UWM Libraries' Book Lovers Short Story Club discussion

This weeks story is the masque of the red death. A somber tale by Edgar Allen Poe that deals with opulence, plague, and self isolation.

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-...

To get discussion going, do you think Prince Prospero was the antagonist of the story? why or why not?

It was his fault that everyone there became trapped and then died from the virus - I mean plague - but I don't think he is the antagonist. If anything, humans as a whole could be viewed as the antagonist and nature is regaining control.

Laura wrote: "It was his fault that everyone there became trapped and then died from the virus - I mean plague - but I don't think he is the antagonist. If anything, humans as a whole could be viewed as the anta..."

Interesting comment Laura! what do you think that they sick person who brought the Red Death in the first place?

Was the mask-wearer, the "stranger," alive? How would we know? Is the clock alive, with its "brazen lungs" made of ebony?

I need some serious background on Poe, who's with me? Johns Hopkins' Literary Theory Guide has a brief description of Poe and his work and Gale Literature Criticism has a good, 60ish page collection of some analysis of our short story (both are available from the Literature LibGuide at UWM libraries, here: https://guides.library.uwm.edu/c.php?... search the name of the short story in Gale Lit Crit to find what they call the "work overview").

This gem, which I'll quote at length, comes from The Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865 (https://uwi-primoalma-prod.hosted.exl...

"While the gothic has been a staple of American literature since the Revolution, the works of the country’s most famous gothic author, Edgar Allan Poe, have traditionally been seen as oddly detached from the mainstream of American literature. His works
are more obviously part of the European tradition, making extensive use of the European conventions of castles, debauched aristocrats, and remote settings, such as the Spanish Inquisition. They seem more interested in psychology and esthetics than
in the nationalist and historical concerns that preoccupied such authors as Brown, Crevecœur, Hawthorne, and Melville. And Poe has influenced and impressed European writers, such as Baudelaire, more than he has Americans. But more recent
scholarship, such as Rosenheim and Rachman’s collection (1995), emphasizes Poe’s embeddedness within American culture, his responsiveness to it rather than his alienation from it. Joan Dayan, for example, has argued that Poe’s obsession with characters that die but then come back to life constitutes a meditation upon how the courts defined ‘‘a person’’ when confronted with issues like slavery, which clearly complicated that definition. Poe’s living-dead characters, she argues, can be read as ‘‘legal personalities’’ that probe the distinction between actual and legal existence. She
points to court cases that distinguished between the physical persons of slaves and ‘‘legal personhood,’’ which she defines as ‘‘the social and civic components of personal identity.’’ Such personhood was denied to slaves: ‘‘So far as civil acts are concerned, the slave, not being a person, has no legal mind, no will which the law can recognize,’’ an 1861 court decision asserted (1999: 410). Dayan argues that legal pronouncements
like this one subject slaves to civil death. But since the slaves under discussion are in fact alive, the result is a form of living death, a state of being that Poe explores in stories of the living dead, such as ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’’ ‘‘Ligeia,’’ and ‘‘The
Tell-Tale Heart.’’"

Jon wrote: "Laura wrote: "It was his fault that everyone there became trapped and then died from the virus - I mean plague - but I don't think he is the antagonist. If anything, humans as a whole could be view..."

I think someone there just got sick and then spread it to everyone else. Ed has a good point as well: is it even real? At some points, Prospero almost seems like he is imagining the whole thing. Perhaps he is sick and then death came to take him from his delirium.

I would say Prospero is an antagonist. An out-of-touch noble who locks himself and a bunch of his friends in an opulent castle full of all kinds of luxuries while we're told over half of the people in his country are dead or dying? Sounds like an antagonist to me. I think Poe is an author who had death pretty heavily on his mind, given how many people close to him died or were dying, and I think he took comfort in knowing that rich people can't escape death no matter what they do.

Poe was orphaned very young and raised by wealthy family friends, who were at times generous and at other times very tight-fisted with their money as far as he was concerned. Once he reached adulthood, they cut him off completely and he was left penniless. He had gambling problems, struggled to make money as a writer because of the lack of consistent copyright laws at the time, and spent much of his life writing people to ask for money. He was, in other words, your standard starving artist, but because of his upbringing, he had a sense of what the "haves" in society lived like and was a lot more aware of the injustice of inequality than I suspect a lot of his peers would have been.

Prospero (prosperous, anyone?) is meant to be a villain, I'd say. He abandons his people when they need him most and is "happy" because he thinks he's safe. His death from the plague shows that for all the rich may try to outrun death, for all of the money they throw around while regular people suffer, they will all die too. As Poe's wife had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and his behavior was becoming more erratic as he drank more and continued to struggle to find work, only being paid $9 (~$200 today) for The Raven, I think he probably enjoyed writing about wealthy people like his adoptive father dying of an awful plague just like everyone else. Can't say I blame him.