Allegory in Masque of Red Death
Decoding Edgar Allen Poe’s Short Story
While many argue that Poe did not intend the story to be an allegory, looking at the elements of the story as pieces in an allegory is an easy way to understand it.
The most popular method for decoding The Masque of the Red Death is by using allegorical interpretation.
Life and Death
The two primary allegorical elements in The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe are life and death. The allegorical figure representing death is clearly the Red Death in both its literal form as the plague that instigates Prince Prospero’s retreat from the world at large and specifically as the mummer who surprises and terrifies his guests at the masked ball.
The allegorical figure for life is the masked ball. The ball is composed of a variety of elements that represent various elements of life.
The Elements of the Ball as an Allegory for Life
The People
First, there are the partiers; they represent humanity and the tendency of humans to try to escape the inevitability of death. They are shut within the secure walls of the castle with a variety of ‘appliances of pleasure’ to distract them from the fate of those outside the walls. Yet, despite these distractions, the prince feels the need to throw a masked ball to amuse and further distract his boon companions.
The Stages of Life
The rooms in which the ball is held are significant. Poe describes the rooms to us by moving us through them from the East to the West, mimicking the path of the sun, which suggests the movement of life from dawn to dusk. The rooms shift colors in the following order: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, purple, black with red light.
There seven rooms are also thought to represent the seven ages of man, which Shakespeare outlines for us through Jaques soliloquy in As You Like It, II.vii. The ages are puking infant, whining schoolboy, sighing lover, quarrelsome soldier, the round-bellied justice, the shrunken elder, and finally the second childhood “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Many have tried to find significance in the colors of the rooms since clearly the order of presentation from East to West and the number seven indicate Poe’s intentions. Those who have tried to discover the meaning in the colors are correct in assuming that the colors are significant; since Poe states in his essay The Philosophy of Composition that when one writes there should be “no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Consequently, the colors of the rooms are clearly intended to create a specific ‘effect’ in the story. However, none of the common theories are satisfactory.
The Clock Ties Life and Death Together
It is the clock that binds life and death together in this story. In the seventh room, we have the great ebony clock whose chimes strike out the passage of life and can be heard in every other room of the entire suite or allegorically every other stage of life. As the party goers, enjoy their revelry, they are forced to pause every time the clock rings and so are reminded that life is short.
Still, no one is aware of Death until the clock strikes twelve midnight, the hour of endings. It is then that the crowd becomes aware of the awful figure whose presence destroys their pleasure. The clock measures the length of our days and when it strikes the final hour, Death’s presence is realized and the curtain closes. And, it is then, that the first person dies. Prince Prospero chases Death through every room in the suite beginning in the Eastern room and ending in the Western room, where he dies.
When, at last, all the guests were dead the clock itself stopped and “Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
In the End
When The Masque of the Red Death is viewed as an allegory, the moral in today’s language is this “Life is a party and then you die.”
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