Examples Of Allegory In The Masque Of Red Death

“The Haunted Palace” is one of Edgar Allen Poe’s mysterious and phantasmagoric poems. Written in the same year as “The Devil in the Belfry,” and included in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Haunted Palace” is another tale of innocence and happiness now corroded with sorrow and madness. It is fairly easy to say that “The Haunted Palace” is a metaphor for Poe’s own ghostly troubled mind, more than it is about a decaying palace. For in 1839, it was found in a book that the main character in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes across. In the context of its appearance in “Usher,” it is startlingly clear that this is no fable of earthly decay, but one of mental and spiritual ruin.

For instance, the panes were scarlet, a deep blood colour. The "bloody" red room thus becomes a place of ending not only due to the westward location, but also because of its color. Poe describes the last, black room as the dreadful endpoint, the room the guests fear just as they fear death. The room is feared by the guests because it reminds them of death, which is why no one enters the room. The room is involved in all of the main scenes throughout the course ofthe story. For example, this is the room Prince Prospero and his guests die from the Red Death and also where the clock is located. The reader sees how important the rooms are throughout the story and its main contribution to the theme.

The fires in each of the suite rooms serve as a representation of death. Poe depicts

Like when Poe explains, “ This wall had gates of iron, The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts, They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within”. (Poe 456). What is being said is, that they basically locked up the whole premises to prevent anyone or anything to leave or come in so he thought he was safe. Symbolizes that he is willing to do anything which meaning to lock down his whole castle from catching the disease and end up underground. But not just that, the red death still came to them and eliminated what it can and thought to be so. Towards the end, “ And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall”. (Poe 461). Due to the castle being locked down and no one being able to get out, at some point they were all killed by the red death. But, even with everything being close and shut from something, it will somehow or some way find its way to

Poe describes, “There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each a novel effect,” (Poe 390). The sharp turns of the abbey correlate to the unexpected events in one’s life. For instance, each day people rise believing their lives will go as planned but often the plans are altered by sudden turns. Poe proceeds to give a detailed description of each apartment, “That at the eastern extremity was hung for example blue and vividly blue were its windows,” (Poe 390). This passage is explaining how the abbey contained an east wing and continues saying, “But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light streamed [...] ghastly in the extreme,” (Poe 391).

In this short story “The masque of the red death” by Edgar Allan Poe, Poe uses imagery and symbolism to create an allegory that communicates to the reader the idea that greed is not without consequence. This story about a prince named Prospero and his friends try to leave the city to get through the plague. They have a party for 6 long months. “It was the close of the 5th or 6th month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad”(Poe 456). Then one day everything went downhill. They had a party like usual but everything seemed different. It was a dark and stormy night, when they had the mask party. The prince knew everyone except one person. “This was had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces

Use of symbolism and imagery have been more than enough for an individual to comprehend this story just by imagining the descriptions. His Gothic style of writing puts you on the edge of your seat. You never know what is going to happen next. The scenery is eye catching and that’s what makes readers look into this story. The setting and situation is far more attractive than the plot or characters. Poe takes his use of literary devices to the next level. Allegory is applied to help the reader understand the true purpose behind Poe’s work. The seven different colored rooms have a stage of life in each room to exemplify life. It shows their progress of reaching death while each hour passing brings them closer to their end. The emphasis that symbolism leaves is far too great for anyone not to interpret them. Poe has significantly positioned clues for the reader to identify the madness that unfolds in this horror

Poe organizes the rooms in a certain that we do not understand until we actually think deeply and research about the seven rooms. Another critic, Zimmerman, mentions “ The arrangement of the chambers reinforces the awful reality of time as it leads inexorably to disease death, darkness and dissolution”(Zimmerman). Here Zimmerman expresses that the rooms symbolize a timeline of human life. He states that the order of the chamber or rooms just leads to the harsh reality of death, which happens to everyone. In the story, Poe takes us through each room and describes each room like a timeline to us ending with the dark room. He does this on purpose to express the rooms as a symbol of human life. Zimmerman also says’ The progression of the colored rooms is circular rather than a straight line”(Zimmerman). Zimmerman helps explain the layout of the rooms. He thinks that the rooms are in this way to portray the image of a clock, and the rooms symbolizing time, it makes sense. Poe takes the characters through these chambers and they end up all dieing in the end, but as he takes them through some die off. Then when they get to the last chamber most of them get killed. This helps explain how life works, we all will end up in the same place.

