The Masque of the Red Death: A Reminder of Our Mutual Interdependence

Scene from Roger Corman’s film of The Masque of the Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death is one of Edgar Allen Poe’s finest short stories. Published in 1842, this terrifying tale relates the story of a medieval prince who retreats to his castle with his courtiers to avoid the horrific plague sweeping the land.

Poe uses the plague, dubbed the ‘Red Death’, as an allegory for the destruction of human hope. Like a medieval memento mori, he reminds us of the transient nature of earthly life and the fate which awaits us all. But the story also invites us to reflect on how things might be different.

The tale’s opening lines warn us what lies ahead:

THE “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution.

With half of his subjects dead, Prince Prospero decided to retreat to the seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys with a thousand of his friends. Means of ingress and egress were barred as they ‘bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself.’

After some months of seclusion, and while the pestilence continued to rage outside the abbey’s walls, the Prince decided to entertain his friends with ‘a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.’ Dancers and musicians were hired. Each room decorated in a different colour. The seventh, and last, room was decorated in black; though the windows were stained red: ‘They cast such a lurid glow that people were afraid to enter.’

Descent into chaos

The debauched nature of the setting is made clear by the description of the rooms’ decoration:

There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

The crazed revels continued until the chiming of midnight, and then stopped abruptly. Prospero noticed a figure in a dark, blood-splattered robe resembling a funeral shroud. His mask resembled the face of a corpse, ‘besprinkled with the scarlet horror.’

Gravely insulted by this mockery, Prospero demands to know the identity of the mysterious guest so they can hang him from the battlements. The other guests, too afraid to approach the figure, let him pass. Maddened by rage, the Prince pursues him to the seventh room. When the figure turns to face him, the Prince lets out a sharp cry and falls dead.

The enraged revellers seize the figure, forcibly remove the mask and robe only to find, to their horror, nothing inside:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

This dramatic finale leaves the reader breathless. And the rapid unfolding of the narrative probably explains why most analyses focus on the inevitability of death, human folly and the illusions that we deploy to try and protect ourselves from the world.

The things that bind us together

But there’s an alternative reading here.

Poe was writing at a time of radical socio-economic change generated by the tumult of the Industrial Revolution. Horror fiction acts as a mirror, reflecting the anxieties and fears of the time, caused by the evident exploitation, crimes and injustices of 19th-century capitalism.

Bourgeois society’s struggle to deal with the growing power of the working class – and the political threat this represented to their interests – is reflected in the transformation of Gothic fantasy and horror literature into its modern form. 

Initially, a line is drawn in the story between the world of life inside the abbey and the world of death outside: ‘All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."’

But this can’t last. While Prospero and his wealthy friends can set themselves apart from the rest of the world, the masked visitor breaches the walls of the abbey and kills everyone inside. Internal and external reality are inextricably intertwined.

In an intriguing article entitled ‘Entropic Imagination in Poe's the Masque of the Red Death’, the critic Hubert Zapf argued that the story can be understood in terms of the second law of thermodynamics’ definition of entropy. The increase of disorder that takes place in the material universe at the expense of order, as energy irreversibly degrades from useful to less useful forms. Until maximum entropy is reached in the heat death of the universe:

The  "Red Death" as the determining agent of the text is not really an outside force but is inherent in the ways in which, by means of political power-structures and the structures of artistic imagination, human life tries to become independent from the forces of chaos and annihilation surrounding it.

The disease which haunts the story is not a force separated from life but represents life itself which has reached a crisis where it abandons its positive functions within the order of individual organisms and thereby destroys itself.

The story offers a commentary on the moral decay of a privileged elite who attempt to use their wealth to escape the plague. They are defined by their hedonistic lifestyle and their abandonment of any sense of responsibility for other people. The gruesome ending of the story can be read as a judgement on the immorality of Prospero and his friends.

But we don’t have to share Poe's pessimism to recognise its relevance to us today as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to spiral out of control.

Crises tend to bring out the best and worst in society. The coronavirus crisis is no different. It requires a collective response, led by public health priorities rather than economic or political considerations. A response that recognises the common bonds of community, empathy and solidarity that will help us overcome the crisis.