Illustration by Maeve Breathnach.
TN2 Magazine’s ‘Fiction Club’ is a new monthly forum for writers to read, discuss and dissect selected works. To suggest a piece of literature for consideration contact literature@tn2magazine.ie
‘The Masque of the Red Death’ was originally published in 1842 by the literary periodical Graham’s Magazine as a “fantasy”. Poe’s story is of a masquerade ball hosted by Prince Prospero during a plague of the ‘Red Death’. His castle is made of intimate, colourful rooms filled with happy, wealthy guests. A masked stranger, the vision of death, passively walks through the rooms until he is confronted by Prospero, but when the guests drop to the floor, the masque turns to a massacre, and the stranger vanishes into air.
Killian Beashel, Contributing Writer
A photo did the rounds on Twitter a few months back of a group of suntanned Americans, crowded together – maskless and unafraid – on a private party island. In the original caption, in deference to the vast existential dread of the pestilential potential inherent in such a large, physically close group, we are reassured that all is well because every member of the private party island tested negative for COVID-19. The retreat of the staggeringly wealthy into a sheltered den of plenty during times of plague is nothing new. Indeed it’s the entire premise of Boccaccio’s Decameron, and this story by Poe.
I was struck by the horror of colours and crowds in The Masque of the Red Death. Somehow, I’ve never read Poe before, and his gothic madness was everything I could’ve hoped it would be. The abiding horror of crowds is apparent right from the start, with the narrator’s vision of a land literally plagued by blood-red crowds spreading pestilence and death. Individual characters barely exist, and for much of the story aren’t even needed to build dramatic tension. Characters are eventually introduced in the form of Prince Prospero and the mysterious hooded mummer. However, after they’ve both achieved their structural purpose, the narrative reverts back, once again, to a final image of a chaotic crowd, bodies crushing together in a hapless carnivalesque fight against death.
I really enjoyed the intensely evocative colours of the story, particularly as it nears its close, with the image of the crowd rushing fruitlessly between each of the coloured rooms. The flashing, pungent colours reminded me of Dario Argento and his demented, surrealistic and claustrophobic environments in Suspiria and Inferno. What also came to mind was Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion, a film that features similarly surrealistic, heavily-stylised colour schemes. Though not a great movie, it quite wonderfully features Anthony Perkins (famous for playing Norman Bates in Psycho) as a sex-crazed priest who wanders the New York streets forlornly cradling a vibrator. With its feverish surrealism and blasphemous impulse, I can’t help but feel like Poe would’ve appreciated it.
Overall, I really enjoyed this story. Punchy and gaudy, laced with doom and excess. Skilfully evoking the horror of crowds, sustaining a compelling narrative almost entirely without the traditional building blocks of character development or human psychology, it’s a quite wonderful, demented little evocation of communal madness.
Dr Dara Downey, School of English Teaching Assistant at Trinity College, Dublin
I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” during my PhD on American haunted houses, more moons ago than I care to remember. At the time, I was very excited by the strict division of the inside of the castle into a series of differently coloured rooms, with the final chamber lit by blood-red windows – a room so eerily decorated that few of the guests will venture there.
Stephen King’s novel The Shining obsessively references “The Masque of the Red Death,” particularly the final line about the Red Death holding “illimitable dominion over all.” That word “illimitable” highlights that the rooms are all about control. They suggest that the owner or occupant of a house can arrange things however he (they’re all “he” here) wants – the colours, the doors and the windows bend to his will – for a while anyway. But there are forces that override that apparent control, and Poe and King work hard to stress this. Prince Prospero seems to think that his wealth and status can allow him to arrange a space for himself and a couple of hundred of his closest friends where the plague raging outside can’t touch them. The wealthy guests who stay in the Overlook Hotel during the summer in The Shining also seem to think that they’re immune to the ravages of the twentieth century’s financial and psychological vicissitudes.
King’s protagonist, Jack Torrance, though, is another matter. On the one hand, his job as caretaker during the harsh winter months seems to give him “illimitable dominion” over the empty, rather shabby Overlook. On the other, his precarious position there, needing the money because he’s messed up his teaching gig, highlights the very thing that Poe’s story insists: that our houses are never really our own, and that we don’t really control everything about them – and that sometimes, they can turn on us. Prospero might be delighted with his design for his ghoulish red-and-black room at the end of a rainbow-coloured phantasmagoria, but he has no “dominion” whatsoever over who or what might show up there – and what it might do to his apparently exclusive guest list. As for Torrance, one of the reasons why the (visually very satisfying) ending of the Stanley Kubrick film version never quite sat right with me is because that final shot of Jack as yet another guest at a glamorous 4th-July party is because it assumes that the hotel gives two hoots about him. It’s been using him. So, just like Prince Prospero, he can’t be celebrating his Independence Day, because he has none.
Fiachra Kelleher, Deputy Literature Editor
Let’s pretend, for 400 words, that Covid-19 doesn’t exist.
