Short stories: themes, forms, and literary analysis

Trifles and the Masque of Red Death

The setting plays a major role in the configuration of the two stories. In Poe's horror fiction, the setting is symbolic as it serves an allegoric purpose. In Trifles, the setting is more realistic, but it also has a symbolic value. Isolation and grimness are the characteristics for both settings of the stories. In Poe's fiction, the seven chambers painted and furnished in different colors so as to create fantastic effects represent prince Prospero's attempt to flaunt death by enclosing himself and his guests in a space isolated from reality. In Glaspell's work, the scene is a grim country house where a murder has just taken place, symbolizing also isolation, but this time that of a country house wife, who feels prisoner of her own life. In both stories the setting symbolizes imprisonment and isolation.

In the Masque of Red Death, a wealthy prince tries to ward off reality by building an isolated place for himself and his guests. The fantastic, dream-like chambers where the masquerade is held are a means to hide away from the reality of death and mortality that haunts the region. The place itself seems like a dream, which is of course the best way to escape reality for a while: "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, 6) the music, the fantastic rooms and the masques create a comfortable feeling of unreality where there is no danger: "And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods." (Poe, 6)

However, reality and death penetrate even the walls of the enchanted castle. The last black chamber symbolizes death, and although the visitors try to avoid it, death makes its presence felt when the clock strikes midnight: "But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture."(Poe, 7) Thus, in Poe's story, the rooms in the castle form an allegory of the passing life and the unavoidable death.

In Trifles, the country house where the plot takes place is also the scene of a murder. Mrs. Wright kills her husband over a "trifle," because he has killed her canary. The bird, as the house itself, symbolizes entrapment and prison-like life. The lonely country woman feels trapped in her role as a country farm wife, whose only concern must be the trifles of daily life, such as the preserves, and all her other chores. The signs of "incomplete work" that are seen on the scene, show that Mrs. Wright felt imprisoned by her daily joyless life: "Mrs. Hale: (looking about.) it never seemed a very cheerful place. County Attorney. No -- it's not cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the homemaking instinct."(Glaspell, 40)