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.
Themes
The Unavoidability of Death
The unavoidability of death is the central theme of “The Masque of the Red Death.” Notably, death comes for Prospero (and all his guests) in the symbolic prime of their life, at a party. This suggests that we never know when death is coming for us and that our inane or excessive lifestyles will inevitably be punished or even cause our death.
Death’s inevitability is characterized several ways in the story. Most profoundly, it is personified through the figure of the Red Death itself. It is also illustrated through the design of the masquerade, which is decked with symbols that allude to both time and death. The seven rooms—one for each day of the week—are styled in colors that suggest stages of life, such as blue for birth and black for death. The location of the rooms, which are positioned from east to west, aligns with the sun’s daily journey through the sky, which suggests the passage of time, with sunrise representing birth and sunset signifying death. That the sun makes this journey every day, without fail, further implies inevitability.
The most significant piece of macabre party décor is the clock, which stands in that black seventh room, which is “ghastly in the extreme” (741). In chiming the passing hours over the guests, the clock reminds them of their own lifetimes inexorably slipping away. It reveals their fear and perpetual awareness of death, despite their attempts to control, mock, or forget it. The habitual nature of the clock’s chimes further asserts that death is as certain as the midnight hour. The fact that death comes for Prospero and his guests exactly as the clock strikes 12 confirms that this party (and by extension all our lives) was doomed from the start.
Our inability to avoid death is also shown though the incredible extent of the Red Death’s devastation, as it kills half the country and does so only half an hour after infection. Finally, death’s inevitability is emphasized by its formlessness. Prospero and his courtiers fortify the abbey, welding the gates so no individual can pass through. But death is not an individual or even corporeal. It slips through these defenses easily. Fortification is futile, and the message is definitive: In the end, death will have “dominion over all” (743).
Fear Transformed to Revelry
Masquerade parties are carnivalesque events, the carnivalesque being a mode of behavior in which the regular rules of society are loosened and people behave in ways that are otherwise unacceptable. At Prospero’s masquerade the carnivalesque functions through each attendant wearing a mask, thereby obscuring their identity. The success of this masquerade requires that all the attendants forget their fear of death: “the external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think” (739).
In dressing as diseased figures, Prospero and the revelers not only obscure their fear of death but also in some sense mock it—making it into a decorative element instead of a real risk. However, in another sense, this masquerade can only exist because of the attendants’ fear; they sequester themselves in a fortified abbey, believing they can shut out the Red Death while leaving everyone else to die. This wealthy society then compensates for its fear of losing everything to death through an event that reaffirms its wealth and excess. That Prospero’s meticulously designed party is trimmed with aspects of death—the foreboding clock, the rooms lined east to west—demonstrates his belief that he has defied death.
However, the fact that all the guests nervously laugh whenever the clock chimes shows that fear of death lurks under the surface of this event. And indeed, despite their efforts to avert and forget death, it comes for them all anyway. Taken allegorically, this revelry in the face of death suggests that all life’s actions are an effort to stave off or forget the death that is inevitably coming for us all.
Death as Invasion
Throughout “The Masque of the Red Death,” death is characterized as a creeping, invisible invader. Because death is such an invader, the body must be guarded to avoid demise.
This concept is first externalized through the idea of disease itself. Disease is an invasion of the body by a foreign agent. To avoid disease, we avoid contact with any external object that may be infected. This is why individuals, on seeing the marks of the Red Death on the faces of those infected, oust them from their mercy. While originally “countrymen” (739), their identity changes with mark of the Red Death, turning them into foreigners or invaders in their own home.
Because death is understood as invasive, Prospero and his guests seal themselves in Prospero’s abbey. With the fortifications of a castle, the abbey is guarded as if for siege—again, death is metaphorically understood as an invader. The guests imagine that sealing of the abbey from the outside world will protect their fragile bodies from the creeping and invisible invasiveness of plague. More metaphorically, the guests also cover themselves in costumes to forget their own bodily vulnerability—this is another form of armor.
The Red Death’s entrance into the party despite the abbey’s impenetrability signals the invasiveness of death and disease. We are told this figure comes “like a thief in the night” (743), and Prospero’s initial anger is due to the fact this figure has penetrated where he doesn’t belong. His aim to kill the figure with a dagger represents another form of bodily invasion to cause death. However, the fact that the figure has no form whatsoever, and that the Red Death kills everyone at the party and holds dominion over all, shows that the Red Death is not invasive but pervasive—it is everywhere all at once. Death is not only coming for us all; it has already arrived.
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