Comparing The Black Cat And The Masque Of The Red Death

Gothic literature was a popular writing tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is still used today. Gothic literature explores the wicked, perverse and dark desires. Gothic conventions can include burial alive, ghosts, hysteria, ruined bodies, tales within tales, undead characters, underground spaces, and more. Gothic themes are guilt, sex, violence, death, and cosmic struggle. Gothic stories or poems should inspire terror or horror. Edgar Allen Poe was one of the many well-known Gothic writers. In his stories he uses a variety of themes to carry out the gothic theme.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote five short stories that are very popular. “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Raven,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are the stories that I found similar. Poe’s stories were written between 1839 and 1846. All of them are similar in a way that they involve madmen. These men think they are sane, but they end up doing horrible things. Poe’s writing style is very dark. We can consider what he is writing to be gothic.

The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allen Poe, is a story of death and how it is impossible to escape. Though the book and the 1964 movie were very different, they did portray the same message. In both, story and movie, Prince Prospero throws a masquerade ball for all of his high class friends, to let all the others die out, and wait out the Red Death. Though it always ends the same way, death.

The author, Edgar Allan Poe, using illusion or misdirection keeps the reader is suspense throughout this story called "The Masque of the Red Death". Symbolism such as the colored rooms, the impressive clock, the feeling of celebration being at a party all makes this story feel like a fairytale. Poe used this fairytale style and converts it into a nightmare in disguise.

Gothic literature has been criticized as being a dreary, dark, and death-involving subset of Romanticism (a literary movement accentuating human individuality, imagination, and subjectivity). In addition, gothic lit incorporates several themes- not all about deathly acts - but includes some emotional and surprising themes such as dreams, nightmares, or hallucinations, and grotesque or bizarre occurrences. Two short stories, both written by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled “The Raven,” and “The Black Cat,” as well as the novel The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern, all encompass these gothic elements, found throughout each story.

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

The gothic world is dark and can contain evil, dark and mysteries. The short stories “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner, “The Black Cat” written by Edgar Allen Poe, “Prey” written by Richard Matheson, “The Feather Pillow”, written by Horacio Quiroga and the novel “The Night Circus” written by Erin Morgenstern all represent several gothic elements. Isolation or entrapment is a gothic element that is found in “The Night Circus”, “A Rose for Emily” and “The Feather Pillow “. Violence or revenge is a gothic element that is well represented by the short stories “The Black Cat”, “Prey” and the novel “The Night Circus”. The narrators use these types of gothic elements to prove that if you stay away from people around you or force others to isolate themselves from the world and act evil towards others, it will lead to your own catastrophe.

In "The Masque Of The Red Death", Edgar Allan Poe uses words and phrases to create an effect. He uses bold and dark words to help his readers be able to picture a very good image of the story and the mood that he wants to set. When he claiming that, "no pestilence had ever been so fatal ", that let the readers know that is was probably a very strong and gruesome disease that killed many of the town people. When Poe starts the story he starts by describing "The Red Death" and its symptoms. He described it as, "sharp pains, sudden dizziness, profuse bleeding at the pores with dissolution", "seizure process and termination of the disease were the incident of half and hour", he lists the symptoms as if it were a recipe, he is very straightforward and uses words that give an image to every symptom, he completely lets the reads know that "the red death" was a very nasty painful disease and you could imagine how much it made the characters suffer all in half

Edgar Allan Poe, renowned as the foremost master of the short-story form of writing, chiefly tales of the mysterious and macabre, has established his short stories as leading proponents of “Gothic” literature. Although the term “Gothic” originally referred only to literature set in the Gothic (or medieval) period, its meaning has since been extended to include a particular style of writing. In order for literature to be “Gothic,” it must fulfill some specific requirements. Firstly, it must set a tone that is dark, somber, and foreboding. Next, throughout the development of the story, the events that occur must be strange, melodramatic, or often sinister. Poe’s short stories are

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

Edgar Allen Poe was one of the most influential and important writers of the nineteenth century. He was the first writer to try to make a living only writing. One of Poe’s most popular short stories, “The Black Cat”, is considered horror fiction or gothic fiction which Poe is known for in his books and short stories because it was a popular genre during his days. In Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat”, Poe uses a horror fiction genre, a mentally deranged and evil narrator/character, and symbolism of death to make a thrilling story with tons of suspense, drama, and gruesome detail.

Edgar Allan Poe, the author of many famous short stories and poems, should be considered as a writer of gothic literature. The first example of this can be seen in his story “Hop-Frog”, as shown when the protagonist, Hop-Frog, says, “‘a king who does not scruple to strike a defenseless girl and his seven counsilors who encourage him in the outrage’” (Hop-Frog 10). This fits gothic literature because it shows that the story does actually have a moral. Gothic stories must have a moral, and Poe explains his moral in this line by explaining why the king deserves to be burned. After bullying Hop-Frog and his friend Trippetta for years, the king is finally being turned on. Another example to show that Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic writer is seen in

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying

Have you ever read a story where fantasy is the reality and things do not quite make sense? This is true for “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. In it is a version of the black plague, which is called the “Red Death”. Prince Prospero secludes a thousand friends and himself from the death around them, but finds that he cannot avoid the inevitable. The author uses many literary devices to create an interesting and meaningful story. One of the devices used is imagery, which evokes the events of the story clearly in the reader’s mind. Another is allegory, which is used by Poe to create another story within his, as it is filled with double meanings. Lastly, Poe utilizes symbolism to give the story meaning. Edgar Allan Poe uses

Stories like the “black cat”, “The tell- tale heart”, “The masque of the red death”, and “Morella” all deal with horror, murder, and sudden death. The short story, ‘The black cat’ gives the audience a story line visual of the mind of an alcoholic and the way his behavior changes over time, in different scenarios the character starts to turn abusive to the animals that he once loved. The man then starts to isolate himself from the black cat which was his favorite animal until one day he snaps and kills the black cat by hanging it to a tree with a rope. Days later a cat comes back around him that shows almost the same identity of the black cat, but the only difference is the white patch which is the bottom part of the cat body. the man then starts to grow jealous as his wife shows attention to the new cat which then leads him to murder his wife and stuffing her dead body in a wall, he later confesses to the crime and spends life in prison. This story is very dark and gives a clear identification of the mind of a troubled individual who then takes out his anger by being abusive to the animals in his environment and later his wife. Different aspects in Poe’s stories look deep into the mind of a person and the reasons that leads to murder and death.