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`The Masque of the Red Death is [an obvious] instance of architectural allegory. You will recall how Prince Prospero, when his dominions are being ravaged by using the plague, withdraws with a thousand of his knights and ladies into a secluded, impregnable, and windowless abbey, the place after a time he entertains his friends with a costume ball. The weird décor of the seven ballrooms expresses the Prince`s personal taste, and in unusual costumes of the Prince`s very own design the organization dances far into the night, looking, as Poe says, like a multitude of dreams.
The festivities are interrupted solely by the hourly placing of a giant ebony clock that stands in the westernmost room, and the striking of this clock has invariably a sobering effect on the revelers. Upon the last stroke of twelve, as you will remember, there appears amid the throng a discern attired in the blood￾dabbled grave clothes of a plague victim. The dancers cut back from him in terror. But the Prince, infuriated at what he takes to be an insolent practical joke, draws his dagger and pursues the parent thru all of the seven rooms. In the remaining and westernmost room, the figure abruptly turns and confronts Prince Prospero, who gives a cry of despair and falls upon his very own dagger. The Prince`s buddies rush forward to seize the intruder, who stands now within the shadow of the ebony clock, however, they locate nothing there. And then, one after the other, a thousand revelers fall useless of the Red Death, the lights flicker out, and Prince Prospero`s ball is at an end.
In spite of its forged of one thousand and two, The Masque of the Red Death has only one character. Prince Prospero is one-half of that character, the visionary half; the nameless determine in grave garments is the other More than once, in his dialogues or indispensable writings, Poe describes the earth-bound, time-bound rationalism of his age as a disease. And that is what the Red Death signifies. Prince Prospero`s flight from the Red Death is the poetic imagination`s flight from temporal and worldly recognition into dreams. A thousand dancers of Prince Prospero`s costume ball are just what Poe says they are dreams or phantasms, veiled and vivid creatures of Prince Prospero`s rapt imagination. Whenever there is a feast, carnival, or costume ball in Poe, we can also be sure that a dream is in progress.
But what is the tremendous ebony clock? For the reply to that, one wants solely to consult a dictionary of slang: we call the human coronary heart a ticker, which means that it is the clock of the body; and that is what Poe's capacity is here. In sleep, our minds can also roam past the temporal world, however, our hearts tick on, binding us to time and mortality. Whenever the ebony clock strikes, the dancers of Prince Prospero`s dream grow momentarily light and still, in half-awareness that they and their revel have to have an end; it is as if a sleeper should half-awaken, and recognize that he has been dreaming, and then sink returned into goals again.
The parent in blood-dabbled grave clothes, who stalks thru the terrifying business enterprise and vanishes in the shadow of the clock, is waking temporal consciousness, and his coming skill is the demise of dreams. He breaks up Prince Prospero`s ball as the keepers in Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether smash up the revels of the lunatics. The remaining disagreement between Prince Prospero and the shrouded figure is like the terrible ultimate meeting between William Wilson and his double. Recognizing his adversary as his own worldly and mortal self, Prince Prospero offers a cry of despair which is additionally Poe`s cry of despair; despair at the cognizance that only with the aid of self-destruction may want the poet full free his soul from the trammels of this world.
Poe`s aesthetic, Poe`s theory of the nature of art, looks to me insane. To say that artwork should repudiate everything human and earthly, and locate its difficulty count number at the flickering stop of dreams, is hopelessly to narrow the scope and feature of art. Poe`s aesthetic points towards such impoverishments as poesie pure and the summary Expressionist movement in painting. And yet, in spite of his aesthetic, Poe is a brilliant artist, and I would rest my case for him on his prose allegories of psychic conflict. In them, Poe broke absolutely new
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