This short story, written and published in 1842 by Edgar Allan Poe, was originally named Life in Death. Poe decided in 1845 to excise the text, conserving only the most important elements in The Oval Portrait .These elements are not the ones we see at first – an easily read gothic story- but are about others issues, more sophisticated. Through the study of the atmosphere and the characters of this tale, we will demonstrate the gothic beauty of the text and find its symbolical interpretation.

The atmosphere of a text is, for Poe, an important aspect for the frame of the story. Here the gothic genre is perceptible and allows the author to demonstrate the power of his narrative strategy. The inaugural sentence of the text sets a lugubrious, mysterious and unusual environment: we can note the lack of every kind of temporal mark (except one time indicator for the hour) and the continuous confusion between the real and the dreamlike. The story indeed takes place in a castle but not a particular castle, “one of those piles of commingled gloom…” into the “Apennines” but also into “the fancy of Mrs. Radcliff”: nothing is defined; the story evolves in a kind of smog, of mystery… This is the testimony of the traditional gothic genre, making the reader uncomfortable (we easily imagine the weather, bad and violent, during the night…), and betwixt the real (the castle…) and the unreal (a sublime, abandoned and antique mansion). The room where the entire action takes place is an isolated chamber; “one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments” located in a “remote turret” and is proof of the antiquity of the place, full of history yet tattered and dated: characteristic elements of the melancholy (which is crucial for the end of the story). This feeling is amplified by the presence of numerous tapestries and paintings, other evidences of the past and of the mysteries of this room, which acknowledge the flip into the marvelous. The bizarre is also