The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe’s life was wrought with misfortunes and loss. At the age of 2, on December 8th, 1811 he lost his mother, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. Elizabeth died at the young age of 24 from tuberculosis, better known at the time as consumption. After her death Poe kept a small miniature of her for the rest of his life. Sadly Elizabeth would only be the first of many women in Poe’s life to die such an untimely death.
Poe’s had always seen women as angelic figures, even writing to John R. Thompson in the last year of his life in 1849 that: “Women have been angels of mercy to me, and have tenderly led me from the verge of ruin while men stood aloof and mocked. [[. . .]]”
Before the death of his mother, Poe’s father David Poe Jr. had abandoned his family leaving them destitute and alone. The family was very poor and a few days after the death of Elizabeth Poe it was reported that David Poe had also succumbed to tuberculosis as well. Left orphaned and separated from his brother and sister, it seemed as if the dreaded curse of tuberculosis followed Poe around like a plague, taking away, and shaping his life into the writer we so love today.
Poe’s parents would not be the last to suffer from tuberculosis. In 1829 Poe’s foster mother Frances Allan died of the same illness. Frances Allan had always been kind to the young Poe,
taking him in after the death of his mother, she fawned over and spoiled him. The Allan family was quite well off and could not conceive a child of their own, leading Mrs. Allen to adore Poe as much as she did. When Poe caught news of her death he was affected terribly; Frances was the second women in his life to die from tuberculosis and by now he’d developed a deep dread for the sickness.
After the death of Frances Allan, John Allan, Poe’s foster father soon disowned him in 1831, leaving him completely out of his will. Poor, orphaned by two mothers and abandoned by two fathers, Poe had seemingly lost everything. However it was in that same year that Poe moved to Baltimore to live at the Clemm house. There he met his cousin and later wife, Virginia Clemm who was only 8 years old at the time. Poe cared for Virginia dearly, treating her as his cousin, sister, and wife, and although their relationship is an odd one, they were reportedly a very loving couple after getting married on September 22nd 1835. However Poe’s new found happiness only lasted for 7 years. In 1842 Virginia began showing signs of tuberculosis, coughing up blood by the piano during a performance. It was in that moment that Poe knew the illness had struck again, a depression and near lunacy taking over his life as Virginia struggled for 5 long years. With not near enough any money to properly heal and support her, Poe had to watch his beloved wife slowly die before his eyes. There were times when Virginia’s would seem to be recovering from the illness only to decline once again. Poe viewed these bouts of recovery as the biggest torture of all, a mocking glimpse into what could have been had he had the money to support her properly. Poe was quoted as writing in a letter to a close friend. “Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
It was in these final years of Virginia’s life that Poe would create some of his greatest works. Death and misfortune seemed to follow Poe around like a plague, ripping away his loved ones and creating a longing for the after life in him that had never been captured in a writer before. With the thought of Virginia’s inevitable demise, all Poe had left was his words.
It was in the same year that Virginia contracted tuberculosis when Poe wrote ."The Masque of the Red Death" . This short story tells the tale of the Red Death, a disease that had been plaguing the lands and killing everyone in the most quick and gruesome way possible. Prospero, a prince of a nearby land comes up with the idea to lock the gates to his kingdom in order to prevent contamination; ignoring the already ill and dying people of the country. After several month of prosperity, Prospero decides to hold a celebration. Painting each room of his castle a single vibrant color, the party becomes a success, Prospero’s guest’s are enamored with the dream like beauty of each room, the only exception being the final red and black room which holds a rather ominous feel to it. As the clock strikes midnight in the black and red room, a mysterious stranger appears at the party dressed with the face of a corpse; Prospero’s guests are frightened and so he tries to confront the stranger only to be immediately killed inside the black room. After his death the remaining guests try and attack the stranger only to find there is no one underneath the costume. Everyone soon dies for the Red Death has entered the castle. 
"The Masque of the Red Death" , was an allegory. The short story represented the mortality of men and the inescapable hold of death. No matter how luxurious the castle or how prosperous the kingdom was, death was still able to dig it’s claws into the prince and his guests. The black room among the vibrant colors was a symbol inescapable hold of death, the ominous feeling the guests got when near it, and the clock that made the castle stop, all represented the spot of death that surrounded their safe haven, the clock striking midnight stopping everyone for the final time as The Red Death arrived to kill them all.
"The Masque of the Red Death" was a clear allegory to not only death but to Poe’s own life as well. The Red Death shared many similar qualities to tuberculosis, a sickness which had not only taken Poe’s mother, father, foster mother, and wife but his brother, Henry Poe as well. In "The Masque of the Red Death" the people would experience sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, leading to death within half an hour. Tuberculosis was most commonly a disease of the lungs and caused the victim to hack up thick phlegm and blood. To Poe the Red Death was the disease which had taken his loved ones away from him.
“No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal --the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.”
Even the main character of the story Prospero’s name is a play off prosperity. Prospero was a rich prince, trying to secure his kingdom from illness with luxuries, only to end up the first to die when the Red Death attacked. This could be symbolic of Poe’s own situation with his wife Virginia as she had just contracted tuberculosis a few months before Poe wrote "The Masque of the Red Death.” Poe was too poor to provide Virginia with the proper care she needed to fight off the illness and was doomed to watch her suffer. I think Prospero’s failure to ward off the Red Death, even with his financial prosperity, was Poe’s way of delivering solace to himself; that even with all the riches in the world, death stops for no man and Virginia would not be saved.
“And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
Because of the death of so many of his loved one’s Poe had developed a morbid curiosity and longing for the afterlife. Poe’s
unknown horrors and frights of monsters lurking under children's beds, and more about the monsters within his and ourselves. Many of Poe’s stories focus on the inevitable guilt, madness and finality that death brings to it’s victims. In this sense Poe is considered a Gothic writer because of the influence of his lost loves. There are always human aspects of twisted romance or lovers separated by death in his morbid tales of fear and guilt and like his characters, so was Poe, the poet placing his own feelings and sorrows inside the stories he’d written over the course of Virginia’s illness.
Link to “The Masque of The Red Death” https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/masqueb.htm
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