Prince Prospero: Red, Symbolizing Blood And Death

Prince Prospero decorates lavishly for the masquerade ball. Each room has a different color as a theme, and the windows contain glass stained to match the respective colors of the rooms. Fair colors paint the faces of everyone. At first they wear masks for the ball, but at the story's conclusion, they all bear the bloody mark that signifies the Red Death. The Red Death, which is characterized by ‘scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim,’ has entered the palace unrecognized (“Explanation”

The story “Masque of the Red Death” uses many symbols throughout the story. The story begins telling about the grim disease that killed many people. It spreads quickly and kills within 30 minutes. The Prince Prospero, who symbolized the rich and prosperous, wanted to throw a great masked ball where no one would get in or out so the disease couldn’t spread or be brought into the palace. As the ball went on there a clock that rang every hour. It stopped the people from dancing and symbolized time passing. The people just resumed dancing after it rang like it was nothing, however. The party was going fine until an intruder invaded the ball. This intruder symbolized the Red Death, and “came like a thief in the night”. The prince tried to stop him with the aid of a knife, but then fell dead, like the rest did after. “Masque of the Red Death” used lots of symbols in it such as the Prince, who represented the rich, the clock, that represented the time passing by and the people’s inevitable death, and the intruder, who represented the Red Death and how merciless it was.

The ball was held in seven decorative halls all arranged in a circle. The prince designed the rooms to be “irregularly disposed that the viso embraced but little more than one at a time”( Poe Para 4). Most conventional castles have the rooms with the doors facing straight, allowing you to see through the hall. However, with the way the prince designed the castle, it was difficult to see what was twenty feet in front of you.. This detail in the setting created a sense of suspense as in the guests wouldn’t know what was facing them around the corner. The room had the windows facing on the outside rather than the outside. There was no lights or lamps used to lighten the room beside the single fire blazing. Poe creates a sense of no return with how he describes the setup of his party. The rooms circle in on each other making the guests feel that once they enter the rooms the only way out is to die. The rooms were also decorated in a certain color pattern. The first room was decorated in blue curtains followed by a blue stained windows. As the guests wandered to the next room it was decorated in green and the colors continued to descend into darker shades. The last room was was decorated in deep black, however the windows panes were stained in what looks like blood. The last room created a bizarre mixture of feelings, according to

pretentious people. As destruction makes its way through the commoners in the country, the prince “summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court… to a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence”(Poe 1). By throwing a wonderful, unceasing ball, the horrifying perceptions of death are whisked away into the frenzy of the night. The acquaintances of the Prince Prospero live wealthy enough a life to be able try to avoid the Red Death. There is a popular belief among these people that wealthy individuals, such as themselves, should not be subject to death of any sort.

Next, is the masquerade ball itself, it symbolizes the dance of life; which parallels death. Once the dance is over; life is over leaving only death. The next symbols are the individual rooms. These rooms can mean many things such as: “…comic center: the seven planetary spheres, the seven notes of the scale… the evolution of the plague’s destructive powers: the reverse of the seven days of Creation” (Knapp 166). The seven rooms could also represent the seven deadly sins which are: sloth, lust, gluttony, wrath, pride, anger, and envy. Another implication for the seven rooms is the seven stages of life. These theories could be backed up by each room’s different furnishings. The blue room represents birth or new life. This is where the party is mostly held. The purple room represents Prospero and his guests’ nobility. Green represents naiveté and greed each person obtains. Prospero and his friends are all naive in believing that they can cheat death by hiding behind closed doors. The white room represents the childlike innocence everyone holds because the guests have a juvenile mentality in trying

Another character who tries to escape his problems is Prospero in “Masque of The Red Death”. Prospero is the prince of a kingdom who is a victim of the disease the Red Death. He thinks he solves the problem by holding an immense masquerade ball for him and his close friends in his residence. As it was dark, gloomy, and depressing with the deep red tint of blood from the Red Death outside, Prospero had his “creation of [his] own eccentric yet august taste” (Poe). His own reality inside of his kingdom is made up of many rooms with a wide variety of colors that each meant something. Every room was color coded and “thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances” (Poe). The last room represents death with it’s black walls and

