The Masque of the Red Death

“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.” 

Immediately after the previous quotation, Poe transitions from describing the specific symptoms of the disease to the stages of witnessing the disease afflict others. Poe uses this description to initiate some of the most important themes of his story. Noting that the signs of this plague ensure that all infected are cast out of society, Poe foreshadows the exclusivity of Prospero’s party. In describing the time the disease takes to kill, Poe highlights the lack of time left for everyone involved in the tale. Finally, in showing that the disease affects not only on its victims but also those who simply see it, Poe suggests it complete pervasiveness, which is brought about fully in the story’s final words.

“The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet dancers, there were musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’” 

Poe uses a style of narration called free indirect discourse here, in which the text, while remaining focalized through the omniscient narrator, simulates the mood or opinion of the character. For instance, it is not Poe but Prospero who thinks “the external world could take care of itself.” This is a complex effect that helps blend the personalities of Poe and his protagonist while also suggesting these events may be figments of Prospero’s imagination (just as they are Poe’s). More generally, in sealing of all his characters within Prospero’s abbey, Poe creates a structural dialectic of the internal and the external. Falsely protective, the internal world is somewhere no one needs to grieve or even think. Through this suggestion Poe foregrounds Prospero’s foolishness in thinking that human walls can withhold the superhuman forces of death.

“It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite. […] the apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. […] That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue—and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange—the fifth with white—the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color.” 

Poe describes the seven rooms of the masquerade in exhaustive detail. Within these rooms are several simultaneous incarnations of time. Running east to west, the rooms align with the passage of the sun on a single day. Seven in number, the rooms represent the days of the week. Once within a room, the homogenous quality of a single color suggests eternity, while the view of only one other room suggests time as present, juxtaposed to past or future. Finally, each color represents a different stage of life—blue for birth and innocence, all the way to black, for sleep and death. These seven rooms structure the allegory of Poe’s story, describing the inescapable transit from life to death through several overlays of the idea of time’s measurement.

“The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened.” 

Poe has already told us that the abbey is sealed without and within. Here he describes the passage of the seven rooms passing in a labyrinthine fashion toward darkness. Soon he will describe Prospero’s guests as if dreams. In these three symbolic descriptions, Poe analogizes the story’s setting to the structure of a single mind, passing increasingly into the recesses of the subconscious as the story progresses. The depravity of madness is a common theme in Gothic literature, and Poe clues us to this reading by describing the windows between the rooms as of Gothic style. Though he never confirms the possibility, many of the aspects of Poe’s setting and diction suggest this story should be read as nothing more than the goings-on in a single person’s depraved mind.

“It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came forth from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians in the orchestra were constrained to pause, momently, in their performance, to harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation.” 

Prospero’s gigantic clock is the centerpiece of his masquerade and the single object that unites his varied models of time. Erected in the final room, the dark ebony clock has an innately foreboding quality. This quality is enhanced by its peculiar sound, which at every hour rings out over the entire masquerade. We note that the description of this sound is related by Poe all in a single sentence, conjuring the way this sound flows out over and immerses everyone at the party. Symbolic of the moment of death itself, this sound is very unsettling to all of the partygoers, who sense its otherworldly nature. In being erected in the final room, this clock suggests all ideas of time are eschatological, inevitably running toward their end.

“The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.” 

This description of the tastes of the prince, here referred to as a duke, are both comic and startling. We are told his style departs from the standard, marking him out as a man of unique taste. However, we are quickly shown the peculiarity and bizarreness of this taste, and Poe even suggests his protagonist may be mad. Prospero becomes a satire of the standard prince or wealthy lord, a madman immersed in his own fantasy and all the more silly for it.

“There was 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.” 

For the first time in his story, but not the last, Poe characterizes Prospero’s guests as a “multitude of dreams.” This may refer simply to the bizarre setting of the story and the fact that Prospero designed the party and costumes from his own imagination. It may also suggest that the whole story is nothing but the dream of an isolated prince, one who “some would have thought…mad” (741).

“And these—the dreams—writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, momently, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff—frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away—they have endured but an instant—and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. 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.” 

Intensifying the sense of the whole scene as nothing but a dream, Poe describes the guests’ movement as an airy flitting between rooms. Set to the chiming of the clock, the whole scene is a dance, but it also uses the conceit of a clock or music box repeating its machinations to suggest the staged aspect of the scene. The dreams “writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms,” are frozen by the chime of the clock, and then “live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows.” Poe’s repetition of the same words across sentences—a literary effect known as parallelism—aids in creating this staged aspect.

“But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.” 

Poe has already established the foreboding quality of the seventh room and the clock within. Again, now, he seems to suggest the clock is living, or the world of the masquerade a hallucination, as the clock is said to release a “muffled peal” whenever anyone enters this room.

“In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum.” 

At the moment when the narrative should be the most terrifying, Poe inserts a somewhat comedic comment. Bringing the reader’s attention to the fiction of the narrative through reference to himself as the writer, he also notes how the dreaded figure has outdone the prince in costume of ghastliness, has “out-Heroded Herod.” The moment is another aside designed to highlight the dual obliviousness and excess of Prospero and his party; it also exemplifies the mix of ornate language, wry understated comedy, and terror that comprises Poe’s tone.

“But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, again, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before.” 

Each time the clock strikes, the thought of death materializes for all revelers. Now, as the clock strikes 12, death itself comes for Prospero and his party guests. The Red Death’s arrival at this fated hour tells us that, like the workings of a clock, the events of the evening were ordained from the start. The fact that such fear creeps into the revelers’ minds before the figure even appears shows that the guests have always known this to be true.

“The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood— and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.” 

Describing the terrifying figure’s mask, Poe harkens back to both the facial pallor of those infected with the Red Death and the artificial nature of the masks worn by Prospero’s guests. In mentioning that most at the party think this is an individual infected with the Red Death, and are therefore terrified of him, Poe reminds readers of the high-class exclusivity and immorality of these characters. Furthermore, the possibility that this figure may be a sickly person sets the reader up for even deeper horror at realizing the figure is the immaterial incarnation of death itself.

“It was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly—for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.” 

Recalling Prospero’s early description as “happy and dauntless and sagacious” (739), we are again reminded of Prospero’s strength and health. While in its first instance the reader may have taken this information at face value, at its second occurrence they have been clued to the irony of these words. While perhaps physically strong, Prospero is a fool, even possibly mad. By now the reader knows that death is coming for Prospero, making this description of his strength all the more ironic.