Poe, the Portrait, and the Daguerreotype: Poe’s Living Dead and the Visual Arts

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay contributes to existing scholarly research on Poe’s relationship with photography by focusing on his metaphorical references to daguerreotypy. While Poe’s essays on this art and his personal sessions with daguerreotypists have inspired numerous articles, his tales about daguerreotypy have not been studied closely as such because they allude to it figuratively. After the daguerreian discovery in 1839, Poe’s fictional works repeatedly depicted an anxious urge in antebellum society to use the art as a rationalized magic for visually preserving the dead in a lifelike manner. His literary interests in reincarnation and the living dead manifest as portraits in a daguerreian discourse, with singular, lifelike, and even grotesquely real effects—precisely like postmortem photographs. Poe’s daguerreian technique can be seen not only in “The Oval Portrait” but also in “The Oblong Box” and “The Black Cat”—works that are representative of nineteenth-century society’s desire to prolong life or preserve the dead.