Considering it as one of the shortest Allan Poe’s stories, The Oval Portrait comprises a brief one-paragraph story outlined in a huge vignette whose intended basis is to underscore the romantic Gothic mood where the story unfolds (Poe, 1850). The context and purpose of the plot are clouded in mystery. The protagonist does not describe how or where is injured, and with his servant, walks into a deserted, devastated chateau that provides the readers with no answers than the protagonist (Poe 1850). The murky dejection of an abandoned building is a classic setting for a gothic story, and the embroideries and mysterious design of the house provide the narrator’s choice of the house a sense of feeling being removed from the modern world (Poe, 1850). Nothing of importance takes place at nightfall, but the descriptions offer the reader a hint of a romantic mood that acts as a prelude to the story of “The Oval Portrait.”
Ray Bradbury’s story The Veldt is in many ways also a Gothic horror story. The actions of the children and the hostile acts against the lions offer some clues that something ominous is happening in the nursery (Bradbury, 1950). The Veldt is depicted to the audience as haunted house, while an untraditional contemporary one because of its strange, doubling, and grasping nature. When the children’s father George Hadley walks toward the nursery room, and the sensors make the lights to flicker on and off, this scene might be implicitly associated with ghost stories, where the lights are wildly going on and off, without any human involvement (Bradbury, 1950). In spite of the feeling the house engender, another of its aspects represent more explicitly the ghost trait it has, which is doubling. The building mercilessly takes over the roles of humans in the house, increasing the role of the parents, caregiver, or even life itself.
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What makes both stories more possessive Gothic horror stories or menacing tales is the way both authors depict a central idea, which the stories explore and analyze. For example, The Oval Portrait provides an excellent case study about the nervous relationship between art and life, represented by the young bride and the oval portrait her husband depicts of her (Poe,1850). However, what the tale is attempting to suggest the link between life and art is not easy to point out. By contrast, the house in The Veldt he central idea is to demonstrate that the inertness is ghoulishly subverted in its artificial intelligence capacity, providing it with nascent, intelligent, as well as a menacing instinct of survival, which finally shocks and eliminates the living forms that occupied it (Bradbury, 1950).
Both Bradbury and Poe styles are manifest by lyricism and wealth of metaphors. These develop and allusion of reality, and that cleverly reflects on the descriptions that the narrators in the tales struggle with. The descriptions of the electronically created veldt have such precise sensory details that virtually appear to be real, and they are the story's end. Furthermore, their reports of the haunted house in The Oval Portrait and The Veldt also shows an environment of dread and hostility reflecting the psychological state of Hadley’s family and the warning regarding the risk of neglecting reality in the art to pursue great art. Moreover, Bradbury uses active verbs and embodiments, detailing the workings of the apartment’s mechanical tools in manner that indicates the living, the human nature that the house is taking over. Typically, both Poe’s and Bradbury’s poetic styles transport the audience out of reality into a fantasy world.
References
Bradbury, R. (1950). The Veldt. Retrieved https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/the-veldt/
Poe, E. A. (1850). The Oval Portrait. Retrieved from https://poestories.com/read/ovalportrait
