edgar allan poe's 'the masque of the red death back up

Edgar Allan-Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death and Stephen King's 'The Shining'.

http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles21/747633/projects/5607787/39473d46f1de866e1c7a3763c23d2054.jpghttp://th07.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2011/130/f/8/the_mask_of_the_red_death_by_flamiathedemon-d3g1ram.jpgEdgar Allan-Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death and Stephen King's 'The Shining'.

Introduction

Throughout the presentation we will be discussing the main allegorical themes within Poes short story and Kings horror novel making reference to the primary texts, secondary sources and critical theory to support our interpretation.

Setting / Poe
POINTS TO COVER

The action of the The Masque of the Red Death takes place in Castellated Abbey / Abbey is confined.

The Abbey is walled with gates of iron.

7 Coloured rooms.

The rooms run from East to West.

Irregularly disposed apartments

Classic gothic setting.

Religious connotations.

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS9SthORapsJhBSY-XUGmvdi8qYJ9f8e5OjFDJdN4imPVVaCNht0ghttp://www.deviantart.com/download/333748155/gothic_background_stock_by_wyldraven-d5ipdq3.jpghttp://www.appalachianironworks.com/images/radfordgate_wrought_iron_gate_salem_virginia_old_ironwork_metalwork_gates_metal.jpg'The deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys' (Paragraph 2, Line 2)

'A strong and lofty wall girdled it in/This wall had gates of Iron' (Paragraph 2, Lines 4 And 5)

'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. 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.' (Paragraph 4)

'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' ( Paragraph 4)

Setting / Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES

Many of the buildings or even individual rooms may symbolize the interiors of human heads (Fisher 84: 2002)

The abbey however , very much resembles the interior of the human head (Fisher 88: 2002)

This act of confinement that the prince imposes on his countrymen is the exact opposite of the reaction that the nineteenth-century society took toward death (Santi 99:2012)

It is, of course, designed to repel all potential entrants, especially the plague itself, although this proves a predictably futile hope (Punter and Byron 260:2004)

Setting / Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES

The Overlook Hotel located in the mountains.

Deaths/murders

East & West wings; Room 217, Boiler Room, The Presidential Suite, The ballroom.

Setting / King
POINTS TO COVER

http://www.theshining2.com/images/overlook2.jpghttps://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSTv9DH2K15U-wYagfC1UDWT1GOmbWtoY9A9JYy1yksnlQCWQvGhttps://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQoFjqiQ-bl8nHY1zuygoWq9Kjkpu7gE756fCi_qk2N9cy5m0pnYgThe winters are fantastically cruel (14)...cut off from the outside world for 5 to six months (14)corridors that twisted and turned like a maze (72) Sheer rock faces rose all around them, so high you could barely see their tops even by craning your neck out the window (49)the bulbs were masked behind cloudy, cream-hued glass that was bound with crisscrossing iron strips (71)

There was a tragedy. A horrible tragedy (14)He killed them, Mr Torrance, and then committed suicide. He murdered the little girls with a hatchet, his wife with a shotgun, and himself the same way (15)

dark musty-smelling room (20) chanelled destructive force (20) the hissing died reluctantly (22)

red-and-white striped silk wallpaper (72) Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of greyish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper (72)

The elevator, the basement, the playground, Room 217, and the Presidential Suite...those places were 'unsafe'. Their quarters, the lobby, and the porch were 'safe'. Apparently the ballroom was too (216)

Setting /King
PRIMARY SOURCES

landscapes could embrace a residual Christianity concerned with sin and redemption but they could equally be non-didactic, without any real hierarchy of values, without, indeed a moral core (Bloom, 2007: 12)The Gothic taste for medievalism gives way by the middle of the nineteenth century to modern settings, often middle-class homes or hotels: bedrooms, libraries or gardens, where the weird is now given free rein. (Bloom, 2007:12)

King is concerned with American values (Bloom, 2007: 9)his work is based on social relations and family ties (Bloom, 2007: 9)[King's] tales are often prolific explorations of small town sensibilities into which horror is integrated as a plot device (Bloom, 9)ghosts and demons that appear are reminders, perhaps in general of man's inhumanity to man, but also more specifically of the earlier violences which have occurred in the development of American society and the American psyche (Punter, 2009: 49)

Setting / King
SECONDARY SOURCES

The signified meaning of the clock.

Clock location.

Midnight.

Mortality.

