Portrait – In the Middle of Reality and Illusion: Analysis on The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Oval Portrait”

Abstract

A portrait is resemblance of man and a form of painting, which retains the appearance of mortal human semi-eternally. The mysterious aspect of the portrait is used as a motif of stories by fantastic and mystery storywriters. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), beautifully completed picture mars the protagonist’s pure mind. Instead of he growing old and his vices show up in his face, they appear in his portrait. The ugliness of the picture which represents the degradation of the protagonist’s mentality, causes some kind of terror to the readers beyond the category of beauty as an art form. A half-century before, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “The Oval Portrait” (1842). A beautiful portrait of a maiden is drawn by her painter husband in lonesome castle. The progress of painting is life-taking processes; as the portrait approaches its completion, she grows weak, and when it is done, her life ends as if it is absorbed by the painting. The two stories of Wilde and Poe have the common element: the portraits are accomplished in a beautiful state but they destroy the life or the spirit of the model. Here, we see the two aspects of the portrait; a beautiful object as a genre of pictorial art and a mysterious object which semi-eternally retains the figure of the mortal model. Focusing on the two stories, the first section of the essay considers their subject, a portrait, and analyse the origin and fantasy of it. In the second section, the relation between the human portrait and life is analysed. Because of its characteristics, coping and retaining human’s figure, a portrait is also considered as an object reflects the mind of the model. In the third section, a portrait is compared to the image of mirror and examined as a reflection of self. Finally, in the section four, the illusion of a portrait which interacts with the idea of gothic literature is discussed.