The Masque of the Red Death [short story]

Extremely relevant now, during the COVID-19 pandemic! Place Trump, or any other ugly, wealth and power hungry despot, in the place of Prince Prospero, and you've basically got the system we have now in the U.S.. The wealthy get protection the rest of us can only dream of. But in this story, the Prince and his 1,000 chosen ones enter a world that I could only dream of! Comeuppance! For me, in this context, the "spectral image" is a hero! Wish we had someone like him now...

"And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death."

Fascinating and lurid allegory about a group of people who, on the invitation of "Prince Prospero," lock themselves within a "castellated abbey" to escape the Red Death. The inhabitants of the abbey are provided "all the appliances of pleasure," and boy do they know how to party: "there were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine." It all culminates in a huge masked ball held in several colorful and gaudy chambers: "There was much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm.... There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." Then who shows up, of show more course, but a figure dressed as a Red Death victim: "His vesture was dabbled in blood--and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror." Prince Prospero becomes seriously pissed-off at this figure because he's spoiling all the fun, everyone is scared and freaked out, but when he confronts him he sees that there's literally nothing behind the mask, and he drops dead, and soon everyone else does too.

So what is Poe saying here? (I find myself searching for the answer to this question because of the allegorical nature of the work itself.) For one thing, that you can't cheat death, but I think there's something more profound going on, a sort of sociological take on how people ignore the suffering of others at their peril. That we can't really wall ourselves off and party in the face of others' suffering because that suffering will inevitably reach us too. We can't ignore others' pain or pretend it doesn't exist or look the other way. show less

I did not listen to this but read it today from The Bible as/in Literature. This happens to be one of my favorite short stories that I remember from my younger years. My memory is that my English teacher showed the movie in class. There is much symbolism in this story. The setting is an important part of the story with its 7 rooms going from east to west and twisting with colors from blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and lastly black. There is no light in the room but a brazier that shines through a stained glass window. the rooms represent the stages of life. Prince Prosperous is the picture of arrogance and pride thinking he can outsmart death by his seclusion. The ball represents decadence and pleasure (some was unspeakable show more and of the Prince’s design). A “multitude of dream” (see Ecclesiastes 5:7) represents the fantastical, grotesque, inner desires and fears, meaningless and empty (vanity). The clock is inescapable and is marking the passage of time and inevitability of death. It interrupts the party and reminds the participants of the futility of escape. It stops them in their tracks. Death will find everyone. Poe may have been employing that refuge in faith and God is futile. Much is unknown what Poe’s beliefs were but his writings often explore religious themes. I am happy to have reread this. Not sure that I want to rewatch the movie, but maybe. show less

I’ve always felt a strong connection to Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, perhaps because I listen to loads of medieval music, perhaps because I enjoy the art and history and philosophy of that period, or, perhaps because I’ve always been drawn to literature dealing with issues of life and death. Whatever the reason, I love this tale. Here are my reflections on several themes:

The Reality – The tale’s Red Death sounds like the Black Death of 1349 where a family member could be perfectly healthy in the morning, start feeling sick at noon, spit blood and be in excruciating pain in the evening and be dead by midnight. It was that quick. Living at the time of the Black Death, one Italian chronicler wrote, “They died by the show more hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in ... ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura ... buried my five children with my own hands ... And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”

The Denial – Let the Red Death take those on the outside. Prince Prospero took steps to make sure his castle would be a sanctuary, a secure refuge where, once bolted inside, amid a carefully constructed world of festival, a thousand choice friends could revel in merriment with jugglers, musicians, dancers and an unlimited supply of wine. And then, “It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade.” Classic Edgar Allan Poe foreshadowing.

The Number Seven – The prince constructed seven rooms for his revelers. And there is all that medieval symbolism for the number seven, such as seven gifts of the holy spirit, Seven Seals from the Book of Revelation, seven liberal arts, the seven virtues and, of course, the seven deadly sins (gluttony, lechery, avarice, luxury, wrath, envy, and sloth), which sounds like a catalogue of activities within the castle walls.

The Seventh Room or The Black Chamber – Keeping in mind the medieval symbolism for the color black with associations of darkness, evil, the devil, power and secrecy, we read, “But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.” We are told the prince’s plans were bold and fiery and barbaric, but, as we read the tale, we see how even a powerful prince can be outflanked by the fiery and chaotic side of life itself.

The Clock – This seventh chamber has a huge ebony clanging clock. A reminder for both eye and ear that the prince can supply his revelers and himself with an unlimited supply of wine but there is one thing he doesn’t have the power to provide – an unlimited amount of time.

The Unexpected Masker – When the clock clangs twelve times, a tall, gaunt, blood-spotted, corpse-like reveler appears in the black chamber. Poe, master storyteller that he is, pens one of my all-time favorite lines: “Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.” Not a lot of merriment once the revelers start dropping like blood-covered, despairing flies.

