SOURCE: Kennedy, J. Gerald. “The Horrors of Translation: The Death of a Beautiful Woman.” In Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing, pp. 60-88. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

In the following excerpt, Kennedy explores Poe's poetry involving the death of beautiful women, suggesting that death involves a translation of the woman as object of desire into an object of horror.

Poe's 1842 tale “The Oval Portrait” tells of a “desperately wounded” traveler who chances to pass a night in a Gothic chateau. Suffering from “incipient delirium,” the narrator decides to peruse a volume of art criticism found lying on his pillow; he gives himself over to the book “devoutly” until the approach of “deep midnight,” when he adjusts the candelabrum at his bedside and perceives in a dark niche the hitherto unnoticed portrait of a beautiful young woman. The picture possesses an “absolute lifelikeliness of expression” that startles...