Why did Edgar Allan Poe write as he did, and why do so many people enjoy reading him? His writing is verbose and melodramatic, with female characters who die young and beautiful and often still in their wedding dresses. Yet we love him; people who don’t read much love him and will sift through his 1800s idiom for a story no one quite understands. If you make art, this should make you jealous.
‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is theatre in short story form. With his kingdom “half depopulated,” Prince Prospero retreats to an elaborate set of his own design; his name is an obvious reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. There is almost no story in this story. Instead, most of its 2,500 words are given over to descriptions of place. Poe presents atmosphere as entertainment.
Young children understand little of what happens in their favourite movies and books, and yet each child has firm favourites. This is because they find the moment-to-moment of the fictional world they’re presented with bewitching. Adults are no different, we just pretend we are. Really, none of us can explain why we love our favourite books, plays or movies on the grounds of characterisation, plot, themes, et cetera. We just like spending time in their world.
Children are fascinated by death. When they play, a key part of the performance is dying – not suffering, not the banality of having cholera, but the passing out of this world. Literary critics have spent a lot of time discussing which illness the red death might be modelled on, whether cholera, tuberculosis, bubonic plague or original sin. For me, the fact that victims of the red death die bloodily within half an hour of the first signs of illness indicates that it’s not meant to mimic any real-life disease. The red death is an impossibly quick, theatrical death: it is playacting. Prospero has constructed an elaborate set for his party, has prepared a space in which we can pretend to die, just as every child does. Like children, Prospero’s guests will not play unless death is a possibility.
Edgar Allan Poe was an entertainer. His writing is irresistible exactly because it is gaudy, because it exists as play and as playacting. Does ‘The Masque’ ask questions about personal responsibility and the inevitability of death? Maybe. Probably. Who cares? Poe makes us feel like children again. He’s just horsing around.
Connor Howlett, Film Editor
I first read this story in primary school, when I would have been about ten years old. Although I was a little too young for a full appreciation of the vices of alcohol, I did find something rather intoxicating about reading Edgar Allan Poe. There is no other writer I have yet read whose use of language, sense of rhythm and tendency toward the sinister come together in such effective potency. There is a delicate beauty to Poe’s stories: a fine balance between the sophistication of his often-archaic lexis and the expressive clarity of his imagery. Poe feels to me like an accessible writer, yet when you analyse the specifics of his prose, it is clear that his words are not accessible, often adding in whispers of other languages such as Latin and French without translation. Instead of frustrating the narrative drive, this has the effect of creating a sense of intrigue and suspense by creating an alluring distance to the reader.
The prose of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is complex, yet alluring, bolstered by the pace and evocative dreamlike quality of the story’s shifting tenses. The imagery is perhaps most chilling in its contemporary resonance: a blithe Prince holds a party of utter decadence in the midst of a pandemic of immense collective suffering, only for the festivity to be interrupted by a masked figure from the outside. So far, so Trump’s COVID festivities. This is perhaps a subject that would wilt in the hands of a less skilful writer, but remains unbearably apposite. However, isn’t that the point? Didn’t this narrative always have some kind of pertinence? A story of a powerful person putting a community at fatal risk for the sake of their own pursuit of pleasure, only to be met with their own downfall, still would have felt painfully familiar before COVID-19 hit our shores. As it did to me as a 10-year-old under the influence of my first literary intoxication. As it will next year. As it will for my grandchildren. That is the true horror of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’: it will always resonate.
Shane Murphy, Literature Editor
Reading Poe’s story in the context of the global pandemic makes it difficult to gauge allegory from the story. Reading it now, it is mechanical; you can see the moving parts and it can seem boring, unimpressive even. How scary is a story when it is news, not fiction? The stakes in the story and those of today are biblical: death follows disobedience; hubris precedes death. Death is the backdrop of the story and the intangible prop; it is the engine and the fuel of our worst fears, and it is the measure of them. Through the lens of the pandemic, the story is only about contagious diseases, not about contagion; it is just about community transmission, not communal thought. To understand the story today is to let go of and unpack the legacy of life in isolation which increasingly feels like institutionalisation. But once you’ve done that, it recedes back into mystery and allure, like something awful creeping back into the shadows, readying itself to pop back out.
In this story, Poe revels in the power and presence of the creeping narrator. Who is telling this story? For whom is this story being told?
Poe’s narrator is maniacal. It is like a beast, watching from the wings the full rooms of poor unfortunate souls celebrating their last moments of life until it joins the party and wafts through the crowd. When it describes the “horror of blood” and the nature of the pestilence, it does so with glamour and glee. The melodrama and theatrics are suitable for Prospero’s party, but not the disease that kills it. When the party is good, it is “magnificent”, and when it is bad, things get even better. One gets the feeling that it is invested in the horror – that it has some skin in the game. Like every good horror, this narrator knows what is around the corner and it knows for sure that it will not be good. The anticipation builds and builds through the story until the narrator disappears. The horror of the Red Death is felt and the narrative stops, revealing nothing else but the tail-end silence of death. The engine cuts out, the tank runs dry. The narrator’s job is done – everyone is dead.
