American Gothic: Reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" in a New Gilded Age

The world is divided into haves and have-nots. A deadly plague ravages the countryside. The wealthy lock themselves away in a secluded compound to wait out the storm, proclaiming with a sneer that the “external world could take care of itself.” Sound familiar?

While it might sound like a speedrun of the last five years or so, this is actually the premise of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” You might have been forced to wander its color-coded chambers in high school, but if you need a refresher, it’s about the “bold and robust” Prince Prospero, who absconds to a secluded abbey with a thousand knights, lords, and ladies to wait out the plague known as the Red Death.

Bust of Edgar Allan Poe

“Masque of the Red Death” Summary

The prince surrounds himself and his attendants with luxury and entertainments in seven chambers, each decorated in a different color. The westernmost room inspires dread in the company because it is hung in black drapery with a blood-red stained glass window and a clock that brings the merriment to a halt each time it tolls the hour. 

The prince throws a lavish masquerade ball for his wealthy friends, but the party takes a disturbing turn when a stranger shows up shrouded like a corpse with the bloody face characteristic of victims of the Red Death. At first, everyone thinks it’s a bad joke. The prince is furious, and he pulls a dagger on the robed figure, only to drop dead, followed shortly by the rest of the guests (as the clock strikes midnight, naturally), and the phantom visitor disappears.

Meanings and Context: The Red Death as Disease

Nobody would accuse American literature’s preeminent horror merchant of being subtle in his portrayal of the inevitability of death. Even the rich and mighty are not immune from the touch of the Red Death, and its coming is as unstoppable as the march of time. 

Alfred Rethel, Death the Strangler, The First Outbreak of Cholera at a Masked Ball in Paris, 1831

It seems clear based on the quasi-medieval European setting and the name Red Death that Poe is evoking the bubonic plague, commonly known as the Black Death. Poe’s fictional illness kills its victims in just half an hour, while the real-life plague took around 1-3 days to do the job. Like the bubonic plague, which caused huge, discolored boils to erupt in the armpits and groins of its victims, the Red Death is an ostentatious killer. It causes attacks of dizziness and bleeding from the pores of the face, creating a ghastly picture. 

In terms of his own biographical context, Poe was no stranger to epidemics. He witnessed a cholera outbreak in Baltimore in 1832, when he lost his close friend Ebenezer Burling to the disease. In 1849, several years after “The Masque of the Red Death” was written, he wrote to his mother-in-law while he was living in Philadelphia that he “had the cholera, or spasms quite as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen.” When the “Masque” was being written, his young wife Virginia was also suffering from the tuberculosis that would eventually take her life. The looming specter of death by disease was very real in the mid-19th century, and Poe was more familiar with it than most.

With the Red Death, he created a fictional illness that is so ruthlessly effective it sweeps through the population like the scythe of the Grim Reaper. It might have its origins in medieval epidemics and the illnesses endemic to Poe’s America, but as long as disease threatens the castle walls, readers will keep coming back to it. 

Allegorical Readings & “Masque of the Red Death” Symbolism 

The heavy use of symbolism in the story is apparent, from the colorful chambers to the dread-inducing clock that stops the party in its tracks each time it strikes the hour. In fact, “Masque” is usually read as an allegory–a story that acts as a kind of extended metaphor. In this case, it can be said to represent a memento mori theme, the idea that death comes for everyone–literally, in this case.

Though it’s a fairly straightforward–even thuddingly obvious–allegory, there’s one aspect of “Masque” that provides endless fodder for discussion: its striking and seemingly deliberate use of color. Scholars have been arguing about the meaning of the color symbolism practically since the story was first published in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine (which paid Poe a whopping $12 for the tale). 

As literary scholar Brett Zimmerman lays out in his 2009 article “The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: Solved at Last?,” some critics maintain that there is no particular meaning behind the colors Poe assigns to each chamber, beyond illustrating Prince Prospero’s general eccentricity. Others argue that the rooms represent the various stages of the prince’s life. (The black room symbolizing death is one thing pretty much all sentient lifeforms can agree on.)

Zimmerman finds that the easternmost blue chamber represents not just birth or beginnings, but the transcendent plane of the spirit, the “prebirth realm” (65), while the purple room represents the kingship and royalty into which the prince was born. The green chamber, he says, represents “the springtime of humans generally and of Prospero more particularly” (65). 

