The Masque of the Red Death Summary

Edgar Allan Poe offers an age-old theme in the short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, a concept that dates back to the morality play “Everyman” from the middle ages. The primary character of this traditional morality play is called Everyman, and early on, he was seen strolling down the street where he meets another character Death.

“O Death, Thy comest when I had thee least in mind”

Every man calls to him. Poe’s tale also addresses the inevitable nature of death and the futility of striving to avoid it. The narrative component or the plot effectively and concisely conveys this central message. To attain his unity of effect, Poe used this technique.

The beginning of the story depicts the “Red Death”, a pandemic that has been ravaging the nation for a long time. The narrator emphasizes the colour of the blood and the crimson stains as she discusses the disease’s progression. One dies of contracting it because it rapidly kills.

During the brief opening paragraph of the story, Edgar Allan Poe employed words such as devastated, fatal, pestilence, profuse bleeding, scarlet stains, and death. So, these words produced an immediate effect of the horror of death brought by the “Red Death”.

The Prince, Prospero, is joyful and optimistic despite the pandemic’s rapid spread. He decides to ignore the disease devouring the area and locks the gates of his palace to ward off the plague.

He hosts a grandiose masquerade ball after a while. He uses only one colour to decorate each room in his home for this occasion. The chamber closest to the east has blue furnishings and blue-stained glass windows.

The same smudged glass window motif is present in the next purple room. According to this plan, the rooms continue to the west with the following colour scheme green, orange, white, and violet. The seventh room has crimson windows and is dark in colour. An ebony clock is also present in the space.

The hourly chime of the clock is too loud and obtrusive that the orchestra stops playing and everyone stops chatting. However, when the clock is silent, the rooms are bizarre and stunning and it seems as though dreams are swirling about the guests. However, due to the presence of a foreboding temperature and a clock, most visitors steer clear of the final, red-and-black room.

At midnight, a brand new visitor shows up, dressed in more horrifying attire than his contemporaries. His mask resembled the face of a dead body; his attire is similar to that of a funeral shroud, and the bloodstains on his face indicate that he is a Red Death victim. Prospero loses his temper when someone who lacks humour and lightheartedness joins his gathering.

But the other visitors are so terrified of this disguised man that they fail to stop him from entering every room. In the black-and-red chamber, Prospero eventually catches up to the new visitor. Prospero meets his demise as soon as he is confronted with the figure.

There is no one hiding behind the disguise when other partygoers approach the space to attack the shrouded figure. The Red Death then infects the castle and kills everyone. Finally, “Darkness, Decay, and the Red Death” have their own.

The Masque of the Red Death: Critical Analysis

A literary antecedent is present for the plot of Poe’s narrative which is “The Decameron”, a book by Italian author Boccaccio written in the fourteenth century. It was about a group of noblemen and noblewomen who flee to an abbey to escape the plague or Black Death. This is the literary antecedent for the plot of Poe’s narrative.

Poe’s core plot has only been modified by altering the colour of the plague to the fictitious “Red Death”. Intriguingly, Poe’s initial title for the tale was “The Mask of the Red Death”, emphasizing the masked figure who appears at the conclusion. By changing “Mask” to “Masque”, Poe instead focuses on the masquerade that Prospero puts on for his courtiers.

A masque is a private ball that has long been popular in Italy and need not feature masks. Masks were not required.

Although they were far from wealthy, it’s important to keep in mind that when Poe wrote: “The Mask of the Red Death” in 1842. Prince Prospero and his affluent companion’s belief that they may evade the Red Death and even outwit death itself is naïve hubris.

Nobody can escape the grip of the plague, whether they are young or elderly, wealthy or poor. No one’s wealth will be able to save them from death, and the masked person after the story represents this.

Allegory is used in “The Masque of the Red Death”. It has several identifiable symbols whose combined meanings represent a message. Every allegory has a dual level of meaning: the literal aspects of the story such as the colours of the rooms and their symbolic allusions, which frequently refer to deep philosophical ideas such as death and life.

This tale might be interpreted as an allegory on death and life and the inability of people to escape death’s clutches. Thus death is symbolized by the Red Death both literally and allegorically. No mortal, nor even a prince, can avoid death, regardless of how lovely the castle, how lavish the apparel, or how lavish the cuisine.

Considering the story from another perspective, the tale serves as a challenge and punishment for Prospero’s conceit that he can use his wealth to postpone “death” which is a tragic and inevitable part of existence. He is also insensitive to the issues and plight of his fellow countrymen as a result of his attitude.

Despite having the resources to aid the underprivileged, he instead utilizes his fortune to defend himself. His self-indulgence in throwing a masquerade party portrays him as an animal in a cage with no chance of emancipation.

The phases of life are symbolically represented by the palace’s chambers, which are arranged in a series. Poe deliberately arranges the rooms so that they flow from east to west. The life cycle of a day is represented by this process, which has a symbolic significance because the sun rises in the east and sets in the west with night standing in for death.

