Alyssa Cameron
Mrs. Payne
Adv. english 10
27 April 2018
Research paper
Analyzing symbolism in Poe’s “ The Masque of the Red Death.” In the short story “ The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism to express ideas to develop his theme and characters. “ The Masque of the Red Death” tells a story of prince Prospero who locks his friends and himself in a castle to escape the Red Death, a deadly disease. Much to Prospero’s dismay, in the end, the deadly disease causes them to perish. Poe uses the dark room to reveal Prospero’s unusual character and reveal that death is always there and cannot be avoided. Initially, Poe reveals Prospero’s unusual character by introducing and describing the black room. In the beginning of the story, Poe is introducing the rooms and begins to describe the black room. When describing the room Poe states “But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme…” (5). The Red Death brought a lot of blood and redness to those who suffered from it; even though the color made the people weary, Prospero still chose to color
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Towards the end of the story, the people encounter the masked man resembling the Red Death and Prospero chases him through the rooms. When the people follow Poe states “ Then summoning the wild courage of despair a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment.”(10). They avoided the black room all night but when all the chaos happened they threw themselves in the room to find out what happened. Just like they eventually went into the room they were avoiding, they eventually all died. The black room symbolizes death, the room was always they and unavoidable just like death
The fires in each of the suite rooms serve as a representation of death. Poe depicts
Poe continues to describe the blue room, noting how clear and bright the color is, saying,“...vividly blue were its windows,” (4). This description has a very positive impact on the readers, as they associate the color of the room with positive feelings of a new beginning. On the other hand, Poe depicts the black room as having a very morbid and gruesome feeling to it, as he says, “The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color,” (4). This depiction has a negative connotation, as people connect the colors of black and deep red with blood and death. Poe characterizes the blue and black rooms very differently, with the blue room having a positive connotation and the black room having a negative connotation. This distinct difference in the rooms and their colors contributes to the overall symbolism of life and
Edgar Allan Poe uses symbolism to show the transition leading to death by using each of the seven rooms in the castle to represent a stage of life. The first room was all blue with vividly painted blue tapestries, which symbolized birth and beginning of life. The next room was all purple with matching panes of purple. With the passing of each room went the passing of time. The last room is all black with matching tapestries. The only thing that did not match were the window panes which were scarlet a d...
Edgar Allen Poe, in the short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, shows how people may try to outsmart death and surpass it, but in the end they will die since death is inevitable. He reveals this in the book by showing all the people closed up in the abbey that belongs to Prince Prospero. They are trying to escape the “Red Death” and think that they can escape the death by hiding away in the abbey. They manage to stay safe for six months but in the end they all die after the stroke of midnight during the masquerade ball Prince Prospero puts on from the Red Death itself which appears after midnight and leaves no survivors in the end. Poe develops the theme of how no one can escape death through the use of the point of view, the setting, and symbolism.
...agraph, the author mentions that the disease had come "like a thief in the night," but this statement is entirely untrue. Poe wrote a cohesive story which acknowledges the fear of trapping oneself in a doomed situation. Ironically, the very place the Prospero built to keep himself safe led to his hideous destruction. However, the audience was never permitted to believe that the prince would escape death, because even Poe's choice of environments reflect the triumph of the plague; the isolation and quarantine of the abbey, the fever and delirium of the masquerade, and finally the progression of time and eventual death. The clock strikes midnight, and with its shadowy expiration, "the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all," (213).
A short story entitled “The Masque of the Red Death” is a wonderfully written story of many types of language. The author Edgar Allan Poe narrated this story from the perspective of himself. One reason the story was written by focusing on feelings was to get the reader to maybe relate to the characters even if only slightly.
“The Masque of the Red Death” was written by Edgar Allen Poe in the 19th century. This story was written during the Gothic era. The stories that are written in the Gothic era is usually has to do with death, and lots of people were fascinated by the stories. There are many symbols in “The Masque of the Red Death”, yet I chose three, the first is all the colors of the room, second is the ebony clock and the last is the inside and outside of the abbey.
Throughout the short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe uses vivid symbolism, structure, and reoccurring details to paint a powerful image regarding the finality and inescapable reaches of death itself. “The ‘Red Death’ has long devastated the country,” yet the Prince Prospero continues to hold extravagant parties for his fellow elite members of society. Rather than merely telling a series of events, Poe carries his readers throughout the many rooms and scenes that hold the Prince’s masquerade, up until the clock strikes midnight and the partygoers can no longer hide behind their façade, and death comes in to take those that thought themselves invincible (Poe 438-442).
