Name
English 1302/ Time
Date
Essay 3 Draft 1
Can’t Escape Death
In “Masque of the Red Death” -- a story of life and death—Edgar Allan Poe
introduces color as themes of life. He also uses color as stages from birth to death. When
the pestilence hits the Prince Prospero’s followers, he locks himself and a few of his
couriers away in an abbey. When death decides to seek Prospero out, Edgar Allan Poe
uses the setting and color imagery to produce the theme that man cannot escape death.
Poe uses the plague, the castellated abbey, and Prince Prospero’s actions to set the
stage for the bazaar happenings in “Masque of the Red Death.” The Red Death proposes
a symptom similar to the bubonic plague of the 1300’s which wiped out half the
population, just as in the “Masque of the Red Death” (TED 1). Edgar Allan Poe describes
the epidemic:
Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood. There were
sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and the profuse bleedings at the pores, with
dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the
victim were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy
of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease,
were the incidents of half an hour. (162)
In an effort to escape death, Prince Prospero took 1,000 of his followers to a
castellated abbey, after half of his dominions were already depopulated by the plague.
The abbey was a massive glorious structure. It was said to be built in the “prince’s own
eccentric” liking (Poe 162). Critic Jeffrey J. Folks suggests that “. . . Prospero intends to
guarantee his own survival, not that of his subjects. The court is necessary only as an
echo to Prospero’s rule . . . (2). A sturdy wall with gates cast of iron encircled the abbey.
Work men came with massive hammers and welded the gates shut with no way in or out.
The abbey was supplied with vitals all in efforts to keep out the plague. The prince had
supplied all the pleasures of the flesh buffoons, improvisatori, ballet-dancers, musicians,
cards, beauty, wine, and security within the walls of the abbey, because outside was the
Red Death (Poe 162). During a masquerade ball every hour on the hour the crowd
demonstrates “the same disconcert, tremulousness, and meditation” (165) as the hour
previous at the chiming of an ebony clock. Despite the fact of the ghastly clock ringing
every hour, the people still had a melodious and happy time at the masquerade ball.
Prospero ordered to all of his followers that the masks must be “grotesque” (165). “There
were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs, and appointments. There were delirious
fancies such as the madman fashions” (165). Poe does not stop with the clothing of the
revelers, he also fashions the abbey so that the eerie mood prevails.
To add to the haunting feeling suppressed by Prospero’s followers, Poe creates
seven rooms. He retained the seven rooms as the seven ages of man. The seven colors are
blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black. The color blue means life; the color
green means prosperity; the color white is spacing time; the color violet means pain, and
black is death. Critic Lawrence Vanderbilt briefly pursues the interesting possibility that
Poe consciously patterns the color distribution of Prospero’s rooms after Shakespeare’s
own sequencing of the seven ages of man (Du Plessis 2). “Joseph Roppolo finds the
colors to be reminiscent of a life cycle: blue in the first chamber indicating birth and life,
and black and red in the last apartment signifying death” (Du Plessis 2). Another critic
Hubert Zapf thinks of the colors as “a parodic reversal of the biblical act of creation, a
symbolic teleology of human life” (qtd. in DuPlessis 2).
The seventh apartment, the black room, has great significance in itself. A few
obvious observations –red is the color of blood and black is relatively a color
accompanied with funerals (du Plessis 2), but that doesn’t account for all of the black
room’s traits. The room had black velvet tapestries draped all over the ceiling and walls.
The color of the windows did not correspond with the color of the room. The panes in
this room were a beautiful scarlet, a dark red blood color (Poe 163). Poe’s description
creates an ominous mood.
There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the
suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite there stood
opposite to each window, a heavy tripod bearing a brazier of fire that
projected its rays through thee tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the
room(164).
In the black room stands an elegant ebony clock that at every hour sends chills down
Prospero’s follower’s backs. Vincent Buranelli explains Poe’s ebony clock in EDGAR
ALLAN POE. “Poe’s symbolism generally takes the form of allowing some object to
stand for an abstraction or a personal attribute. The clock in ‘The Masque of the Red
Death,’ with its hourly peal of the chimes, gives to the revelers a premonition that the end
for them comes ever closer” (78). The costumes and the description of the abbey lead to
Poe’s theme that man cannot escape death.
Poe demonstrates that avoiding death is a lost cause. During the masquerade ball
Death is able to float among the followers as a guest of Prospero, but Prospero does not
like Death’s costume which displayed him as the Red Death, and thought it disrespectful.
The mask was splattered with blood giving it the appearance of the red death (165).
“Prospero’s instinctive reaction to the masked figure is that of the paranoiac confronted
by a rival whose masking appears to mock the secrecy that all rulers take on” (Folks 3).
Prospero orders Death be captured and striped of clothes and hung from the battlements.
None of his followers respond. “There were found none who put forth hand to seize him;
so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the princes person” (Poe 168). Prospero
had his chance to arrest Death. He even came within a breath’s width of Prospero’s
person walking strait passed him; Prospero froze. Prospero swelled with embarrassment
taking off after Death, following him to the black room passing all of the chambers one
by one. Black room, sharp cry, the thud of a dagger hitting carpet, immediately after a
limp Prospero. Afterwards a thousand more limp bodies of Prospero’s followers littered
the grounds of the castellated abbey (Poe 168). Critic Robert Wilbur gives his opinion of
Poe’s work:
More than once, in his dialogues or critical writings, Poe describes the earthbound, time-bound rationalism of his age as a disease. And that is what the Red
Death signifies. Prince Prospero’s flight from the Red Death is the poetic
imagination’s flight from the temporal and worldly consciousness into dream.
(68)
Poe shows in “Masque of the Red Death,” man cannot cheat death or lock himself
away from fate as Prospero does in his abbey locked away with his multitudes. In the
end of the story as Prospero is chasing Death, he is doing what he has been trying to
prevent his whole life. He has been running from death all the way until the end, and as
he passes through the chambers, he runs through the seven stages of his life--ending in
his ultimate demise.