As we all learned from Vincent Price, if not from our high school English teacher, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American writer of fiction, who was and still is famous for his dark poems and short stories. He is best known for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre.
Like most, I had read Poe. However, I had little idea of the international scope of his work, until I studied at the Sorbonne in the early 1980s. Much to my surprise, I discovered that Poe was even more revered in France than in the USA. This was largely due to Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the great French poet, whose masterful translations of Poe’s work enshrined Poe in French literature.
Baudelaire was so impressed by Poe’s aesthetic use of language that he even learned English in order to translate him. (This was like my son in Texas who so wanted to marry a Russian girl that he learned Russian for that purpose.) Both in his poetry and prose, Poe focused on producing a single effect in order to reveal some important truth. The goal of Poe’s poetry was to create beauty for the sake of beauty. However, in many of his short stories, his objective was different. It was focused on creating a single unified effect of horror.
This is exactly what Poe did in one of his most famous Gothic tales, “The Masque of the Red Death”. The tale, which is about a deathly illness that attends a masquerade as an unexpected guest, has no real characters or precise location, and is meant to be an allegory. However, now in Times of Coronavirus, this tale has become eerily relevant. The story begins with the description of a scene that by now, we have become quite familiar with.
“The Red Death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” Like Covid-19, the Red Death is also a disease of the blood. “Blood was its Avatar and its seal – the redness and the horror of blood.” Once infected, victims succumb very quickly and many die. “And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.”
Paradoxically, the country of the Red Death is ruled by Prince Prospero, whose name is indicative of a healthy and booming economy. Despite being “happy and dauntless and sagacious”, the prince does not seem to care that his subjects are dying in great numbers.
In fact, he does not think that the disease or the deaths caused are important at all. (‘It is what it is.’) As long as the prince and his cronies are safe, that is all that matters. And so he devised a plan.
“When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.”
This castellated abbey (the White House) has strong, lofty walls and "gates of iron." Prince Prospero has very carefully provided entertainment of all types (possibly a golf game or two), for his guests. Meanwhile, outside the sealed abbey, the Red Death is rampaging.
“The abbey was amply provisioned” (perhaps with Big Macs). “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself […]. All these and security were within. Without was the Red Death.”
After five months of merry seclusion, Prince Prospero decides to entertain his guests with a masked ball “of unusual magnificence” (Republican National Convention). This masquerade will be held in an imperial suite of seven circular rooms, each decorated in a different color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black.
This is a bit difficult to reproduce in real life. Nevertheless, the state floor of the White House has a Red Room, a Blue Room, and Green Room whereas the Jacksonville Convention Hall has six large exhibition halls (no colors mentioned though the walls could be chromatically decorated as appropriate).
Of these rooms in the castellated abbey, the most important is the seventh and last one, which is "shrouded in black velvet," with scarlet windowpanes. "The effect of the firelight upon the blood tinted panes is ghastly in the extreme". This frightening room also has a gigantic ebony clock, which represents the passing of time (perhaps until the elections).
The masquerade (Republican National Convention), however, is “a gay and magnificent revel” on a grand scale. Prince Prospero has a fine eye for color and effects. “His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not.”
It is the prince’s taste that has guided the costumes of the masqueraders. “There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”
However, at some point during the masquerade, the revelers (7000 delegates at the scaled-back convention) gradually become aware of a tall and gaunt masked figure, “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave”. His mask is that of a corpse that died from the Red Death and his entire outfit is sprinkled with blood. "All the features of the face were besprinkled with the scarlet horror."
Prince Prospero also notices him. He calls him “blasphemous” (nut job, dummy, dope, clown, etc.) and orders him to be unmasked (fired and sent home). However, when the revelers try to seize the intruder, who stands “erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock”, they find that his shroud and mask are “untenanted by any tangible form”, like the coronavirus.
The Red Death, which could not be tweeted away, had come like “a thief in the night”. One by one, the revelers, as well as Prince Prospero, then drop to the floor beside the ebony clock of the great black hall with scarlet windowpanes, inevitably vanquished by the mysterious guest that unexpectedly appeared at the masquerade.
“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
In his poems and stories, Poe’s strived to create a single, unified effect of unmitigated horror. Even now 200 years later, his stories are still able to strike a chord. This is the hallmark of a great writer when his literary production is timeless. And Poe’s gothic stories have never been so timeless (or timely) as now in Times of Coronavirus.
