The Oval Portrait

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Oval Portrait” is an interlocking puzzle of themes related to narcissism and magic: the importance of the gaze and contemplation, the gradual disinvestment from the outer world to the benefit of the ego, the failure of love linked to the negation of the other, a dizzying fall into melancholia and death, and finally, the artist’s dream of omnipotence: the artist as diabolical magician, truly a rival of the Creator.