fun fact: there was originally a slightly longer version of this story that explains exactly how but it got cut for relevance after the initial publication), holes up in an abandoned mansion in Italy with his valet. Honestly, exploring creepy old mansions and finding dark secrets therein is such a classic and fun horror trope. My favourite versions are ones like this, where the people telling the story break in, find it apparently very recently abandoned, and still go “hm, yeah, this looks like a great place to bed down/explore. Surely there is no horrifying reason it looks like the owners ran for their lives in the middle of the night.”

So we have our narrator, a bit delirious with blood loss, and his valet, making themselves at home in this great abandoned mansion, and finding himself transfixed by the paintings on the walls and the conveniently placed guidebook to them. He spends hours looking at them and reading about each one and then...one he hasn’t seen before catches his eye, almost like it’s calling to him and specifically drawing his attention to it. And of course, it’s a portrait of a beautiful young woman, so radiant and lovely as to almost seem alive, and it’s this strange lifelike quality that soon disturbs our narrator enough to go looking for its explanation in the book, and oh, boy, what an explanation it is.

She was the artist’s wife, to her own eventual misfortune, and from the very beginning of her marriage had a rival for his affections in art. There’s something very sad about all of it, truly. This: “hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover” is such a great expression of her grief and frustration at always coming second to her husband’s first, greatest love, art. (I was going to say “paints such a picture” but that felt a bit on the nose.) His desire to paint a portrait of her should be an expression of his love for her, that he wants to capture her forever, but she’s still coming in second for his love, as he ends up obsessively painting day after, oblivious to the way that his single-minded fixation is sucking the life out of her, figuratively and literally. She says nothing because she loves him, despite growing weaker and more despondent with each passing day, and yet he doesn’t even notice her suffering until it’s too late because he’s too fixated on the art and not the human, and in the end she pays the price for his obsession, much to his sudden horror.

And that’s where it ends, our unnamed artist staring aghast at his painting and the corpse of his wife, with the implication that he has only realized, after that last brushstroke, that his painting Life itself into the portrait has literally drained the life from the real woman he loved. (We don’t get any further reaction from out narrator, but I think it’s safe to assume he didn’t get much sleep that night.)

There’s something to be said here about the view of the relationship between art and death and art and life, and how Poe though of poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty in words, and the ways that idea translates into other art forms. Mostly though, there’s something to be said about the effectiveness of such a short story at creating an intensely creepy atmosphere and a shocking ending that packs a punch. 

( Also, apropos of nothing I’m just gonna say right now: Fuck Rufus Griswold, the miserable envious bastard. All my homies hate Rufus Griswold.)