The Masque Of The Red Death Essay

The Red Death Redemption Over the centuries, several fatal diseases have come and gone and left several countries in ruins. Diseases such as leprosy, measles, Ebola, and tuberculosis have wiped out towns in the matters of months. Though, the darkest and most murderous illness came in the 1300s and wiped out twenty-five percent of Europe’s population. That odious sickness was the bubonic plague, also known as the “Red Death”. In the short story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe utilizes symbols such as the clock, the Red Death, and the seven colored rooms to reveal that no one can escape mortality; they definitely cannot escape the brutal bubonic plague. In the short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe …show more content…
The Red Death represents the disease’s limitless sovereignty over the partygoers, and how it killed them all. In the end of the short story, Poe describes how “…darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Poe 452). The darkness and decay are words used to describe the result of the Red Death’s complete control over the partygoers’ lives. This excerpt illustrates how the disease will find everyone, even if they are hiding in a fortified abbey, and infect them. The Red Death also represents how death is abrupt and an unwelcome guest. In the story, “The figure who appears at the masquerade as the Red Death represents the outside of the tale… And if the figure represents the Red Death, so has everyone that has ventured within the precincts of the west room…; presumably, each individual sees the others with him as either the representation of the Red Death or a representation of its victims” (Roth 1). Roth recognizes the Red Death as a symbol of the outside of the story because his intrusion and disruptions are out of bounds. However, the partygoers in this story see the figure as a representation of Red Death or its victims because it enters the black room – which is a creepy room that is rarely entered – without a second thought and it scares everyone. The Red Death leads directly to the theme that death is inescapable. According to one …show more content…
To begin with, Poe describes the decorations that are outside and within the black room to show how creepy the room is. The seventh chamber had windows that were “…of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of decorations of the chamber into which it opened…The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls… there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all” (Poe 448-449). The black room was filled with decorations and had tapestries that blacked out any light, to represent the darkness caused by death. Many of the individuals in the abbey were so intimidated by its deadly characteristics that they refused to enter it. Secondly, the seven different colored chambers are arranged in an order symbolic to the stages of life. In a literary analysis, the author states how “…the seven differently colored rooms which are arranged from east to west, and in which the masque takes place, are composed in the form of a symbolic teleology of human life which leads from the color blue to the color black, from light to darkness, from creation to destruction” (Zapf 1). Zapf recognizes the color blue as a symbol of God’s creation of the bright, blue skies, which happened at the beginning of time. Then, the color black is recognized as a symbol of