The Masque of the Red Death

The “Masque of the Red Death” is a Gothic horror tale—Poe being one of the first practitioners of the Gothic form in America and a father of the American Gothic subgenre. The story is often taken allegorically, as a narrative made to communicate the inescapability of death. This is symbolized through Prospero’s futile armaments against death, yet its ultimate arrival despite them. The imminence of death is also symbolized through the emphasis on several different ideas of time, such as through the gigantic clock striking the hours.

Stylistically, “The Masque of the Red Death” is highly ornate. Poe shifts between tenses (e.g., past, present future), narrative focalizations (e.g., first person, third person), and different literary genres and subgenres (e.g., Romantic, Gothic, fairy tale, parable) with ease. Poe’s genre-shifting is exemplified well in the transition between the first and second paragraphs of the story. In the first, macabre elements are brought forward in a short description of disease that reads like a medical text: “there were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleedings at the pores” (739). The tone shifts drastically when we are introduced to Prince