The Psychological Tale – We read how there are some who think the prince mad. After all, what is a Poe tale without the possibility of madness? Additionally, when the revelers attempt to seize the intruder with his grey garments and corpse-like mask, they come away with nothing. If these revelers were minutes from an agonizing plague-induced death, how sharp are their senses, really? To what extent is their experience the play of the mind? show less

In one of my Literature textbooks, this is the story the book chose to best set the example of how important setting can be to a story.

Poe's incredible talent in setting mood through the most miniscule of details is powerful as he establishes dread, irony, and a hefty infusion of Gothic feel by detailing the colors of a series of rooms and what they represent to the audience and characters. The symbolism of the clock is musical and alluring; the ominous clang and the dancers reactions, with its dong indicating the time, further spells out a foreboding mood and tone.

Even the pattern the rooms are walked through speaks volumes. The first room as light blue can symbolize brightness and innocence, skies and springs and births and new show more beginnings. Each of the seven rooms has a window, all with the color matching the interior of their walls, the exception being the final, seventh room: black.

Poe has stated that stories are best enjoyed if they can be read in one sitting. The Masque of the Red Death is indeed short, only a few pages long, and so it should speak volumes that Poe chose this short space to go into detail about the rooms. He goes into the most detail about the black, final room as its significance - death, the ultimate end, the irony - is the most important element of the story. It is also in this room that the clock beckons and waits.

Without getting into details about any of the characters, Poe concentrates on setting and the most important and only qualities about the prince that the audience needs to know - his fear of the Red Plague and death, his ultimate arrogance in the face of death, believing he can seal it off and defeat it by abiding within his castle walls.

The party-goers feel the same, reassured by the self-imposed power the prince claims, dancing around at midnight behind their masks, stopping only when the clock chimes its ominous call, feeling a small hesitation but quickly ignoring it again as they resume merry dancing and happily embracing false securities. Death as the ultimate, inevitable force erupts onto the party. The prince then proceeds from room to room in a circular order, indicating from life to different stages of color, to the inevitable black which is the end room, from which there is no escape.

Poe was an original type of writer who aspired to make a solid career as a literary critic. Confident in his writing ability and seeking to inject freshness into words by developing the world's first detective story and gothic pieces which whispered doses of irony, he isn't the type to resort to already used phrases or cliches. Because of this, I find high relevance in the ending paragraph, where he writes:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night.

Instantly I recognized "come like a thief in the night" as the biblical words spoken by Jesus when referring to the apocalypse. It would come without warning and begin the reign of death, as He comes "like a thief in the night."

A powerful tale about the finality of an ending which can't be avoided, Poe is to be admired for capturing such a significant range of emotions using creative settings in a short span of pages. show less

I think this is supposed to be a gothic thriller. But while it definitely had gothic elements, I didn't find it thrilling at all. I enjoy Poe's work (or at least I did last time I read it) but I found this one boring. And I don't think that's just because of the COVID-19 crisis we're currently living through. I had thought that reading The Masque of the Red Death now would be even more interesting given COVID-19. But the writing style wasn't what I had expected from Poe, and I didn't really care for it.

I mean, it was okay. Its writing style is a product of its time, and I didn't exactly dislike it. I just didn't exactly like it either.

I love the premise- fearing a horrible sickness that has seized his lands, a hedonistic prince locks himself and hundreds of his friends away in a castle, with an enormous wall running the length of it so nothing can get in or out. But soon the prince's fanciful denial is shattered in a very... strange way.

Basically, what my dislike of this comes down to is the length. It's only four pages, which (for me at least) simply is not enough time to become invested in a story and care about its ending. The writing is beautiful as always, but there was something missing, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I didn't really care about the plot, wasn't even rooting for the selfish Prince Prospero to get his comeuppance.

The idea of the show more rooms of all different colours just kinda made me shrug, the same way I shrugged in The Picture of Dorian Gray when everybody is avoiding Dorian because of his incredibly scandalous lifestyle- which pretty much entails collecting foreign instruments and fancy books. I feel that both of those things were supposed to have a greater affect on the reader than they did. Perhaps I'm missing the symbolism of the rooms, though I do have my own theory about the castle itself: that it represents the human mind, or maybe just the mind of Prospero, and as much as the enormous ballroom tries, it will never be able to shut out what comes from the black room, which I took to represent paranoia and the knowledge of impending death. Again, I feel I must impress that this may be completely and totally wrong, and maybe my impeded grasp of symbolism is what kept me from enjoying this short tale. It is what it is.

I much preferred Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher, which, though they're not as well-known as The Masque of the Red Death, are longer and more fleshed-out. Read it here.

(Though the Month of Poe is still in full swing, once Halloween passes I'm going to take a little break from Great Tales and Poems. I'm in the mood for some action-adventure fantasy and was thinking of trying The Final Empire, unless any of you guys have some recommendations for a good fantasy book? I haven't explored the genre very much, and I think it's high time I do.) show less