44 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Masque of the Red Death
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1842A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Prospero
At first introduction Prospero is described as “happy and dauntless and sagacious” (739), the proper picture of a charming prince. Poe quickly subverts this description. We are shown Prospero’s true nature in his summoning all his courtiers to his abbey during the devastation of the Red Death. Sealing himself and his friends off from the fatal plague that infests his own people, he shows little care for his subjects. Imprisoning his courtiers inside his abbey and then dressing them for a party of his own design (though they never object) shows his lack of respect for this group as well.
An embodiment of wealth’s obliviousness and folly, we are also told Prospero may be insane: “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” (741). This suggestion of madness, combined with the characterization of his courtiers as dreams, may also suggest that we should read this story as occurring only within Prospero’s mind.
Prospero can also be considered to represent Poe himself. Like Prospero, Poe has a taste for the bizarre and the Gothic. Like Prospero, Poe has an active imagination and dreams up the setting and costume of this party. These autobiographical aspects of Poe’s protagonist add another layer to the allegory, with the author perhaps believing death would soon be coming for him, as it came for his young wife only months before the composition of this story. In a more literary bend, Prospero’s madness and bizarre tastes may simply be a way for Poe to inject these aspects into his writing, with little thought of the psychological realism of his character.
The Masked Figure
This mysterious attendant of Prospero’s party is the incarnation of the Red Death itself. In describing the figure as a terrifying “phantasm” (741) that is “tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” (742), Poe draws upon some cultural reference points for the embodiment of death. The figure resembles the standard image of the Grim Reaper, a shrouded skeletal figure carrying a scythe, as well as the horsemen of the apocalypse. As such, the figure can be construed not just as the embodiment of the Red Death but more generally of death itself.
The masked figure is a foil for Prospero and his guests. Arriving (like a guest) and wearing a mask and shroud that “out-Herods Herod” (742), meaning it outshines even the courtiers’ grotesque costumes, the figure mocks the revelry of the living and signals they have brought death on themselves. At the end of the story it is not Prospero but the Red Death that holds “dominion over all” (744), inverting Prospero’s princely power.
The incorporeality of the figure reflects on the fleetingness of all life’s actions, especially the oblivious revelry of Prospero and his court, which has no real weight. This supernatural element of the figure also shows that death’s power operates beyond human control. While it is necessary to “hear and see and touch” Prospero to ensure his sanity (741), and Prospero’s castle is sealed exactly so no diseased bodies can get in, the incorporeality of death allows this figure to slip into this impenetrable abbey. With this aspect of the character, Poe tells us death is unavoidable by mortal techniques.
The Guests
The guests, a “thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of [Prospero’s] court” (739), are Prospero’s subordinates and playthings. They are an amorphous unit, with nothing known of them except that they are members of Prospero’s court and that they willingly submit to his madness. No individual among them is at any point highlighted. Surrounding Prospero in his abbey but manifesting no personality or defining traits of their own, these characters emphasize only Prospero’s seclusion, even more so in the fact that Prospero obscures their identities in grotesque costumes of his own design, thereby transforming them into externalizations of his doomed madness. Poe even suggests that these guests, and by extension much of the story, could be nothing but figments of Prospero’s own imagination: “To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams” (742).
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