Then there is white which symbolizes the elderly, and then the violet room was for the dying. The final room was black and that is where death took place. In the story once the characters enter the castle-like abbey of Prince Prospero, nobody could enter or exit because of the welded locks that kept all evil from the outside world out. Another example of Poe’s symbolism is when he is describing the clock and its effect on the guests,

Poe’s use of symbolism is very evident throughout the story of “The Masque of the Red Death”. Much has been made about the meaning of the rooms that fill Prince Prospero’s lavish getaway. One such critique, Brett Zimmerman writes, “It is difficult to believe that a symbolist such as Poe would refuse to assign significance to the hues in a tale otherwise loaded with symbolic and allegorical suggestiveness” (Zimmerman 60). Many agree that the seven rooms represent the seven stages of human existence. The first, blue, signifying the beginnings of life. Keeping in mind Poe’s Neo-Platonism and Transcendentalism stance, the significance of blue is taken a step further. Not only does blue symbolize the beginning of life, but the idea of immortality is apparent when considering these ideas. “Perhaps ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ then, is not quite the bleak existential vision we have long thought it to be”, expounds Zimmerman (Zimmerman 70). Poe’s use of each color is significant to the seven stages

Realities are often compensated with the most drastic realities of man. The profound mystery in Edgar Allan Poe's’ short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” he introduces many symbols that make up his allegory. Poe’s allegory is made up of his main 3 symbols. Castle, Stranger and the Masquerade. Everyone in the Castle tries to hide their realities with fantasies, but later the irony kicks in because they all die, in a bloody mess.

To start off, an allegory is an extended narrative which carries a second meaning along with its surface story, the people and/or events are symbolic. A few allegories are the abbey, the prince and the seven colour-coded rooms. As mentioned before, the prince and his guests use the abbey to isolate themselves from the Red Death. The abbey represents man’s efforts to avoid death. However, regardless of wealth, social class, and power, death still arrives and again, proves to the readers that death is inevitable.

Poe’s use of symbolism and word choice affects how well the reader perceives the theme. The theme of the short story is evident when the Prince Prospero comes face to face with the red death after thinking he had done everything right to hid from it. : “The Masque of the Red Death” has evidence of symbolism and loaded words all throughout the short story and has a very deep, yet true

Poe uses allegory to allude to the double meanings of the characters Prince Prospero and the masked figure, as well as the setting of the chambers. Prince Prospero represents prosperity. While his nation is suffering from the “Red Death”, “…he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and lighthearted friends…and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbey” (420). His nobility and wealth give him the ability to ignore the horror around him and live in luxury. This refers to real life in that the privileged are the ones who are able to still live comfortably even if others are in a crisis. Prince Prospero also represents an ignorance, selfishness, and arrogance that come with wealth through right instead of hard work. He believes that “[t]he external world could take care of itself” and that it is “…folly to grieve, or to think” (420). Instead of taking action to help his people, he just leaves them in the grips of the “Red Death”. The “Red Death” is

Poe used the rooms of the fortress as a symbol of the progression of a human life. The fortresses design contains seven distinctly different rooms. H.H. Bell, Jr., an expert on Edgar Allan Poe, has suggested that Poe seems to represent these rooms as an “allegorical representation of Prince Prospero’s life span” (Bell 241). The greatest piece of evidence for this is the order in which Poe arranged the rooms. The first room is positioned in the far eastern side of the mansion and the last room’s placement resides in the far western side. Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west each day, the arrangement of the rooms suggests the beginning and the end of life. Poe exemplifies this idea with the coloration of the last room. Black, a color connected with night and death, covers the walls in the last room. Also, the color of red seeps through the stained glass windows representing the bloodiness often incorporated with death, particularly the Red Death so feared at this party. Prospero’s guests avoid the last room out of fear, just as the living avoid reminders of death. Meanwhile, music and dancing