The Oval Portrait Summary and Analysis

These summaries and analyses are my own views on the stories, however, I am happy to take any comments that you may have.

Summary
Once again in this story we have an unnamed narrator who we know very little about, apart from the fact that he has a valet called Pedro and that he has been injured whilst travelling in Italy. The narrator takes refuge in a gloomy mansion (just for something different), which is decorated with tapestries and paintings. The narrator appears fascinated by the paintings and discovers a book detailing the history of the paintings.
He reads on into the night and as he moves the candle closer to see more clearly the light hits a particular portrait. It is a portrait of a young lady. The narrator is not so taken in by the subject or her beauty but more that he is fixated on how lifelike the woman looks in the picture. The writer is disturbed by this picture and turns his attention back to the book.
The book explains the history of the picture and that it was the portrait of an artist’s wife. The artist seemed to love his art more than he loved his wife. She agrees to sit so that he can paint her though he tends to pay more attention to the canvas than his wife.
The wife sits for hours and starts to wither and fade but the artist does not notice, and it is almost that he is drawing the colours from his wife and putting them on the canvas.
When the artist finally finishes he states ‘This is indeed life itself!’, he is so excited by the work that he has done that he turns to his wife only to realise that she is dead.

Analysis
This is an interesting idea and hearkens back to a similar story by Oscar Wilde in ‘The portrait of Dorian Gray’ where a painting and person are inextricably linked. We also have the idea of this over the top type of obsession particularly with the artist who is so engrossed in his work he fails to notice the declining health of his wife. It does seem strange that the wife would just sit there and die whilst her husband painted her, surely she would have said something to alert him. This idea of subservience within the story once again suggests the role of women in the society of the time. There is also a similar theme of the idea of beauty fading and being turned into something more macabre similar to Berenice who withers and fades from some strange disease. Is Poe here suggesting that sometimes we are too obsessed with beautiful things to our detriment?