However, the additional symbolic presentation of the twenty-four-hour life cycle which relates to the domain of humans turns this collection of symbols into an allegory.

Both Prospero and the unidentified visitor acted out this movement from the direction of east to west, which stands for the human life cycle from conception to death. Poe uses the final, pitch-black room as the foreboding culmination; it is this room that the visitors fear just as they fear dying. The guests are also reminded of death’s ultimate judgment by the clock that rules over that space. The ringing of the bells serves as a constant and ultimately individual reminder of the passage of time.

Similar to earlier Poe’s stories, this one’s use of names adds to the symbolic economic framework of the narrative and raises the possibility of further allegorical readings. For instance, Prospero, whose name implies financial success, uses his money to fend off the spread of the Red Death. A form of an economic system that Poe warns is bound to failure may also be symbolized by his escape to the safety of an aristocratic mansion.

Poe illustrates the injustice of a feudal system, where money is concentrated in the hands of the aristocracy while the population suffers, through the hierarchical connection between Prospero and the Peasantry.

Because feudalism was widespread during the genuine Bubonic Plague that ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, this usage of feudal iconography is historically correct. Therefore, because it affects both the wealthy and the poor equally, the Red Death represents a form of monetary equality or radical egalitarianism.

The depiction of the masquerade ball prefigures “The Cask of Amontillado”, which debuted less than a year after “The Masque of the Red Death”, and its comparable setting of the carnival. The masquerade in this narrative serves as a joyous retreat from the air itself, in contrast to the carnival in “The Cask of Amontillado”, which associates drunken merriment with an expansive Italian celebration.

The masquerade, however, relieves the guests’ sensation of claustrophobia by allowing them to face their inner demons. The hideous outfits then take the form of these demons.

The masqueraders continued to be happy and enjoy everything. Poe’s description in this case: There is “much shine and piquancy and glitter and phantasm”, “arabesque figures”, and “madman fashions”, and the attendees are wearing frequently strange clothes. Poe calls the gathering “delirious imaginations” and” beautiful…wanton…weird…awful, and not a little of that which might have excited revulsion,” and other adjectives to describe it.

These depictions are evocative of how orgies are depicted in the other major romantic works, such as Byron’s Childe Harold, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and Goethe’s Faust among others.

Furthermore, it is extremely shocking when the “Red Death” mask appears because the persons wearing the masks are themselves looking like weird beings. The reader learns that compared to all the other guests, this “guest” is even more bizarre and peculiar. He is awful in comparison.

It is significant and symbolic that the “Red Death” appears at midnight. By analogy, this marks the conclusion of the day and the end of life. His physical presence exudes “fear, dread, and revulsion”.

The person is “covered with the target structures of the grave from head to foot”. His mask is that of a corpse, apparently, one that succumbed to the Red Death, and to add to the fright, his entire clothing is covered in blood, with “all the features of the face splattered with the scarlet terror”.

Again the reader should observe how skillfully Poe conveys the ubiquitous dread of death and its horrors through his word choice. Prince Prospero became furious at the intrusion when he sees the stranger; saying that everyone is outraged by the interference of death in their lives would almost be oversimplified.  The prince orders the visitor to be taken immediately, but everyone is too terrified to take this Red Death.

Furious, the prince rushes “hurriedly through the six apartments,” and grabs a knife, but as he gets close to the figure, the blade stops, and the prince collapses to the ground dead on the black carpet. The other partygoers stumble onto the black “mummer”, but to their “unspeakable terror”, they discover nothing hidden behind their corpse-like mask or beneath the shrouds.

Each of them dies one by one. Poe claims that The “Red Death”’ has an “illimitable rule over all”.

There are no real characters in Poe’s tale. The unpredictability of death is an age-old theme, and Poe uses it masterfully in this narrative to immerse us in its dread by creating and maintaining a complete unity of effect.

The narrative does not attempt to offer a genuine perspective on any observable part of life.

Even though we have got no idea where the narrative takes place, we guess it is in southern Europe based on the prince’s name. Poe’s amazing ability to produce a strong unity of effect gives the story credence and every word in every description works together to create a singular, overarching feeling of dread and fear.

One of Edgar Allan Poe’s most potent tales is characterized by a weird atmosphere, absurd circumstances, and expressive style.

Into the carnival, the masquerade encourages the letting go of rigid notions of personal identity and social norms. The enigmatic visitor, however, sheds light on Prospero and his guests’ level of social convention policing. Prospero becomes angry when the enigmatic visitor exploits his disguise to represent the anxieties that the masquerade is meant to allay.

He is aware that the success of the celebration depends on the psychological conversion of fear of the Red Death into joy. The unknown guest breaks a masquerade social convention when he dramatizes his interpretation of celebration as the unspoken terror. This logic of the masquerade leads to Prospero’s downfall and the consequent death of his guests. When festivity is revealed as a means of fending off terror, the bare disclosure of what lies beneath is sufficient.