The middle color is orange, which has more negative associations with adultery and hypocrisy (as, for example, marigolds were the flower associated with faithless spouses) (66). We are told in the story that the prince’s taste is the guiding principle of the festivities, and that there is “much of the wanton” in his galas, underscoring Prospero’s lascivious carpe diem philosophy. The final set of colors (white, violet, and black) are associated with mourning attire and funerals. White represents going towards death, illness, and infirmity, while violet is a “mortuary color” that lies exactly opposite life-affirming green on the color wheel (67).

Zimmerman notes that Poe combines black and red in the final room, since red is the color of its stained glass window. Red is the emblem of disease in the story, of course, but it also traditionally represents life and passion. Their union can be said to represent “the passions of a morally degraded man” (68)--Prospero himself, soon to meet his ironic but well-deserved punishment.

Zimmerman concludes by explaining that while the story is indeed a bleak vision of human failings, it does allow for the possibility of a metaphysical realm beyond the prince’s corrupt domain: the blue sphere of the “repertoire of souls” waiting to be born represented by the blue chamber (70).

Memento Mori in “The Masque of the Red Death”

As mentioned above, Poe makes heavy use of memento mori imagery throughout the tale. For example, the clock is a symbol of time running out and looming mortality often found in 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings. Skulls and skeletons are the major motifs associated with this art, and in “Masque” we get the corpselike visitor dressed in what appears to be a burial shroud as a direct nod to the memento mori imagery in Christian art of the Middle Ages. 

A vanitas painting from 18th-century Poland

Brett Zimmerman has examined the memento mori elements present in the story, showing how it acts as a kind of narrative vanitas painting. He notes Poe’s subtle “hidden allegories,” which correspond to visual motifs in vanitas art (46). For example, the musicians in the story fall silent whenever the ebony clock strikes the hour, and music and clocks are both prominent symbols of life’s impermanence in vanitas paintings. Poe also writes that there is “no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle” in the chambers, with the only light source being fires placed behind each room’s stained glass window. This also corresponds to vanitas art, since extinguished candles are a major motif in the genre.

Another feature the story shares with 17th-century vanitas paintings is the way it contrasts images of death with “pleasurable objects” such as the lavish decorations and tinted glass of the seven chambers, and the “glare and glitter” of the “multitude of dreams” inside. The paintings often showed skulls resting on shimmering silk draperies beside elements like flowers, silver mirrors, and gold watches, for example. 

Unlike the memento mori and vanitas art of an earlier age in Europe, however, Poe’s message is not a moralizing one. It is a bleak vision similar to his poem “The Conqueror Worm,” in which the triumph of death is the only thing we can really be sure of. In Poe’s newly mechanized, post-Enlightenment 19th century America, the soul was the stuff of ghost stories, and the physical body was on borrowed time. 

The “Masque” as a Dance of Death

The artistic motif known as the danse macabre, or dance of death, has been associated with epidemics going back to the Black Death. In it, skeletons can be seen holding hands with humans of all social backgrounds, from royalty and clergy to poor farmers, dancing them into death. 

Of course, there is an inherent social commentary in these images of death as a great leveller. No matter how high up you are on the food chain, the worm conquers all, as Shakespeare mentions in Hamlet when the prince of Denmark muses that “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” when the worm that fed on the dead king is eaten by a fish, which is caught by the beggar.

Like Shakespeare, artists of the Renaissance and later periods seized on this theme to critique their own social hierarchies. For example, German engraver Hans Holbein the Younger created a series of Dance of Death woodcut prints in the 1520s that shows Death rudely intruding on the daily lives of the rich and powerful, lending the danse macabre imagery a satirical edge. 

The Judge by Hans Holbein, from the Dance of Death, 1523

Poe is partaking in this long tradition when he presents the striking image of Death personified appearing at a masquerade ball–a dance. This contrast between horror and frivolity is one that dates back to 14th century danse macabre imagery, appearing notably in a painting on the walls of the charnel house at the Innocents cemetery in Paris. Although the Cimetière des Innocents was eventually demolished and its inhabitants moved to the catacombs, the mural survives in the form of copies and etchings. These medieval depictions of death juxtaposed with merrymaking prefigure the haunting central image of Poe’s story.

Illustration based on the danse macabre mural at Cimetière des Innocents, 1490

Masque/Mask

It’s important to think about why Poe locates the action of the story not just on any night in the abbey, but during a masquerade ball. What kinds of associations do masks carry, especially when it comes to infectious diseases?

