The Masque of the Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842. The story follows Prince Prospero’s attempts to avoid a dangerous plague by hiding in his abbey. It is often analyzed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading.

About The Masque of the Red Death in brief

The Masque of the Red Death is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842. The story follows Prince Prospero’s attempts to avoid a dangerous plague by hiding in his abbey. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose costume proves to contain nothing tangible inside it; the guests also die in turn. Poe’s story follows many traditions of Gothic fiction and is often analyzed as an allegory about the inevitability of death, though some critics advise against an allegorical reading. Some suggest it is not allegorical, especially due to Poe’s admission of a distaste for a moral, but does not explicitly state that moral in the text.

The imagery of blood and time throughout also indicates corporeality. The plague may, in fact, represent typical attributes of human life, which the entire story is an allegories about. However, there is much dispute over how much to interpret the story and how it is meant to be read as a moral allegory. It has since been adapted in many different forms, including a 1964 film starring Vincent Price, and has also been alluded to by other works in many types of media. The final line of the story sums up, \”And Darkness and Decay and the Red death held illimitable dominion over all. \”Directly influenced by the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in The Masque Of The Red Death.

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