Chapter 5 - "The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe
In Chapter 5, fan favorite George Eliot is bludgeoned to death with a framed painting. It's tempting to make the corny joke that "art kills". Instead, Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait" (1850) makes a similar point with more nuance about the relationship between art, death, and sanity.
"The Oval Portrait" invites us into another Gothic locale (an abandoned chateau) with another unnamed narrator in another fit of descending madness. Unable to sleep, he[?] casts his eyes about the room's many paintings and reads about them in a handy guidebook. Having moved the candles, he becomes aware of a portrait he hadn't noticed before, a young girl "just ripening into womanhood", and is suddenly wide awake. Staring at the portrait and examining his powerful reaction to it, the narrator finally concludes that it is the uncanny "life-likeliness" that struck him so, made more remarkable by the fact that he at no point actually mistook it for a real person. Having identified his aesthetic response, the narrator eagerly searches the guidebook for its tale of the portrait, which comprises the last third of the story.
The subject was a girl of liveliness and beauty, who married the portrait's painter. She loved everything but Art, because it took her husband's devotion. However, when her husband wished to do a portrait of her, she meekly consented. The painter, wild and moody, worked for many weeks, growing solitary and increasingly heedless of food and rest as his inspiration waxed. Finishing the painting, he was first entranced and then shocked by the realism of his own work. Declaring the painting was "Life itself!", he looked over to discover that his wife was dead.
For Poe, there's not a huge difference in practice between delirium and inspiration, between obsession and devotion. Had he been a doctor or scientist like his guest Wells, he might have marveled at the similar symptoms and tried to reason out a shared cause. But Poe was an artist, above all. So instead we're treated to a ghost story in which he tries to replicate the *feeling* in us of artistic inspiration. It is an exalted place, apart from life, but perhaps also apart from sanity.
“Sanity” is a fun word with Poe. We usually hear “sanity” and think of “"sane” or “insane”, as a term of psychological fitness, a mental state. “San-” also forms the root of “sanitation”, forming clean and healthful conditions. To be in-sane as an artist is to be, in Poe’s world, something like mad, but also in opposition to health, in league with death. Art requires human sacrifice: in the case of the Oval Portrait, it's the painter's wife. She is Life, but the painter's first bride is Art. No wonder Poe believed "the death of a beautiful woman" was the most poetic topic.
His amoral stance towards Art was probably the biggest complaint against Poe, and it's why his work has such an eerie singularity. It's a more rational, even clinical approach to writing than the typical morality of a work's effect on its *reader*. Only Oscar Wilde, 40 years later and in an entirely new way, could appreciate this story for its pure aestheticism. The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890), in line with his philosophy of "life as a work of art", focuses on the painting's relationship to its subject. Within #PoeParty, "The Oval Portrait" suggests that Wilde was the intended victim of Eliot's attack and asks us to reexamine for significance the order of the authors' deaths.
