Gothic literature is often set in gloomy and foreboding locations that are far removed from everyday life. “The Oval Portrait” is set in an eerie, abandoned “chateau” or mansion in the Apennines, a range of mountains that run from the north to the south of the Italian peninsula. Poe chooses a remote location where strange and supernatural events might occur far from the eyes of the world. Poe’s narrator describes the setting in detail at the beginning of the story:
The château into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments.
The unnamed narrator of the short story does not explain how he found himself in this mountainous region of Italy, nor how he became “desperately wounded.” In his injured state, his valet makes a “forcible entrance” into a “chateau,” or in other words, a large manor house that serves as a residence for a member of the nobility or gentry. The chateau was once grand but has been left in a dilapidated state of “commingled gloom and grandeur.” Adding to the mystery of this setting is the fact that the building has been only recently abandoned, suggesting that its former occupants left in a rush.
