The Masque of the Red Death

The “Masque of the Red Death” is a Gothic horror tale—Poe being one of the first practitioners of the Gothic form in America and a father of the American Gothic subgenre. The story is often taken allegorically, as a narrative made to communicate the inescapability of death. This is symbolized through Prospero’s futile armaments against death, yet its ultimate arrival despite them. The imminence of death is also symbolized through the emphasis on several different ideas of time, such as through the gigantic clock striking the hours.

Stylistically, “The Masque of the Red Death” is highly ornate. Poe shifts between tenses (e.g., past, present future), narrative focalizations (e.g., first person, third person), and different literary genres and subgenres (e.g., Romantic, Gothic, fairy tale, parable) with ease. Poe’s genre-shifting is exemplified well in the transition between the first and second paragraphs of the story. In the first, macabre elements are brought forward in a short description of disease that reads like a medical text: “there were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores” (739). The tone shifts drastically when we are introduced to Prince Prospero, who is “happy and dauntless and sagacious” (739), in the second paragraph. It is as if we have suddenly stepped into a fairy tale, leaving the Gothic undertones and medical stylization of the first paragraph behind. Poe’s ability to shift between linguistic flavors signals his literary genius and is part of the story’s overall baroque (or excessively ornate) style. It also encodes some of the deeper ambiguities of the text that scholars still question: Should it be read as an allegory? Is Prospero’s happiness despite these events intended to signal his madness? If he is mad, are the guests figments of his imagination, as the story elsewhere suggests? Poe leaves all these questions unanswered.

Other important facets of the story emerge in its first lines. In noting that Red Death causes the sick to be cast out by their countrymen, Poe sets up a critique of the wealthy and the exclusionary tendencies that unfold through the character of Prospero. Symbolic of these characteristics, Prospero shuts himself off from the dangers of death in his abbey, and while his country suffers, he and his courtiers celebrate. In his belief that he may escape death, even to the point of holding a masquerade that mocks death in its macabre design, Prospero also invites death on himself (as if a guest), sealing his own fate (as he has sealed the walls of his castle).

Prince Prospero’s actions indicate his own unhinged nature as the story unfolds. His initial decision to seal himself and his court within a castellated abbey shows he is both literally and figuratively disconnected from reality. His party design choices, which extend to dressing all his guests, show that the prince has little regard for the thoughts and tastes of others, and uses his court much like playthings. Consistently making mention of Prospero’s bizarre tastes, Poe goes so far as to suggest at one point that “there are some who would have thought him mad” (741). In this statement Poe cements his satirical picture of the wealthy as so enmeshed in their own tastes and invented realities that they seem mad. In doing so, Poe also suggests that all the story’s events may be nothing but the thoughts of a madman.

A later description of Prospero’s guests adds to the possibility of his madness: “to and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these—the dreams—writhed in and about” (742). The guests are described as dream figures, figments with little substance. Prospero, on the other hand, is corporeal exactly because we can “hear and see and touch him” (741). This may signal that Prospero is more real than his guests. Could this entire story be occurring in the final fever dream of Prospero, infected by the plague? Poe never assures us one way or the other.

One of the most striking elements of Poe’s story is the extensive detail describing the seven-room setting of Prospero’s masquerade. This intensity of description serves the allegory of the tale. Telling us the exact color of each room, how they are laid out, and their east-west direction, Poe encourages the reader to think deeply about these rooms and what they might symbolize. Arranged from east to west, these rooms mirror the passage of a single day. In their play from airy blue to deepest black, they also mirror the passage of life from birth to death. The foreboding clock in the final room, chiming each of the hours, symbolizes the winding down of all of our lifetimes and the unavoidability of “the hour of death.” Traversing all the rooms, the figure of Red Death comes for Prospero, despite how hidden away he and his friends are in this abbey. The suggestion is that when our time comes, there is nothing we can do to avoid death—our life, our party, is over.

Following the description of the rooms and the clock, the story ends rather quickly, gesturing to the fleetingness of life. Before the arrival of the figure and after the description of the rooms, Poe gives us a single description of the party in action. Notably, he does not highlight any specific conversation or event; instead, he takes a bird’s-eye view of the guests who move “to and fro” (742) in the chambers with ease, who are frozen stiff by fear every time the clock strikes and then continue their revelry. In synchronizing all the party’s events to the chiming of this clock, Poe structures a conceit (an extended metaphorical description) of a cuckoo-clock or music box in this paragraph. Through this descriptive tool, he gestures to the fated-ness of the events that are playing out before the reader: The clock is moving inexorably toward midnight, and all the guests are simply figments who move set by the gears of this great machine.

When the masked figure arrives, he comes at midnight, signaling the hour of death is at hand and gesturing again to the centrality of the clock’s chiming in structuring the story. Initially, the guests are not afraid of the figure because he is the Red Death incarnate but because he shows signs of infection with Red Death. This recalls the first lines of the text, which inform the reader that the Red Death shuts its victims out from the sympathy of others, emphasizing here both the obliviousness and exclusiveness of Prospero’s court. Prospero, enraged someone could infiltrate his fortifications, aims to kill this figure with a dagger. This emphasis on death as penetrating the body fits into the larger theme of the internal and external gestured to throughout the story. Of course, this dagger is useless, as the Red Death has no form. It is this formlessness that, ostensibly, allows it to slip past the welded gates and shows that the powers of death exceed that of mortal evasion. In the final moments, after the Red Death has infected and killed everyone at the party, we are told it holds “dominion over all” (743). This is the inverse of Prospero’s mortal kingdom, showing that the real ruler of us all is no king but the inevitability of death itself.