Time/Poe
POINTS TO COVER

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/092/d/f/The_Masque_of_the_Red_Death_by_MirrorCradle.jpghttp://larrygetslost.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/clock.jpghttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/_GY-vHrWkMMg/SMsJnPg6CjI/AAAAAAAAAJI/iA7_kK93psw/s320/RED+DEATH.jpgIt was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony (Poe, 279)

and when the minute hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical (279)

And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay (281)

And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight on the clock....there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before...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 (280)

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death . He came like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers...and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. (281)

Time/Poe
PRIMARY SOURCES

[the clock] marks the ravages of time in each of the seven stages of earthly mortality (Vanderbilt, 1968: 382)Freud understood the death drive as a biological urge..a force on the threshold between the organism and the psyche, Lacan has since reconceptualized as the return of a sense of the chaotic and ordered Real (Savoy, 2002: 184)

Poe understood that absence is more unsettling than presence, particularly when the absent manifests itself indirectly as uncanny, the psychological, cultural, or physical otherness just below the threshold of what is conscious and conventional (Savoy, 2002: 186)

Time/Poe
SECONDARY SOURCES

The signified meaning of the clock.

Clock location.

Midnight.

Juxtaposition between 1975 and 1945.

Time/King
POINTS TO COVER

http://whatculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/final-shot.jpgIn the Overlook all things had a sort of life. It was as if the whole place was wound up with a silver key. The clock was running. The Clock was running (Chapter 37, Page 334)

Here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one (Chapter 37, Page 335)

All the hotels eras are together now, all but the current one, the Torrance era. And this would be together with rest very soon now (Chapter 43, Page 377)

There was a small, racketing series of clicks, and then the clock began to tinkle Strauss Blue Danube Waltz (Chapter 37, Page 333)

They retreated the way they had come, disappearing just as The Blue Danube finished. The clock began to strike a count of five chimes (Midnight! Stroke of Midnight!) (Chapter 37, Page 334)

(And the Red Death held Sway over all) Chapter 37, Page 33)

A moment later and things began to run backward (Chapter 37, Page 334)

Time/King
PRIMARY SOURCES

Stephen King, for instance, notes three levels, the most significance being that which calls up terror of things unseen but suggested: it is what the mind sees that makes these stories such quintessential tales of terror (Bloom 155:2004)

Whether its Dannys psychic ability or Jacks barely repressed frustration and rage, or both that wind up the clockwork mechanism of the hotel is not completely clear (Byron and Punter 249:2004)

Time/King
SECONDARY SOURCES

Masquerade ball.

Red Death.

Secrets And Masks/ Poe
POINTS TO COVER

Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence (Paragraph 3)

It was voluptuous scene, that masquerade (Paragraph 4)

The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit now propriety existed (Paragraph 11)

The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse (Paragraph 11)

PRIMARY SOURCES

If the red death mummers are so terrifying to them, he is so because they fear realities of time and death (Fisher, 88: 2002)

For Poe the horror lies in the animation of death itself. In his imagination and in his hands, the terror lies in the vitality of death (Giddings, 33:1990)

As in Edgar Allen Poes The Masque of The Red Death, all is phatasmagoric and fearsomely distorted (Hurley 142: 2007)

SECONDARY SOURCES

Masquerade Ball, Ballroom.

Scrapbook.

Basement.

Secrets And Masks/King
POINTS TO COVER

The Ballroom was empty....But it wasnt really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. There was an endless night in August of 1945....a not-yet-light morning in June some twenty years later...bleeding bodies of three men who went through their agony endlessly...a woman lolled in her tub and waited for visitors (217-218)

And later, at midnight, Derwent himself crying: 'Unmask! Unmask!' The masks coming off and...(The Red Death held sway over all!).....the shining glowing Overlook on the invitation....was the farthest cry from E.A Poe imaginable (115)

It seemed that before today he had never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to history (118)

PRIMARY SOURCES

Sigmund Freud has observed, the very point of the repressed is its eventual return. Gothic literature is committed to representing that fearful uncanny. The uncanny, he suggests ''is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar''; it designates the peculiar quality of something ''that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light'' (Savoy, 2002: 171)

The ego altered by such identification becomes an unquiet grave that harbours the living dead...the ego seeks to overcome its own fragmentation by bringing the dead back to life. (Savoy, 2002: 173)

SECONDARY SOURCES

The Author.

Disease.

Death.

