Edgar Allan Poe's Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, where his parents cared for him until their deaths in 1812 when Poe was three. He was left to John Allan and his wife Frances Allan. While Edgar Allan Poe’s background is rather long, and tragic, it all begins will death and ultimately ends with his death. It was in 1836 that Edgar married his cousin Virginia Clemm, but it was the death of his mother, his foster-mother, and his wife that truly exposed his emotions in a raw way after each woman died from tuberculosis. It is a common theory that writers in any genre write a piece of truth within their works, whether it is intentional or not, and with this is it can also be believed that Edgar Allan Poe’s life directly affected the means in which he …show more content…
Masque of the Red Death is about a deadly disease in the form of a living being, that reigns over a part of the country, where a man known as Prince Prospero rules. It’s when this disease, named ‘Red Death’, begins to kill of many that Prince Prospero “…summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends…these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.” (The Raven X Edgar Allan Poe– Guillermo del Toro) It was in his abbey that Prince Prospero and his people lasted to almost the fifth or sixth month, within his abbey walls, uninfected by the virus. There were seven rooms, each made up of different colors completely, that Prince Prospero held a masquerade ball. One of his ‘guests’ dressed as a victim of the ‘Red Death’ and Prince Prospero, filled with anger at the thought that he was being made a fool of, ordered his courtiers nearest him to expose the masked guest so that everyone could know who was to be hung at sunrise, but everyone, fearful of the masked guest, did not move to help Prince Prospero. The masked guest travelled through all of the seven colored rooms until it came to the final, where Prince Prospero followed after him with a knife. It was when the masked guest turned around that the Prince realized who he was up against and he fell to his death with scream. “…fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. …show more content…
In Masque of the Red Death every one dies by the ‘hands’ of the ‘Red Death’. The similarities are very haphazardly pieced, but it’s hard to deny that Edgar Allan Poe lived a life where he lost every woman he loved in a very tragic way. He was left to live life in a state that he could not fully condone and this may have been the very reason that Poe wrote his story. Masque of the Red Death may simply be a way from Poe to express how he feels about losing the women in his life, secluded and surrounded by death and decay, the same way his short story ends “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” (The Raven X Edgar Allan Poe–Guillermo del