However, there are also literary scholars who say that this story is much more than what it appears to be. Poe may have meant something quite different about Prospero's actions.
Says Canada, for example, while literary scholars have analyzed all of these aspects of Poe's work, they have studied many more, as well. "Of particular interest is Poe's fascination with psychology. An outspoken admirer of phrenology, a pseudoscience based on the premise that various functions are controlled by specific regions of the brain, he tirelessly explored subjects such as self-destruction, madness."
Some critics argue instead that Poe's story had a religious motive, because Poe is often seen as a philosophical-religious writer who expounds on the conditions of salvation and psychological reconciliation to the will of God (Wagenknecht, 217; May 102). Prince Prospero attempts to escape death by retreating into his abbey, "an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste" (Poe 130). Once everyone is inside, the gates are welded shut to make sure there is no "ingress or egress," and the prince says that "the external world could take care of itself" (Poe 131). However, by shutting himself away from the plague, Prince Prospero, is also shutting himself away from his life as a whole and from God. The result, in this case, is death.
May (102-103) also questions whether or not Prince Prospero is mad and unable to discern real from unreal. For the masquerade ball, he paints a patterned unreality: "There were delirious faces such as the madman fashions. There were 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. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact a multitude of dreams" (Poe 132).
This madness and ability to step in and out of reality is perhaps a way that Poe's characters can relate to the insane world around them, over which...
How can a rational human being who sees life in a perfect cause-and-effect manner deal with a world where thousands of people are dying for no apparent reason and where nothing can be done to stop the death and decay? Perhaps insanity and madness is the only way to adapt.
Timmerman states that this "use of a mental landscape is nothing new to Poe," and appears prominently in his work where "the weird and otherworldly geographical landscape is nothing more than an objectification of the narrator's own mind." This is often depicted in his short stories, "particularly in the descriptions of the ornate and convoluted furnishings of a room that mirror the mind of the narrator" like those in "The Red Masque of Death." In his works, he structures this interconnectedness, between the physical world and the mental/psychological world where individuals are trying to cope with the reality of everyday existence.
Thus, with both the "The Black Cat" and the "The Red Masque of Death," many questions are left unresolved. By giving just enough information about the protagonists to make them of interest and believable, but not enough information to truly understand their true motives, Poe gives his readers the opportunity to search within themselves to find the answers that best respond to their own psychological needs.
References
Canada, Mark. Poe in His Right Mind. Dissertation. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1997.
Frushell, Richard C. " 'An Incarnate Night-Mare': Moral Grotesquerie in 'TheBlack Cat' Poe Studies, (1972) 5.2: 43-44.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Stark, J. "Motive and meaning: The mystery of the will in Poe's 'The Black Cat.'"
The Mississippi Quarterly (2004) 57.2: 255-264.
Timmerman, John H. "House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'" Papers on Language and Literature (2003) 39: 227-234.
