khaihiok's blog

After reading, the seven colored chambers are most impressive to me. Seven colors, black velvet, and the Red Death all attract my attention of Edgar Allan Poe’s allegorical meanings of colors. The chambers are in a sequence like a rainbow and the black one is added, and in the west; therefore, we could know that from the east to the west is from the red to the black. The directions and the colors of these chambers, actually, symbolize the life stages of people that from red to black is like from birth to death just as the sun orbits from east to west (to people on the Earth). As the sun rises in the east and is covered by night in the west, Princes Prospero’s pursuing the Red Death leads himself to the deadly black chamber, the room of death, which he wants to exclude.

Each chamber shares the same color with its windows; however, in the seventh, black chamber, “the panes were scarlet--a deep blood color.” Why aren’t they corresponding? The red usually symbolizes blood, which, actually, contains opposite meanings. In Poe’s arrangement of the colors of the chambers, the red is birth or life; in the title and throughout the story, the red is death or blood. It is not difficult to relate the Red Death to the epidemic Black Death during the mid-fourteenth century. The death is red because, after the infection, blood pours out and stains people’s faces. Blood is evidence of our lives that babies gain nutrition from the blood of mothers and we couldn’t live without it. However, when we suffer from flooding, death is lurking. Also, in this story, Poe sets both the red and the black to be vital that Prince Prospero pursues the Red Death from the red chamber, a beginning of death, to the black one, the end of his life. When light illuminates through the scarlet panes of the black chamber, the combination of two destructive colors incarnates the Red Death.

In the end of “the fifth or sixth month” of their seclusion, Prince Prospero holds a masquerade, inviting dancers and musicians, to entertain the courtiers. This ball would imply more when it is connected to the “dance of death,” which originates from the English moralities in the mid-fourteenth century, following the pervasion of the Black Death. In those plays, the Death shifts from its traditional, terrifying image to the messenger of God, leading people inching to death, to the Last Judgment. In Poe’s story, the dancing and the music pave the path to death. Prince Prospero, who wants to walls off the Red Death, is, ironically, the leader of the journey of dissolution, leading himself and the crowd from the revel to the decease. In view of this, we could also say that the masquerade is held, not by Prince Prospero, but by the Red Death, the host of the mortal orgy.

For five or six months, Prince Prospero and the nobles hide in the abbey to shun the pestilence which devastates the folks. To avoid monotony, the Prince holds a ball; while, the ball is the hotbed for the Red Death. In minutes, the Red Death destroys Prince Prospero and one thousand isolationists who think they could be exempt from the disease. This induces a moral, if we see the story as an allegory, that no one can escape death. No matter male or female, rich or poor, sturdy or flimsy, people must die—an inevitable result of birth. The name of Prince Prospero suggests positive meaning of “prospering,” but it’s impossible for him to proper all the time and he has to face death when it comes. Although Prince Prospero shields himself from the Red Death by “the castellated abbey,” he fails when death is inside his body.

Another moral may be, from the same line of Prince Prospero’s flight, that the leaders should be responsible to all people, not just “the knights and dames.” The poor, the weak, and the sick are banished from the abbey ruthlessly by the Prince. The abbey, of course, could not accommodate all people, and the key point is the Prince should not abscond at all. It is his duty to be with the mass, to provision for the needed, and to avoid the rising death toll. People’s efforts may be invalid when it comes to ineluctable catastrophe, but the wealth to support the seclusion would benefit more people if the Prince could be less selfish and nonchalant.

Reference

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Masque of the Red Death. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia (Eds.), An Introduction to Fiction (pp. 386-391). United States: Longman, 2005.