“The Masque of Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe

“The Masque of Red Death”  by Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic tale of macabre horror. It brings us into a plague-ridden country where the peasants are dropping like flies from a gruesome disease called the “Red Death.” Red Death victims experience “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution” (256). The disease killed within a half-hour after infection. Victims are quarantined and die alone.

Prince Prospero doesn’t really care. After his kingdom is “half depopulated”, he brings together a thousand friends (wealthy nobles) and retires with them into one of his castles, where they party incessantly (256). Six months later, the prince holds a masquerade ball.

The ball is a hit. The thousand friends make merry, but there is another guest. A tall lean figure stalks about the ball, wearing vestments of the dead and a mask of the corpse of a victim of the Red Death. The prince orders the partygoer unmasked and executed at sunrise, but the partygoers are terrified and do nothing.

The prince charges after the insulter with a dagger. The unknown guest simply turns around and faces him, and the prince drops his dagger and dies screaming. Then the rest of the party finally lays hands on him, stripping him, but finding the clothes empty. Slowly, all at the party die by the Red Death, who had attended the ball uninvited.

The plot isn’t complicated. It is a tale of hubris. This prince thinks himself above the simple mortality of his peasants and that he has the resources to stand apart from the throngs of humanity. He sets himself up in his castle with a thousand friends because he feels the need to mock the horror his lands suffer under below. In the paradise he has built for himself, “there were buffoons, there were impovisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All of these and security were with. Without was the ‘Red Death’” (258). He goes so far as to barricade himself in to prevent the diseased and filthy peasantry from gaining entrance.

The Prince is incredibly egotistical. His perspective states, “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think” (256). He is clearly a man drunk with ego and authority, absolutely unfit to minister to the people charged to his authority. He lets them die by the thousands while he holes himself behind armored walls so he can party until the whole plague things fizzle out. He is an unfit ruler.

He also has a taste for the bizarre. The party takes place in an imperial suite decorated like an LSD funhouse. The suite had seven rooms, all differently colored, with the last chamber “closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue.” The windows are “scarlet – a deep blood color” (257). The partygoers are dressed in “grotesque” masks (258). The prince continues to mock the Red Death.

The tone is one of despair. One can hardly sympathize with the cowardly, hedonistic prince. If anything, he is the one at fault in the story. The prince neglects his duties in favor of riding out the crisis. The disease is no villain. In fact, the Red Death enters his apartment as an agent of justice to claim a fugitive.

Work Cited

Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday &, 1966. Print.