He has set the tone in which he illuminates humans’ desperate desire to escape death. However, to any reader who has completed reading the text, they know this attempt will be in pitiful vain. One cannot simply ‘bid defiance’ to the natural order of life. Furthermore, Poe begins to report their fear of death by making it clear that the guests tend to avoid the black room, which in actuality, represent death. Nevertheless, despite their dismay, towards the ending of the story, this quote shows that entering the room, or death, will be unavoidable whether they are willing to do it or not; “. . . none of the maskers who venture. . . threw themselves into the black apartment.” Specific parts of this much longer quotes have been singled out to reveal that even though the guests felt a fright towards that room at the start, they contradict their own unwillingness by subsequently throwing themselves into the room to attack the masked figure later on. This discloses that no matter one’s fear and undesire for their own demise, it will indubiously occur. Poe also uses great detail in describing these black rooms, pointing our distinct features of each room, especially the black room; “The panes here were scarlet-a deep blood color.”. The specific word of blood is commonly associated with inappropriate gore, injury and or death. It is seen in
In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery, sensory detail and symbolism not only to build suspense, but also to convey the idea that an individual can not hide or run away from death which becomes closer as time passes on. Throughout the story Poe uses imagery details to create suspense in the story. For example when the author is describing the disease that has taken many lives he describes the unfortunate event as, “ Blood was its Avator and its seal- the redness and the horror of blood. One can understand that in the story the tragic death of someone might occur as tragically as the disease is described. Accordingly, as the story progresses the deep shade of the color red is evident in many areas to represent symbolism.
Edgar Allan Poe's writing style is based on the supernatural and the unknown. In The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero invites the revelers to come to the castle to party until the danger of pestilence is gone. The party was interrupted by an intruder who was dressed in all black (like the Grim Reaper) and was associated with the plague of the "red death." The reaper killed everyone one by one in the end. The Masque of the Red Death is an allegory. An allegory is symbols that are presented in the story that have two levels of meaning. An example can be the clock in the story. The clock told time and represented the time they had left before they died. There were seven chambers that were different colors, and the last chamber was black, which was the last chamber that represented death. I think the seven rooms symbolized the days until you die and the clock symbolized the time until you died.
During the time period of romanticism, literature usually contained grotesque and fantastical settings, plots, and characters. The short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” by Edgar Allen Poe resembles the qualities of romantic literature. Poe uses objects and settings to represent values of life and death. These representations add to the overall romantic theme of this story. Poe uses seven rooms of the main character, Prince Prospero’s, palace to represent stages in life. The last and seventh room represents death. This room “was shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls […] the panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color”(116). In this story Prince Prospero and his guests all die of the “red death” once they enter this room. The theme of this story is that no one can escape death. This is shown as Prince Prospero, a greedy and self-centered man, who tries to escape death, ironically dies as he enters the seventh room. Another element that is often found in romantic literature is the literary device, symbolism. Washington Irving, the author of the romantic folktale, “The Devil and Tom Walker”, uses symbolism to develop the plot and setting of his story. In this story, the setting is a dark and gloomy swamp with trees that symbolize lives that were once given to the devil, Old Scratch, in exchange for wealth. “Tom looked in the direction that the stranger pointed, and beheld one of the great trees, fair and f...
In the story, “Masque of the Red Death” it covers six months during the Red Death.It takes place in a castle which has seven different colored rooms.In the beginning of the story it describes the main character prince Prospero as happy,fearless and wise. Towards the end of the story a new guest appears to the party and everyone is scared and Prospero goes from being happy to mad and in the end the new guest kills Prospero and everyone dies because he was the Red Death. The message in this analogy ,”The Masque of the Red Death “ by Poe is life passes by so quick that you don't realize what's going on until it's your time to die.
“And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall” (Poe, par. 14). After the mummer kills Prince Prospero, the masqueraders in the abbey perish one by one until the ebony clock runs out and none remain. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the symbolism of the iron fortress, the masque, and the mummer to reveal the theme that man does not have control over their fate, and they cannot run from death.
...th the impression that Prospero represents Poe’s image of the artist who insists on creating an ideal artwork, but whom is permanently imprisoned by the time-bound nature of life. Poe emphasizes that the artistic effort to transform temporality into spatiality is condemned to failure. Even the seven rooms, which suggest a orderly pattern of static placing, become misshapen into an image of the time span of life when Prospero follows the Red Death through a time-based development from birth to youth to maturity to old age and finally to death. It is when Prospero must confront the reality of the temporality of life that he inevitably must confront the death that life always insists on. “The Masque of the Red Death” should not be relinquished as a simple gothic horror story, but rather should be understood in terms of the aesthetic concept that dominated Poe’s work.