8th of May – Summary of Edgar Allen Poe ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ discussion by Sophie Smars

This week’s session was led by Dr Tim Beasley-Murray

The summary of the discussion is written by Sophie Smars

In this week’s book-club we discussed Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of Red Death’. An appropriate read considering the current situation of lockdown, where much like the characters of this gothic short story, we too are slowly losing a sense of time, as a pandemic rages on outside.

Indeed, the concept of time and specifically the symbol of the clock was one of the points we focused on. Time appears to be liquid in this story. On the one hand, the guests are taken in the illusion of excess to a point where they lose a sense of this time and awareness of what is happening in the outside world. Yet on the other hand, they are also constantly haunted by the presence of the clock and thus cannot really escape time. It is the device that mediates and organizes everything in the story. The party is constantly marked by the eerie effect of silence and stillness that the ominous sound of the clock creates every time it strikes a new hour, until this tension eventually builds to the fatal rupture the midnight hour brings, when the Red Death is finally among them. The appearance of this figure illustrates how time symbolizes the frailty, futility and illusion of Human control in the face of inevitable death.

The omnipresence of a time that is accelerating towards death is also mirrored by a quickening-pace in vivid descriptions of the environment of excess. Readers had different point of views on what these depictions of the castle meant to them. Some thought it to be a gorgeous, exotic fantasy that is undeniably attractive to its’ guests. Yet others found this surplus to be sickening and oppressive, with an architectural geometry resembling a maze that is purposefully confusing to its’ guests and the readers. The question was thus raised: is something being kept out or are they being kept in? Are these guests even enjoying this party or is it an illusion, like a staged masquerade or similar to a ‘Danse Macabre’? Are these prisoners or guests? These questions about the descriptions of the castle bring about a general feeling of horror, which we compared to HP Lovecraft’s writing of ‘impossible spaces’, or physical dimensions in stories that create horror due to being unimaginable, inhuman, and unknown. This chaotic space is further highlighted by the abundance of colour (red and black being the most significant), with typical gothic images from 19th C literature, like the stained glass, as well as a profusion of sensory impression, that represents the moral decadence of the time. We concluded that red could symbolize death, but also life, vitality, and desire, which we related to the tension of Eros and Thanatos, that is commonly found in literature.

The importance of aesthetic in this story, as well as the indication of Prospero being somewhat of a ‘mad artist’ made us question the role of Art and the Artist. We often associate art, music and dance as things that bring joy, and much like storytelling, activities that put of death. But in this story, it is actually what brings death to them. We also tend to think of the artist as the voice of society’s victims, or as Nadine Gordimer says ‘Art is on the side of the oppressed’. Yet here the figure of the artist also happens to be a controlling and tyrannical one that does not care about those dying outside. This Prospero and his story also have many similarities to Shakespeare’s Prospero in ‘The Tempest’. The latter is a figure of magic and illusion, and the play itself has often been interpreted as a part of Prospero’s dream or a metaphor for the illusion of theatre itself. In Poe’s story we see a similar importance of dreams, magic, and the occult, that is conveyed through the rich sensory images and colours, acting as omens of the approaching death. Sorcery is often seen as a zero-sum game; engaging in magic means winning but necessarily losing something in the process, which we see in the fate of these guests who thought themselves protected. Their illusions and specifically their fantasy of power are eventually caught up by reality. ‘The Tempest’ isn’t the only literary reference in Poe’s work that is unquestionably a mesh of intertextuality, with its masked spectral figure that reminds a reader of ‘Macbeth’ or the mentioned Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani’, but also made our readers think of later works, such as ‘The Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges or ‘Cortigiana’ by Miloš Marten.

Lastly, we may be left with questions about the ‘aim’ of this text. Is it didactic and moralizing? Does it resist the idea of a moral, despite the argument that it is hard to write about an apocalyptic scenario without being moralizing (especially considering the time period). Does the presence of Horror prevent a didactic conclusion? What is the allegorical function in this tale? And so on.

By Sophie Smars