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Biblical Allusions In Masque Of The Red Death

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From castellated abbeys to Night's Plutonian shore, Poe's works are replete with biblical innuendos. The major correspondence between his narratives and the Bible would be the many implications to the Book of Revelations in "The Masque of the Red Death". Revelations tells of the collapse of civilization through four horsemen, Conquest, Famine, War, and Death. "The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal..."(Masque 1) expresses the presence of the initial horsemen, better known as Pestilence. Conclusively, "...one by one dropped the revellers...and the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay."(Masque 16) expounds the demise of the characters, alluding to Death. War exists in …show more content…

Prince Prospero was sybaritic, as his love for luxury and pleasure blinded him from the raging pestilence outside his abbey. Fortunato had a hedonistic existence as wine connoisseur, priding himself in his knowledge of the drink, such as when he states "Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."(Cask 14) to debase other wine pundits in comparison to himself. William Wilson from the story of the same name was driven by lust, attempts to seduce a wedded woman during a Roman carnival. Another characterization element he uses is that many of his narrators appear to have idolatry. Egaeus is an odontophiliac, as his obsession with teeth justifies his state of shock when "...there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor."(Berenice 21). The painter in "The Oval Portrait" suffers from obsessive love towards his wife, indicating his adulation towards the beauty of his beloved. The narrator of "The Man of the Crowd" is fascinated by figures he sees outside the coffee shop window he sits behind, going so far as to stalk a man who intrigues interest. Poe's stories oftentimes succumb to women portrayed as beautiful and sickly, a raw connection to the women in his life. This on its own is Poe's own idolatry, and it exudes into his writing. Notwithstanding their elegance, these women create tribulations for

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