Masque of the Red Death

Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe's the Masque of the Red Death is a short story written in 1842 that tells the tale of a wealthy nobleman, Prospero, who seals himself up inside his castellated abbey in order to avoid a great plague known as the "Red Death." Somewhere around six months into his seclusion, Prospero has a costume party where he has decorated each of seven rooms in a different color. At midnight, an uninvited guest appears dressed in a costume reminiscent of a "Red Death" plague victim. While the other guests are terrified of the hideous figure and allow it to walk unopposed through the seven rooms, Prospero, who at first was just as terrified but has recovered his courage, chases the costumed figure. As he encounters the uninvited guest in the seventh room, a room colored in black with red windows, Prospero touches him and immediately dies; the guest is in fact, the "Red Death" itself and all of the other nobles die as well. This short story is filled with imagery and symbolism, from the sealing up inside of a fortified abbey to the idea of a costume party in the middle of a plague, but one of the most interesting aspects of it is the setting. Poe's Prospero has decorated seven of the rooms of his abbey in different colors, and this setting plays an important role in the story itself.

The setting of the Masque of the Red Death is a castellated, or fortified, abbey. First off, one may not think of an abbey as a place that needs to be fortified as it is religious in nature and therefore a place without violence. However, the "Red Death" plague is a non-violent threat, not associated with war, but it is a sickness and the fact that Prospero and his friends are in a castellated abbey implies that those inside are defending against an outside threat. Next is the fact that Prospero has decorated seven rooms of the abbey in seven different colors, representing the various stages of life from birth to death. The first six rooms were completely decorated in the colors blue, purple, green, orange, white, and violet, and had every aspect of the room, including the windows, colored. However, in the final black colored room, "the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations;" its windows were colored blood red. (Poe) This is important because the black room, being the final room, represented death, and the death that was threatening everyone was the plague known as the "Red Death." This room also had a great ebony colored clock that struck out on the hour in a loud and most annoying manner. The clock is also symbolic of time, and how time is always ticking away on a person's life, moving them closer toward death.

The seven rooms of various colors were seven adjacent rooms, all in a row from East to West; in other words, the easternmost room was the first and the westernmost room was the seventh. The fact that they were arranged from East to West represents the daily cycle, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, but it is also symbolic of the cycle of life. In other words, as a person travels in a westward direction from the first room to the seventh, they travel symbolically travel from birth to death. The various colors represent different stages in a person's life, with the last room being black with red windows, representing death from the plague. At midnight, when the uninvited guest arrives, the terrified party-goers move out of the way as he travels from the first room to the seventh room. When Prospero finally recovers his courage and follows the hideously costumed figure, he symbolically travels the path of life from the first room to the last. And as Prospero confronts the masked intruder, he comes face-to-face with that which he had sealed himself away from: the "Red Death" plague.