In our present moment, masks are a form of mitigation. We cover our faces to reduce the risk of transmitting disease. However, Poe was writing in a time before germ theory was really understood (his own brush with cholera was treated with toxic mercury), about a plague that is more of a cosmic punishment than an actual communicable illness. 

In the history of plagues, we can see the figure of the 17th-century plague doctor, who typically wore a leather mask with a long, beaklike nose stuffed with fragrant herbs to ward off the foul-smelling miasma believed to spread infection. It’s also interesting to note that plague doctor masks resemble the long-nosed masks associated with masquerades and the Venetian carnivale–creating a possible association between masks and plagues.

A Venetian plague doctor c. 1700

Luisa Rittershaus and Kathrin Eschenberg, in a recent article about depictions of epidemics in art, have noted the link between masks and death as in, for example, the practice of creating death masks. In Poe’s story, they find that the mask is “an allegorical figuration of the epidemic and … a symbol of human ignorance in the face of ever-triumphant death” (336).

Masks also symbolize a loss of identity. Prince Prospero’s masked company willfully put on a set of new faces for the masquerade party, only to ultimately lose themselves to the collective fate of death.

Boccaccio’s Decameron and “The Masque of the Red Death”

The 14th-century Italian writer Giovanni Bocaccio, author of the satirical collection of stories The Decameron, wrote of the bubonic plague that it worked so quickly that one could have lunch with friends and dinner with ancestors in paradise (paraphrased from “Day the First”). Poe’s terrifying plague sweeps through the population even faster, though like the plague in Boccaccio’s account of the Florence epidemic of 1348, it is said to have killed half the population. Boccaccio responded to these horrifying events by creating an indelible monument to the human spirit in all its frivolity and tragedy.

Illustration showing the characters of Boccaccio’s Decameron

In fact, The Decameron may have been a source of inspiration for Poe’s tale. In it, ten young Florentine socialites retire to a house in the countryside, hoping to remain safe from the raging pestilence. There, they spend ten days telling each other stories to pass the time, often humorous and bawdy tales of human folly. Boccaccio’s story collection shows resilience and humanity in the face of unimaginable turmoil.

The Decameron finds cause for hope and joy even in the midst of the Black Death, but Poe’s vision is much darker. His cavorting aristocrats are vapid and devoid of the slightest regard for the suffering of those outside the castle walls. Even their celebration is forced and frenzied, its spell broken every hour by the death knell of the clock.

Poe left little indication as to the inspiration behind his famous story, but it’s very likely that he was familiar with the Decameron, as it’s considered to be one of the classics of medieval European literature. One interesting parallel is that the friends meet in an empty church in the Decameron, while Poe’s revelers are holed up in an abbey, suggesting a shared theme of religion being unable to cope with the destruction.

Collective Mourning

Part of the horror of “Masque” is that Prince Prospero and his retinue refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the situation. The endless party at the abbey feels grotesque and perverse because it flies in the face of all the suffering and death outside the walls. This lack of care for the dead and dying resonates with the eras of both AIDS and COVID-19, when–especially in America–those suffering from the diseases were left to “take care of [themselves].” When a society faces a mass death event and tries to go on as if nothing has happened, it creates a feeling of profound dissonance that Poe captures in his story with simplicity and elegance. 

In our own times, COVID-19 killed approximately 4.5 million people worldwide in its first two years alone, and in the U.S. there has been little official recognition of the death toll. No national monument or official day of mourning commemorates the dead. People were left unable to mourn the nearly 1.2 million Americans who died in the pandemic as they normally would, with funeral gatherings and services, due to concerns about spreading the infection. 

The Paris catacombs photographed by Nadar in 1861.

Because the rites and rituals of death were disrupted and the powers that be preferred productivity over pallbearing, our collective grief remains unprocessed. Going back to Boccaccio, he remarked in the Decameron that a “dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day.” (It seems the phenomenon of plagues disrupting mourning is as old as humanity itself.) This widespread disregard for the dead has led to the feeling that the pandemic was a strange interlude, a nightmare that the country should just be able to wake up from: in a word, unreal. 

Prince Prospero shows the ultimate folly of trying to go on with business as usual when the world has turned upside-down. His masquerade is the ultimate form of pretense–literally putting on a happy face in the midst of tragedy–and it’s no surprise that Death comes for him in the form of a masked reveller.