Human Vs Nature/ Poe
POINTS TO COVER

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CMyi8p1LSl4/UGX_wWduIdI/AAAAAAAABso/LP4ey23kcs4/s1600/Masque_of_the_Red_Death_by_Edgar_Allan_Poe.jpghttp://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01498/poeEdgar_Allan_Poe_1498622c.jpgThe Red Death had long devastated the country...blood was its Avatar and its seal --- the redness and the horror of blood (278)

This figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask... resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse (280)

PRIMARY SOURCES

Poe was obsessed with the catatonic condition in which life imitated death (Giddings, 1990: 47)

Death appears dramatically like the chief dignitary at a public ceremony (Giddings, 1990: 48)

Poe the dweller among the undead and their crypts, the would be necrophiliac or vampire, the madman, the drug-taker, the alcoholic, the husband of a child-bride, the gambler and celebrant of 'the perverse' in effect none other than his own tormented figure of Roderick Usher (Giddings, 1990: 46)

SECONDARY SOURCES

The Topiary.

The Wasps Nest.

The Shining.

The Author.

Human Vs Nature/ King
POINTS TO COVER

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01592/wasp-nest_1592591c.jpghttp://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/0/2800/1081246-king2.jpgHe was scrambling up the roof as fast as he could, looking back over his shoulder to see if the wasps brothers and sisters were rising from the nest he had uncovered to do battle (Chapter 14, Page 113)

He felt that he had unwittingly stuck his hand into the Great wasps nest of life (Chapter 14, Page 119)

It occurred to him that he didnt care much for these hedge animals (Chapter 23, Page 223)

Yes, there was something different. In the topiary (Chapter 23, Page 227)

PRIMARY SOURCES

The Freudian concept that art is a direct result of a psychological disturbance (Morrison, 192: 1968)

The strong drive to the symbolic in The Shining is of course founded precisely on the overwhelming power of those oppositional images which haunt reader, writer and protagonist (Hanson 145:1990)

According to Freud, one of the most striking and distinguishing features of the human animal is its extreme and extended dependence on its parents after birth (Hanson 135:1990)

Much of the power of the text derives from the fact that the images of death in it, function precisely as images Kind sees that their power lies in their ability to evoke our most secret and fundamental terrors (Hanson 148:1990)

One might say that in Kings work two incompatible realms lock: the realm of moral order, and the other realm of addictive drive it is clearly no accident that King himself has suffered from various addictions in the course of his life (Punter 50: 1998)

SECONDARY SOURCES

Conclusion

In conclusion, both Poe and King use symbolism to explore gothic themes and ideas. There is a clear influence upon The Shining based on Poes The Masque of the Red Death that make the texts open to critical readings and analysis. Although there has been a range of varied readings of both texts, its a united agreement that both authors successfully use symbolism and allegory with purpose to create signified meanings and maintain the gothic genre.

http://news.cnet.com/i/bto/20080625/The_Shining_270x360.jpghttp://www.brunswick.k12.me.us/hdwyer/files/2012/07/product_thumbnail.php_.jpegBibliography/ Further Reading

Bloom, C (2004) Horror Fiction: In Search of a Definition in A Companion to The Gothic Ed. David

Punter London: Blackwell Publishing

Byron, G/ Punter, D (2004) Stephen King, The Shining in The Gothic Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Byron, G/ Punter, D (2004) The haunted Castle in The Gothic Oxford: Blackwell Publishing

Fisher, B (2002) Poe and the Gothic Tradition in The Cambridge Companion To Edgar Allan Poe

Ed. Kevin J. Hayes Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Giddings, R (1990) Poe: Rituals of Life and Death in American Horror Fiction Ed. Brian Docherty

Hampshire:Palgrave Macmillian

Hanson, B (1990) Stephen King: Powers of horror in American Horror Fiction Ed. Brian Docherty

Hampshire:Palgrave Macmillian

Hurley, K (2007) Abject and Grotesque in The Routledge Campanion to Gothic Ed. Catherine

Spooner and Emma McEvoy Oxon:Routledge

Morrison, C (1968) Joseph Wood Krutch and Edgar Allen Poe in Freud and The Critic North

Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press

Punter, D (1998) Stephen King in The Handbook of The Gothic Ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts

London:Palgrave Macmillan

Santi, L (2012) Prince Prospero: The Antithesis of The Beautiful Death in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal

of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 98 102 London: Routledge

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edgar allan poe's 'the masque of the red death back up

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