Hiding from Problems in Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death

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Hiding from Problems
Many people try and hide from their problems because they are scared about what would happen if they confront it. That is probably how Prince Prospero felt, scared and confused, which is why he held the masquerade. People try to do certain things to take their mind off the event they want to forget. They do something that they are good at or something that they like to do. The Prince is probably good at spending money because he would have to had to spend a lot of it considering all the things he put up. He tried to put up protections, so he could try to lock out the problem. He also tried to add a lot of decorations and colors to try to forget his problem. He probably created the black/red room because his sub-conscience knew his problem was going to come back. In the “Masque of the Red Death,” the Red Death entering the castle symbolizes that the Prince cannot hide from his problems.

The Prince tries to put up a wall and adds extra precautions to the palace to forget about the Red Death. He doesn’t realize that the Red Death can get in no matter how much protection he puts up. One of the things that the Prince does is he puts up a giant wall to try and keep the Red Death. Poe describes the wall to be, “A lofty strong wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron… [Courtiers] welded the bolts” (Poe 261). He acts like the sickness is a person and he can keep it out with regular protection, when it is not. A sickness, especially as bad as this one, can get into a building through other entry ways, like through the air or through water. If the sickness were to get in through the air entry ways, then it would spread quite fast throughout the building and to the people. Since the sickness spreads so fas...

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...rget about the death. He acts like everyone else in today’s world, when people are faced with a problem that they do not want to face, like problems with their family or problems with their mean people. They would do something that they are good at to get rid of it or ignore it. This would only keep the problem escalating and it would stay there because no one did anything about it. This story is a good example of when people ignore and hide from their problems, they will come back to haunt them and end up being worse.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar A. “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Benjamin F. Fisher. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004. 4 -4 . Print
Zimmerman, Brett A. "The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in "The Masque of the Red Death":
Solved at Last?" The Edgar Allan Poe Review 10.3 (2009): 60-73. Print.

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