Free Essay Sample: Narrative and Poe

The Oval Portrait is a horror short story written by Edgar Allan Poe that unveils strange situations involving a portrait in the chateau. The substantive paragraph in this story is the last paragraph that describes the climax of the circumstance in the narrative. The peak describes the struggles of a young woman who was trying to keep her husband happy by allowing him to make a painted portrait of her for an extended period (Poe & Sarah, 1842). The husband, on the other hand, was fully consumed into his paintwork and even forgot that his wife's health was not good only to realize after his wife died. Based on the narrator's story, the painter's wife died of neglect from her husband because the husband was too involved in his paintings and forgot about the condition of his wife.

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The narrator of the Oval Portrait is a severely injured person who, with the help of his servant, Pedro, locates an abandoned chateau. Since the narrator is wounded, what he sees in the chateau may be unreliable, particularly when he admits to being in a delirium state. The story of the painter and his wife, as narrated by the narrator, could be some of the illusions that the narrator was experiencing due to his weakened condition. In this case, we cannot fully trust the version of events narrated that evening by the injured narrator.

When the narrator becomes annoyed with the candelabra and throws it across the room, he "glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed his eyes" (Poe & Sarah, 1842). At first, he had no idea why he closed his eyes; he then noticed that everything was not delusional. The narrator becomes disgusted and shocked by the story in the painting and read the description of the art. The narrator was left puzzled when he realized that the art sucked the life out of the young lady's experience as a result of her negligent husband. A young bride dying before her husband's obsession with painting comes as a shock even to readers because no husband would like to trade the life of his wife at the expense of art.

Elizabeth Siddal was a famous English artist, artist's model, and poet during the 19th century. Elizabeth Siddal was an influential person, and her paintings of her and her story reflected the great arts of the Pre-Raphaelites (Rossetti, Rossetti & Hartley, 1903). Siddal and Poe's stories can be connected in such a way the ladies in the story both died because of love. In Poe's story, the painter's wife died as a result of making her husband happy by letting him paint her for an extended time. On the other hand, Siddal committed suicide through drug overdose after losing her baby.

References

Poe, E. A., Poe, E. A., & Sarah (Gen. Ed.) Shute. (1842). The Oval Portrait (pp. 1983-734). Alex Catalogue.

Rossetti, W. M., Rossetti, D., & Hartley, H. (1903). Dante Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 1(3), 273-295.