“The Oval Portrait,” a brief frame story (essentially, a story within a story), is set in an abandoned chateau in the Apennines, a mountain range in Italy. It takes place in an unspecified year, sometime in the early 19th century. The story opens with the unnamed narrator and his valet (servant), Pedro, breaking in to the chateau. This drastic action is necessary because the narrator is severely wounded (for reasons which are never revealed) and cannot spend the night out in the open.
The narrator and Pedro hole up in a small room in a remote corner of the building, and find it to be tattered yet richly decorated—a romantic mixture of gloom and grandeur. The walls of this room are hung with tapestries, “armorial trophies,” and numerous paintings in decorative gold frames. The narrator, whose unspecified injury has thrown him into a state of semi-delirium, is captivated by the paintings. Instructing his valet to shut the curtains against the night, he contemplates the images by the light of a tall candelabrum. On his pillow, he also finds a guide book that gives more insight into the paintings in the chateau.
The narrator reads and gazes deep into the night, and is utterly entranced by what he sees; Pedro, meanwhile, has fallen asleep. Shifting the candelabrum to alter the light in the room, he notices a painting he hasn’t yet seen—a portrait of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. He shuts his eyes involuntarily, unsure why he has done so, and then considers the reasons behind this “impulsive movement.” He quickly concludes that it isn’t related to the execution of the painting—a vignette in the style of the artist Thomas Sully—or with the radiant beauty of the girl it depicts. Rather, it’s to do with the extreme lifelikeness of the image, which has simultaneously startled, confused, subdued and appalled him. Awed, the narrator returns the candelabrum to its former position, shutting the painting from view, and proceeds to read about the painting in the guide book.
The book describes the sitter as a “maiden of rarest beauty.” Full of life and love, she hates only one thing: the artistic vocation of her new husband, a renowned painter who injects wild passion into his work. In fact, she regards Art—personified with a capital “A”—as a rival for his attentions. Nonetheless, she’s also meek and submissive, and doesn’t protest against his burning desire to paint her. The painter spends day and night laboring over the portrait, and the closer to completion he brings it, the more physically weak and psychologically distraught his wife becomes—almost as if her vital energies are being drawn from her and into the image. But the painter, totally engrossed in his work, barely shifts his eyes from his canvas, and fails to notice his wife’s plight until it’s too late. Just as the painting reaches a height of lifelike perfection, he finally deigns to look up at her—only to discover that she has died.
