Frames Symbol Analysis

Frames, both physical and abstract, play a major role in “The Oval Portrait,” symbolizing the danger of trying to capture and exert ownership over physical beauty. The framed portrait of the artist’s wife represents a kind of metaphorical imprisonment—the physical frame is symbolically akin to the walls of a prison cell wherein only the young woman’s outer beauty, rather than her inner self, is essentially held captive for the viewer’s appreciation. In this sense, the frame also represents the general objectification she faced as a physically attractive woman, since the story implies that men (including her own husband) viewed her as nothing but a beautiful sight to look at, as opposed to a complex individual. At the end of the story, it is revealed that the artist’s wife died while he was preoccupied with painting her portrait and deeming it as “Life itself.” In light of this, the frame around her picture encapsulates the danger of conflating life with art, as the young woman’s essence is now limited solely to the confines of this frame, and thus her husband’s idealized interpretation of her. Yet her actual, real-life beauty and the nuances of her personality were consequently lost forever in the process.

Interestingly, the failure of the frame to reinforce the boundary between art and life is reflected in the very structure of Poe’s tale, which is a frame tale, or a story within a story. The narrator begins reading the guide book, which transports the reader into the world of the inner story—but Poe never returns to the outer story of the narrator’s own predicament. The suggestion is, perhaps, that the narrator never manages to reach the end of the description of the painting, and succumbs to his injuries just as he reads about the death of the model, bringing both inner and outer stories to an abrupt and premature close. This abstract framing of the story, then, ironically reinforces the same cautionary tale against focusing on life over art that the framed portrait represents, since the narrator presumably dies while committing the very same mistake as the artist himself: focusing too intensely on art, rather than life. The reader, too, is implicitly involved in this cycle of being drawn into the painting simply by reading the outer and inner stories through the narrator’s perspective. The physical and metaphorical frames of the story, then, are defined boundaries that broadly represent both the artist and the viewer’s flawed tendency to objectify and capture beauty as something separate from reality.