Morella and The Oval
Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe
Quiz Time
• Who is the narrator in Edgar Allen Poe's Morella?
• What name is the daughter baptized with and how does she
respond?
• What does the narrator find in the tomb?
• Who is the woman in The Oval Portrait?
• What did she hate?
Morella
• Published in April 1835 in the Southern Literary Messenger
• Poe’s favorite short story
• Originally included a 16 line poem called “Hymn” which was sung
by Morella. He later removed the poem and published it
separately under the title “A Catholic Hymn”
• Name is based on the morel plant (black nightshade), where
belladonna is derived from, and which grows in abundance in
Pressburg- where Morella received her education
• Falls under 2 genres: Gothic Literature and Dark Romanticism
Popcorn Plot twist
• You tell me what happened
• First person tells me a part and so on until everyone has talked
and the story is told.
• No telling the ending early…. If you do we start over
Major Themes
• Fate of the individual after death
• Horror
• Jelousy
• Spousal Mistreatment
• Revenge
• Fate or Choice
Moral Theology
• a branch of religious and philosophical thought that probes questions
about what it means to be a sane and good person
• In Morella, it is used to indicate a preference toward belief in the
everlasting, immortal human soul. He draws on philosophy and religion
throughout this passage in order to dramatize how Morella transcends
her corporeal body and assumes a new life in a new one.
• Major Philosophers include Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph von Schelling, and Pythagoras
• The idea is that God and the universe are one and the same. When you
die your soul joins a collective “consciousness” that waits until it can be
reborn
The Uncanny Woman
• Morella is unlike most female characters to this point
• She is exceptionally intelligent and strongwilled
• After they marry, Morella introduces him to one of her favorite
activities: studying mystical writings. Pouring over them, the
narrator hopes to fathom their arcane meanings, but fails. So he
submits himself to his wife’s guidance.
• But she is unloved and her spirit begins to fade as she is neglected
• Promises him that he will never see happiness, only sorrow when
she dies. It is only here where she tells him she is pregnant and
about to give birth to a daughter
Private piece of Hell
• The narrator could have had a marriage of comfort, but he doesn’t love anything about
her except her intelligence. She eventually finds himself jealous of her abilities and
unable to compete with her so he comes to despise her.
• All that he could have had becomes a nightmare for him
• “a forbidden spirit" arises within him as she recites strange words “from the ashes of a
dead philosophy." For hours at a time, he listens to her, enjoying the lull of her musical
voice. But one day her words become “tainted with terror" and a shadow falls across
the narrator's soul. It is no longer a joy to listen to her; it is a horror.
• “The most beautiful became the most hideous," the narrator says, “as Hinnon became
Ge-Henna."
• Hinnom is the valley surrounding the City of David, which was a place of Joy and solidarity.
After the death of David a portion of it became Ge-Henna, which was a place where the kings of
Judah would burn their children as sacrifices to a pagan god called Moloch
• Rabbinic Literature refers to Ge-henna as a place the wicked go; often synonomous with Hell
• “I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers," the narrator says, "nor the low
tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes."
Revenge is bittersweet
• In spite of her preoccupation with the incorporeal, she still needs
physical expressions of love and affection.
• Deeply wounded by the narrator’s rejection of her, Morella decides to
gain revenge on her death. As she grows weaker, the narrator begins to
wish she would just hurry up and die.
• Calling upon her knowledge of metempsychosis, she passes her soul into
the body of her daughter, whom she gives birth to at the moment she
dies. Her husband obviously takes his own needs at least once but it only
wounds her more.
• The daughter is an exact replica of her mother and grows very quickly in
both physical and mental capacities
The Daughter
• While the narrator despised his wife, he loves his daughter beyond
all reason
• He remains fascinated by her growth and the traits she is
portraying
• The narrator becomes unsettled when the daughter turns 10. He
becomes consumed with the comparison of her with Morella. He is
unable to shake the feelings of dread and fear that surround him
• He decides to have his daughter baptized and give her a name.
• Why is this important?
The ending
• At the baptismal font, the clergyman asks what the child is to be
called. A demon then seizes control of the causing him against his
will to whisper the child's name into the ear of the clergyman:
Morella. The child hears the whisper, falls onto the family’s vault,
and says, “I am here."
• The girl dies after speaking
• When the narrator places his daughter in the vault he begins to
laugh when he “lays the second where the first should be”
Is he a reliable narrator?
• Poe is known for choosing characters that seem perfectly normal but are actually
nuttier than a fruitcake
• Thoughts offered for Frank (Yes, I named him)
• Morella did in fact learn how to pass her soul on, and in turn destroyed her body when the
daughter was born
• Frank is suicidal and having a delusion during his death
• “the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day."
• Socrates was forced to drink poison made from the hemlock plant. Drinking a hemlock concoction was
the method of capital punishment in ancient Athens. This mode of execution was like modern "lethal
injection" except that the condemned prisoner drank death rather than receiving it through a vein.
Over the centuries, writers incorrectly reported that Socrates committed suicide, and hemlock
became associated with self-inflicted death. In "Morella," the narrator's reference to hemlock indicates
that he contemplated suicide. As for the cypress, it is a tree that has been long associated with
sadness and melancholy
• Frank is crazy and imagined the daughter, the death, or the whole Morella story
• During the funeral rites for the daughter, Morella leaves the tomb as a vampire or zombie in
order to bedevil the narrator later
• What do you think happened?
The Oval Portrait
• Possibly Poe’s shortest piece
• Published April 1842 in Graham’s Magazine under the title "Life in
Death"
• It included a few introductory paragraphs explaining how the narrator
had been wounded, and that he had eaten opium to relieve the pain.
• Poe probably excised this introduction because it was not particularly
relevant, and it also gave the impression that the story was nothing
more than a hallucination.
• Republished in April 1845 in the Broadway Journal
• Even though it is short, it served to influence Oscar Wilde’s Portrait of
Dorian Grey and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”
Themes
• Art vs Life
• Beauty as Death (actually more of a trope than a theme)
• A trope is something that is reoccurring across a genre
• A theme is a meaning or subject
• Nature of creativity
• Submissiveness
• Fatal Love
A lot of stuff in a tiny package and so much
to question
• Tale within a Tale within a Tale
• The traveler
• The Storybook
• The artist and his wife
• A nod to Anne Radcliffe, author of Gothic literature in British Literature
• He has literal framed the portrait in the story
• It can clearly be analyzed as a story about the uneasy relationship between life and art,
embodied by the young bride and the oval portrait her artist-husband paints of her.
• a warning about the danger of neglecting reality in the rush to pursue great art. As soon
as the artist stops looking to reality – embodied in the story by his devoted, but
increasingly weaker, wife – and becomes wrapped up in art itself, he makes a grave error.
• statement about the nature of creativity – namely, that no great art was ever created
without cost. After all, the oval portrait is an artistic success – it is its lifelike quality, and
the artist’s triumph in having managed to capture the living essence of his subject, that
first draws the narrator’s attention to it among all the other paintings.
So what exactly happened to the girl?
• 2 ways to read the story
• The artist paints a portrait of his wife, and becomes more and more
obsessed with capturing her likeness, until he ends up spending all of his
time gazing at the portrait of his wife, and not looking at her. She becomes
weaker and weaker because she has lost his love. She dies as he finishes.
• As the artist paints her, he is stealing her beauty in an attempt to create
the perfect portrayal only to find her dead as he declares that the painting
is “life itself.”