Red death is a disease, caused disaster in the country and slain half of the kingdom this disease have been spread intensively and overall that their prince, Prospero, was happy and glad. He establishes to close and lock his palace to protect himself from causing disaster inside the palace, and he doesn't care for the illness of ravaging the land, after few months. He disposal a modulate ball, to celebrate, then he colored each room with a different color. He started from the eastern room and it was colored by blue with blue stained-glass window, the other room was painted purple with the same stained-glass, from the westward side the colors were, green, orange, white, and violet. The seventh room was black and it was stained with red windows,

He then comes up with a way he thinks will be able to remove it and escape the poisons and problems that the red mark could bring to his sweet Georgiana. Compared to Poe’s story “Masque of the Red Death”, where he portrays a different way of showing love. He doesn’t show it for another person, but shows it as Prince Prospero loving himself way too much. So much that he decides to lock himself up in a castle outside of his town. Doing so because of the plague that is sweeping the cities, “The Red Death”. Prince Prospero doesn’t want to mess around with the plague and certainly doesn’t want to die, so he locks himself up in a castle and away from civilization. Getting lonely as the days and night get longer and longer every day for him. Prince Prospero decides to have a party and invites all of his friends for a wild party. When one guest shows up in a weird way, dressed in blood and looking like a corpse.

The story's main action takes place in an elaborate suite of seven colored rooms within the abbey, where Prospero holds the masquerade ball. The suite, which Prospero designed, consists of seven rooms that run in a line from east to west. Roughly a line, at least – as the narrator tells us, their alignment is actually rather irregular, so that from any given room you can only see into one other room. The lighting's interesting too. Every room has one window on

When Prospero throws the celebration, he decorates rooms in his house with a different single color each. The room furthest East is blue, and is followed by purple, then green, orange, white, then violet, with the last room – the room farthest West – being black and red. The first six rooms are visited by the guests, but the last room is avoided. When a mysterious character enters the party, dressed like death and showing symptoms of the plague, he walks through each room, terrifying

Now in the abbey, Prospero arranges in a row from east to west, seven colour-coded rooms in the palace. The colours and their representations are blue (birth), purple (youth), green (adolescence), orange (adulthood), white (old age), violet (imminent death), and black/scarlet (death itself). All of the rooms is an allegory of the progression of human life. The prince arranged the rooms from east to west. East is associated with “beginnings" such as birth because the sun rises in the east, and west being the opposing direction of east.

The gothic monstrous doors slammed shut, and almost immediately after, Prince Prospero’s servants welded the doors shut, entrapping the thousand guest inside with no way out. With the Red Death happening, the veil of reality outside the castle penetrated everyone’s minds and hearts. To lighten the mood, Prince Prospero arranged a masquerade ball for all of the thousand guest. Being the Prince’s ball, it was to be the most elegant and expensive masquerade the kingdom has ever seen.

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

It is fourteenth century Europe and the Red Death, a plague, is spreading. Prince Prospero decides to isolate a thousand individuals from the upper crust of society in an abbey to protect them from the contagion. After spending months contained in the abbey, the courtiers attend a masked ball. One of the attendees wears a costume that simulates the effects of the Red Death. Prospero is angered by the mysterious guest’s disguise and demands that he be punished. Prospero pursues the individual and discovers that he is a literal personification of the Red Death who has now infected the nobles in the abbey. It is also believed that the seven rooms of seven colors may represent the seven deadly sins, which are: sloth (laziness), lust, gluttony (eating

His ignorance and indifference to their pain allowed him to ignore the people who were entrusted in his care. It was all for naught, because in the end, Mother Nature prevailed over human nature, and as the guests moved east to west, like the sun is born in the east and dies in the west, the party goers died as well. The impending mortality is noted several times through the story as evidenced by the seventh room being decorated in red and black as well as the ebony clock that chimed the time until each person was dead. When the personification of death arrives at the festivities dressed like the Red Death, “The Prince pursues him with a drawn dagger until he is cornered in the seventh room. When the figure turns to face him, the Prince lets out a sharp cry and falls dead” (Poe). Ironically,