“Masque of the Red Death”

By Edgar Allen Poe

Allegory• a story in which the characters

and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life or for a political or historical situation

• the objective of its use is to preach some kind of a moral lesson.

7 Rooms•7 rooms are allegorical

arranged from East to West

East / West ?

• East=the directions associated with “beginnings,” and birth, because the sun rises in the East.• West=direction of the sunset.

Associated with endings, and death

7 Rooms

1. Blue -birth, suggests the unknown from which a human being comes into the world.

2. Purple – combination of Blue (birth) and Red (associated with life, intensity) suggests the beginning of growth.

3. Green – suggest the “spring” of life (youth)4. Orange – the summer and autumn of life

7 Rooms

5. White-suggests age, white hair, bones

6. Violet – combination of purple and blue or purple and grey, a shadowy color, represents darkness and death

7. Black - Death

Rooms

• The revelers (partiers) don’t go into the black room, they fear death

• The Red Death walks from the blue room to the black room

• Thus walking the course of life from birth to death

• Prospero follows the Red Death

Rooms

• In following the Red Death Prospero and his guest rush into the black room to unmask the Red Death, and die.

• So, the course the characters walk in the story is both literally and metaphorically the course from life to death

The Clock as a symbol

• A symbol of death• Symbol of the passing of “the time that flies”• The inevitability of death• The eerie chiming of the clock on the hour is a

reminder to the revelers that their lives are drifting away with the time, and that death is approaching

The “Castellated Abbey”

• Cut off and secluded, hidden away• Doors are welded shut from the inside

(Gives the story a threatening atmosphere)

• Symbol of worldly power• Standing above the pheasants• Represents both the State and the Church

Imagery

• the formation of mental images, figures, or likenesses of things, or of such images

collectively

• pictorial images.

Imagery examples

• Masquerade ballroom-everything is too wild, too intense, too frenzied and too “grotesque”

• Masqueraders- dressed up in bizarre costumes, a truly mad collage of images, Poe uses dream images to describe them

• Withering dancers• Swelling music• Giddiness• Dizzying scene