The oval portrait
The Oval Portrait (Engl .: The Oval Portrait ) is a 1842 first under the title Death in Life ( Life in Death published) short story by Edgar Allan Poe , which deals with the relationship between art and life. It is one of his shortest prose texts.
content
The first-person narrator, after being wounded for reasons that remain unexplained, fled with his servant to an abandoned castle in the Apennines , which is not only completely but splendidly furnished. On the pillow of his bed he finds a book that describes the history of the art objects with which the room is decorated. He corrects the position of the candelabra so that he can read better. Its light falls into a previously unlit corner, in which the bust of a young girl who is just maturing into a woman hangs, the sight of which shakes the narrator so much that he closes his eyes. He opens it again, analyzes the strong effect the picture has on him and sums it up:
- The magic of the picture had discovered itself to me: in an absolute likeness of expression which, at first just astonishing, finally overwhelmed, disturbed and horrified me.
The book reveals the story of the picture to him: it depicts the wife of a painter who was always jealous of her husband's art because she robbed her of his presence. So she agreed to model him for a portrait. The more passionately the painter devoted himself to his work, the more his model withered:
- He did not want to see how the tints he applied to it (in the picture) were withdrawn from the cheeks of the being sitting next to him.
When the picture is ready
- He was seized with tremors and great paleness, horror seized him, and in a loud voice he cried: “Verily, that is life itself!” and suddenly threw himself around to look at his beloved - she was dead.
interpretation
Poe thematizes the theory that the performing arts have something vampiric about them, that they suck the life out of the depicted object, a magical idea that can lead to idolatry as well as a ban on images . Poe witnessed the invention of photography , and some of the photos of him give the impression that they had cost him his life (most of them were taken in the last phase of his life). At the same time, however, the oval portrait hides a reference to the loss of mother and foster mother who traumatized Poe . The first-person narrator mentions Thomas Sully , who long made portraits of the kind described in Richmond , Poe's hometown, then at the same time with Poe in Philadelphia- based painter Thomas Sully , to describe the picture . Sully painted the portrait of Frances Allan , Poe's foster mother. The beautiful young woman, whom the first-person narrator compares with a deer, is therefore not a stranger to him, but a dearly loved person, whose early death left the poet defenseless to the arbitrariness of his foster father (whom he certainly made partly responsible for her death). So you can guess who the nameless man was who wounded him so badly. At the same time, however, Poe also sees himself as the sucking artist, because at his side his wife and cousin Virginia Clemm, model of his female figures, is languishing with tuberculosis . Moving the story to Italy allows Poe to amuse himself a little at the masterpiece of the horror novel , Ann Radcliffe , whom he specifically mentions in the introduction.
History of publication and genesis
The oval portrait was first published in Graham's Magazine in 1842 under the title Death in Life (taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner ) . In this version the wounded first-person narrator takes refuge in a serving of opium in order to finally be able to sleep again. The second version, published in the Broadway Journal in 1845 , is entitled The Oval Portrait . Here Poe deleted that introduction - perhaps out of concern that the reader might dismiss the story as a mere hallucination . Poe could have inspired a story by ETA Hoffmann : The Jesuit Church zu G. , in which, of course, the performing arts are not assumed to be of a vampiric character, but instead it is asserted that the artist needs an ideal , a muse , which he should never marry because she then loses the magic she wields from a distance.
See also
literature
- Marie Bonaparte : Edgar Poe. A psychoanalytic study. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt / Main 1984, ISBN 3-518-37092-8 (German first edition: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1934), especially volume 2 of the first edition, pp. 75ff.
- Emma Kafalenos: Effects of Sequence, Embedding and Ekphrasis in Poe's "The Oval Portrait". In: A Companion to Narrative Theory , edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005, ISBN 978-1-4051-1476-9 , pp. 253-268. (Kafalenos works out the effects of the order of reading or narration or the framing of the narrated by first reading the last section separately from the rest of the story in a functional analysis experiment according to Propp and Todorov . Then she draws a comparison between the effects after she put the beginning of the story back in front of it for her interpretation.)