“Masque” in the AIDS Era 

With the coming of another epidemic in the late 20th century, critics and readers in the midst of the AIDS crisis looked to Poe’s story for catharsis. Scholar Paul Christian Jones cites the novel The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. In it, friends gather to remember someone who has died of AIDS, and some guests dispute the “forced festivity” (192) of the event. One character says, “It’s like that Poe story, the Red Death one. There’s death out there, but we’re gonna have a fabulous time in here.” Another friend reminds him, “That’s not the point” (192).

Jones traces how the story was used not just as an image of people in a similar situation partying in the face of destruction, but to advocate for resistance against an administration determined to treat AIDS deaths like a punchline. A new generation of readers had found their plight reflected in Poe’s strange, disturbing tale. 

For those experiencing the loss of a generation of people who would now have been queer elders, it must have been surreal to see life carrying on as normal. For them, the “Masque” was a powerful metaphor for the total disregard of the powerful–and likely a comforting reminder that the Reaper would come for every modern-day Prince Prospero one day.

Wealth and Isolation: “Masque” as Social Commentary

Ultimately, “Masque” isn’t just an allegory about humanity’s inevitable march toward the grave or the seemingly endless destructive force of plagues. It also presents a callous, feckless ruling class uninterested in doing anything but riding out the damage in an orgy of conspicuous consumption. 

The prince and his followers recall the decadent court at Versailles, enacting bizarre rituals and hosting lavish parties while the country suffers. (It’s worth remembering that it was only fifty years after the French Revolution when this story was written, and the world was still very much feeling the fallout of the French aristocracy’s downfall.) Although the setting feels ambiguously medieval, Poe might have also had much more recent history in mind when he wrote it.

Poe’s Prince Prospero (whose very name references his material wealth) constructs a walled garden for his elite cronies and fills it with acrobats, buffoons, musicians, dancers, and plenty of bubbly. Poe’s hostility toward the upper classes might have been a case of sour grapes on his part, given his comfortable upbringing and the lack of financial security he labored under for much of his adult life. Nevertheless, he presents a scathing critique of the rich and powerful who close themselves off from the rest of humanity.

It’s hard not to see the parallels with present-day wealthy elites who would rather construct lavish bunkers to fend off the effects of climate change (or other calamities) than actually do anything about them. In this story, Poe constructs a timeless image of the isolating and corrupting effects of extreme wealth–and its inability to keep death at bay.

Poe famously disliked didacticism in art, and the idea that he was trying to teach anyone a moral lesson would probably have been abhorrent to him. Themes of corruption at the top and class consciousness are undoubtedly present in the story, but ultimately the aim of “Masque” is to weave a spellbindingly creepy yarn from the threads of memento mori imagery. Poe’s tale reminds readers of their own not-so-distant date with the “uncanny guest” who always drops in uninvited.

An 1803 illustration by Rudolf Schellenberg showing Death as a seductress

Conclusion

Living in the era of Covid–in a country where over a million people died of the disease–invites contemplation of the grim history of previous epidemics and the stories we tell about them.

In many ways, Poe’s stark and obvious allegory actually did come to pass. The wealthy and powerful were able to shield themselves from the worst of the pandemic, while the poor and those on the front lines bore the brunt of it. Unlike in “The Masque of the Red Death,” there was no ironic comeuppance to punish the hubris of these 21st-century Prince Prosperos.

However it may apply to our current time and place, the power of Poe’s gothic gutpunch of a story lies in its universality. Like the memento mori art it draws upon for inspiration, “Masque” will always be relevant, because the unwelcome guest is always just outside the castle gates.

Works Cited

Aimee Cunningham, “Four Years On, the COVID-19 Pandemic Has a Long Tail of Grief,” Science News, March 11, 2024.

Paul Christian Jones, “The Cultural and Political Work of Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ During the AIDS Era,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 21.2 (2020): 192-223.

Allison C. Meier, “Our Mortal Waltz: The Dance of Death Across Centuries,” The Public Domain Review, July 11, 2024.

Joshua J. Mark, “Boccaccio on the Black Death: Text & Commentary,” World History Encyclopedia, April 3, 2020. 

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” full text via Project Gutenberg.

Luisa Rittershaus & Kathrin Eschenberg, “Black Death, Plagues, and the Danse Macabre. Depictions of Epidemics in Art,” Historical Social Research 33 (2021): 330-41.

Brett Zimmerman, “The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: Solved at Last?,”  The Edgar Allan Poe Review 10.3 (2009): 60-73.

Brett Zimmerman, “‘Such as I Have Painted’: Poe, ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ and the Vanitas Genre,” The Edgar Allan Poe Review 20.1 (2019): 46-63.