The colors of the seven rooms are just too juicy a detail not to mean something, aren't they? The black and blood red room seems so obviously to represent death, shouldn't the other rooms mean something too? A lot of commentators have thought that, and there is something of a general agreement among many of them about the meaning of the rooms.
Supposedly, the suite is an allegory of human life. Each room, in other words, corresponds to a different "stage" of human life, which its color suggests. The first clue that the suite is allegorical is that the rooms are arranged from east to west. East is usually the direction associated with "beginnings," and birth, because the sun rises in the east; west (the direction of the sunset) is associated with endings, and death.
According to this reading, the blue room, which is furthest to the east, represents birth. The color suggests the "unknown" from which a human being comes into the world. The next room is purple, …show more content…
(The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 437-439)
Now is there any more to this connection than the similarity of "Red Death" and "red plague"? We can't find one, at least not without getting speculative. But it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suspect the phrase gave Poe an idea, since there are other connections to The Tempest in the story as well.
Does that line about the Red Death coming "like a thief in the night" sound familiar? If it does, that's because it's a really famous line from the Bible. It's from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:4, in which Paul is referring to the last judgment. According to him, Jesus will come when the world is least expecting it ("like a thief in the night"), to judge sinners for all of eternity. If you're caught unprepared, you're in trouble. So it's better to always be expecting the judgment, and focused not on the "pleasures of this world" (which have a tendency to be sinful) but on the promise of the next. Otherwise, you're a
Supposedly, the suite is an allegory of human life. Each room, in other words, corresponds to a different "stage" of human life, which its color suggests. The first clue that the suite is allegorical is that the rooms are arranged from east to west. East is usually the direction associated with "beginnings," and birth, because the sun rises in the east; west (the direction of the sunset) is associated with endings, and death.
According to this reading, the blue room, which is furthest to the east, represents birth. The color suggests the "unknown" from which a human being comes into the world. The next room is purple, …show more content…
(The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 437-439)
Now is there any more to this connection than the similarity of "Red Death" and "red plague"? We can't find one, at least not without getting speculative. But it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to suspect the phrase gave Poe an idea, since there are other connections to The Tempest in the story as well.
Does that line about the Red Death coming "like a thief in the night" sound familiar? If it does, that's because it's a really famous line from the Bible. It's from Paul's First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:4, in which Paul is referring to the last judgment. According to him, Jesus will come when the world is least expecting it ("like a thief in the night"), to judge sinners for all of eternity. If you're caught unprepared, you're in trouble. So it's better to always be expecting the judgment, and focused not on the "pleasures of this world" (which have a tendency to be sinful) but on the promise of the next. Otherwise, you're a