Indeed, whether on carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings, all upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque” and arabesque the decoration of Prospero’s vaults is. He wrote: “The soul of the apartment is the carpet. Some of these principles already foreshadowed the decoration of the abbey in “The Masque of the Red Death”. In “Philosophy of Furniture”, first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1840, he explained some of the principles of interior decoration that he deemed fundamental.

Poe has always been concerned with the atmosphere that can be created by decorating a room in a certain way. Everything from the significance of blood over the importance of the number seven in mysticism to the meaning of colors can be traced in this tale, which must also be read as an allegory and a memento mori. Equally important, “The Masque of the Red Death” is said to contain one of the most exact definitions of the grotesque in the literary sense.įinally, as almost all of Poe’s tales, “The Masque of the Red Death”, too, contains an incredible amount of symbolism. A lot of research has also been done on the narrator of the tale – I will only elaborate on the most plausible theories on who it is that is telling this tale. Others attempted to compare the story of Prince Prospero and his followers to other great works of art, for example Christopher Brown, who saw parallels between “The Masque of the Red Death” and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Pollin, who assumes that Poe used his own “Shadow – A Parable” as a source for “The Masque of the Red Death”. Scholars have tried to find its roots, like Burton R.

Much has been published about “The Masque of the Red Death”, one of Poe’s most read tales.

In her interpretation of “The Masque of the Red Death”, the figure of the Red Death is an incorporation of the father who returns to punish the son. A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation”, Marie Bonaparte takes a Freudian approach to Poe’s stories, Sigmund Freud himself wrote the preface, and claims that all the above tales are connected to Poe’s father complex. In her book “ The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Since all these stories take place during the carnival season, they are called “The Masquerades”. It is generally grouped together with three other of Poe’s stories, namely “King Pest”, which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in September 1835, “The Cask of Amontillado”, published in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book 33 in 1846, and “Hop-Frog”, published in The Flag of Our Union in 1849. “The Masque of the Red Death” first appeared in May 1842 in Graham’s Magazine. “The Masque of the Red Death” – An Allegory, A Memento Mori “The Masque of The Red Death” and the GrotesqueĦ. The Narrator of “The Masque of The Red Death”Ĥ.1 The Narrator is one of the dying revellersĤ.2 The Narrator is an ‘impossible narrator’ĥ.

The masque of the red death read online