THE PORTRAIT AS MEANS OF HIDING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NARRATIVE SELF
THE PORTRAIT AS MEANS OF HIDING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NARRATIVE SELF

Summary/Abstract: Based on the aesthetic and iconic relationship between literature and painting, the portrait may represent one of the core elements that are able to connect these two arts. In visual arts, it is already known that the portrait assumes the functions of the mask, revealing or hiding the true features of a real person and,at the same time, reflecting the author’s perspective. In these terms, regarding the portrait means regarding it as a view or as a consequence of a relation between a viewing subject and a viewed object. In literature, a narrative portrait is based on the positions and perspectives of the narrator, the characters and, sometimes, of other entities that belong to the fictional world. Far from being static, the narrative portrait is a result of all the points of view that focalizes upon it. The study intends to analyze the interchangeable relationship between the narrative and the visual portrait whose function may go from hiding the true narrative self of the model, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to replacing it, as in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait.

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