Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
Episode 13
Someone's throwing a giant party during a pandemic and Professor Pipes is here to talk about it! No, this is not about 2020; it's Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death"! Enjoy this special, spooky episode, and Happy Halloween!
Transcript:
Introduction:
Welcome to a special Halloween episode of Piper’s Paraphrases. I’m Professor Pipes, and this week I’m reading Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” a tale utterly apropos of the time, or should I say, apros-POE? Anyway...
Summary:
In a land ravaged by a deadly illness , known only as “The Red Death,” Prince Prospero abandons his peasants to die and hides himself away in an enormous fortress. After the pestilence has killed about half of his people, Prospero decides to throw an enormous party STARE INTO CAMERA with 1000 of his closest friends. Popular guy, that Prospero. The party is a decadent DANCE masquerade, paper faces on parade… Ok, ok, I’m done. Anything that anyone could ever want is there: buffoons, ballet-dancers, an ominous clock that strikes the hour so loudly that everyone stops what they’re doing to listen to it fearfully. You know, normal party stuff. The masquerade is going full swing in a set of seven rooms that Prospero has carefully decorated by color: blue to the east, followed by purple, green, orange, white, violet, and finally black with red windows to the west. However, the black room is dark and frightening and contains that ebony clock, so people are too spooked to hang out in there. It’s midnight, and everybody’s partying hard, stopping only when the clock chimes the hour, when suddenly they become aware of a guest in the blue room whose costume is so horrifying and grotesque that everyone takes notice. Rude, Cooper! He’s not dressed like ME. Anyway, he’s dressed like death, with a mask that looks like a stiffened corpse, and he is dotted with blood, resembling a victim of the Red Death. Mwahahahaha! When Prospero spots this guest, he is disgusted and tells the rest of his guests to seize him and unmask him so they can kill him for ruining the party. Dude. That may be a bit of an overreaction. However, the guests are so awed and frightened by his appearance that they let him pass by, unimpeded, from one room to the next. Eventually, Prince Prospero himself runs after the deathly costumed guest and reaches him just as he enters the black room. Suddenly, the guest turns around and faces Prospero, who falls down dead! Spoooooky… This shocks the guests into action and they rush into the black room, and rip the mask off the intruder to discover that it’s….. No one. There was nothing beneath the costume and the mask. And they realize that it was the Red Death itself that had snuck into their seemingly impenetrable fortress. And one by one, all the guests died, “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.?”
Analysis:
While the obvious analysis of this classic Gothic story might simply tell us not to have a large party during a pandemic (Who’da thunk it?), “The Masque of the Red Death” is often read as an allegory, which means a simple story that is symbolic of something and whose characters are symbols. With this in mind, we can see the chilling tale as a reminder of the inescapable nature of death. Prospero’s name sounds like the word “prosperous,” which means rich, showing that even money can’t buy you safety, and even the richest will still eventually die. Sorry, Cooper, we’re all doomed. Several other elements of the story support this analysis, such as the seven rooms. The rooms are placed from East to West, mirroring the path of the sun, therefore symbolizing the progression of life from birth until death. The use of seven rooms could be symbolic of the seven ages of man that Shakespeare wrote about in the play “As You Like It,” a piece that Poe certainly would have been familiar with. Some scholars even think the colors of the rooms might represent this passage of time. Green could mean youth, blue is often connected with calmness, which they think could reflect birth. But having been in the same room as a woman in labor, I don’t know if I buy that one. The final room is dressed in black, which symbolizes death, and the red windows are a reminder of the Red Death that the guests are trying to avoid, and similarly the people avoid this room, subconsciously trying to avoid their own deaths. Speaking of avoiding things, the clock. It chimes out each hour in that black room, and everyone stops to listen in fear, and then they laugh it off. The clock is clearly a reminder of the passage of time. Each chime brings them one step closer to death, something they cannot ignore, but then try to forget. And the figure of the Red Death is… well... death, which greets them all in the black room.
There are a few other theories and analyses of this story, and a couple of them really focus on Prospero. This name happens to be the name of the sorcerer in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Coincide, maybe, but in the play, his magic is his art and at one point he creates a magical ball, or party, and then he ends this ball saying that we are all “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Interestingly, Poe calls the guests at this party “dreams.” So maybe the party itself is Prospero’s artistic masterpiece, invaded by reality. Some people even think that Prospero is a reflection of Poe himself. I see the resemblance. Poe was, after all, the adoptive child of a wealthy, distinguished family and he was perhaps a little bit mad. Prospero is also the only one willing to confront the masked figure, much in the same way that Poe confronted death through his writing.
Another analysis focuses on Prospero’s abandonment of the poor. He leaves them all to die and runs off to his castle, hoping that his riches will protect him. Oooh! Let me hide between these dollar bills! Guess that doesn’t work. This could be Poe’s way of criticising this type of economic hierarchy, and suggesting that it is doomed to fail, since nothing could protect Prospero, and he inevitably dies, just like the peasants he ran away from. Poe did struggle with money for much of his life, and greedy publishers prevented many writers from making ends meet.
The Red Death seems to be a reference to the Bubonic Plague, but the blood seeping from the pores might be more reminiscent of tuberculosis, whose sufferers often cough up blood. Poe did lose his wife, brother, mother and adoptive mother to this disease. So maybe this story was his way of facing these losses in a way that he didn’t do in life.
Ultimately “The Masque of the Red Death” is a story marked by mystery, which makes sense since, reportedly, Edgar Allan Poe felt that when the meaning of a work is too obvious, it isn’t really art.
Food for Thought:
Finally, let me leave you with some Food for Thought:
First, if this story is an allegory, do you think it is symbolic of the inevitability of death, reality’s intrusion on art, or the problems of an economic hierarchy? Why?
Second, how does the vivid imagery throughout the story affect the mood of the piece?
Third, the story mentions that some people thought Prospero was insane, but his followers didn’t. Why do you think that is? And why was it necessary to “see and touch him” to be sure?
And fourth, why do you think the guests originally avoided the intruder but then came and attacked him after Prospero died, and what might this be suggesting about people in general?
Thanks for watching this episode of Piper’s Paraphrases. Go forth, read a bunch, be good people, and maybe don’t invite over 1000 people when there’s a deadly disease on the loose.
