On Monday 7 February 2022, we read “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842, which we took from the book of The Complete Stories by Poe, with an introduction by John Seelye (London: David Campbell, 1992), pp. 604-609. This reading was part of a session devoted to “Gothic and historical plague narratives in the nineteenth century,” and constituted the “Gothic” part, whereas the historical one was represented by Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], from which we read an extract.

The situation from which Poe’s story starts is very similar to Boccaccio’s frame narrative for the Decameron, which we read last week: there is a plague, and to escape it, a group of young people retires away from where the pestilence rages most furiously. Whereas Boccaccio recounts an historical event – the “Black Death” of 1348 and its effects in the city of Florence – Poe does not give us a precise setting: “The ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country”. Which country? This is the very beginning. “No pestilence had even been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.”

If he leaves us uncertain about the time and the place of the narrative, Poe, however, gives us plenty of hints to understand where Prospero’s initiative is taking.

“But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these he retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

There is something sinister in this story from the very beginning: Prospero’s fearlessness and his friends’ gaiety are too much in contrast to the fury with which the plague rages. Similarly, their seclusion in the castellated abbey is somewhat too deep:

“A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. 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 nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair from without or of frenzy from within.”

[Listen to this extract, read by Philip Rouse]

While they are leaving outside the plague, they are also imprisoning themselves. They think they are safe (“[…] security […] within. Without was the Read Death”), but in fact they do not give themselves any way out, as the reader discovers little by little, with a growing sense of unease – that sense of unease that Poe masters so well. Like Prospero, the reader is caught in the trap, but unlike him, he sees it: when will the Red Death come?