Girls. According to Beyonce, they run the world. So why is it that women in literature are treated with such disdain and negligence? Many famous authors, praised for being prolific, are culprits of treating their female characters with this same utter lack of respect, including the infamous Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s stories and poems “Ligeia,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Berenice,” and “Annabel Lee,” he demonstrates no regard for the lives of his female characters, and seems to only find them useful when they are suffering or dead. Additionally, Poe uses his female characters as objects to facilitate the male plot, giving them no real identity or personality. Despite being worshipped my the male characters, Poe portrays his female characters as inferior objects. To begin, the life …show more content…
The wife in this story—much like all of Poe’s female characters—has no real personality. She is described as what the ideal female was thought to be: “humble and obedient, ” her character contains no originality and is extremely two-dimensional (Poe, “The Oval Portrait” par 6). For example, she sits “meekly” for the painting that she hates and does not interrupt her husband’s work once, even though with every brushstroke he makes, she is weakened a little more (Poe, “The Oval Portrait” par 6; Weekes 150). Eventually, the wife just dies without a word . Due to that, it is clear that Poe did not create a woman with depth, he created a woman meant to die whose death literally furthers the male’s success. As soon as the painting is completed, the painter turns to his wife only to realize that she is dead because, as he comes to realize, the reason his painting is “‘Life itself’” is because he was taking the life from his wife in order to paint his masterpiece. Therefore, the wife’s death was the one and only reason that the painter was able to succeed with his