Plague and Cultural Panic: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

Abstract

Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ turns on the paradox of a privileged elite succumbing to a plague that is ravaging society at large, and from which they believe themselves completely protected. The horror of the story consists not in the devastation of external society – that is taken for granted – but in the abject failure of the elite’s supposedly impregnable defences, their faith in which is exposed by the ‘Red Death’ as utterly delusory. ‘Put not your trust in Princes’ (Ps. 146.3) takes on an entirely new meaning.

Keywords:

• Edgar Allan Poe
• ‘The Masque of the Red Death’
• symbol and allegory
• The Castle of Otranto
• Á Rebours
• Axёl
• The Tempest
• The Aeneid
• translatio imperii
• Tennyson

Notes

1 For example, The Boston Globe: ‘These days, the short story strikes me as a metaphor of a kind Poe never intended but which is applicable to this crisis: Who among us is akin to the ghastly, ghostly figure who wanders through the party spreading disease?’ (Lehigh 2020); Medium: ‘“The external world could take care of itself”. For Donald Trump, it wasn’t just the rest of the world, but even parts of America itself that were to be left on their own’ (Carlson 2020); Livewire:

The central character … decides that barring a thousand-odd friends among the nobility and the rich, his castle would be closed off to those who contract the illness. In short, those with resources would be protected from the disease, but those stranded outside would be left to possibly die. (Chakraborty 2020)

Psychology Today: ‘The palace had been sealed, as it turns out, to no avail. The deadly disease was already inside. The ruler and his revellers had quarantined themselves with death’ (Fileva 2020); The Prospector Daily: ‘“Masque of the Red Death” serves as a parallel not only to the tragic deaths it can foresee, but in the lack of morality in human behavior’ (Martinez 2020).

2 Poe is a hugely conscious stylist. Controversy over the effectiveness, sophistication and felicity of his prose and poetry has been fierce. The debate is summarised in Zimmerman (3‒27). Sadly, despite the brilliance of his literary constructions, I incline to the view mordantly expressed by Harold Bloom: ‘Poe is inescapable though a vicious stylist in all his works’ (‘Editor’s Note’ vii). However, in mitigation, Bloom has also contributed one of the finest summative insights into his work: ‘Poe dwells, with the rest of us, in Plato’s Cave but wants, more desperately than most do, to find his way out into the disembodied light’ (‘Introduction’ xi).

3 See the epigraph to this essay.