Edgar Allan Poe is known for
tackling dark and complex themes in his works, including madness and death. He
is also known for using concrete objects as symbols to represent these abstract
concepts. The Masque of the Red Death and The
Tell-Tale Heart are peppered with symbolic images that portray death,
insanity, and even life itself. Edgar Allan Poe uses these images to enable
readers to visualize his words and, therefore, better understand his message.
The Masque of the Red Death:
In The
Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero, the protagonist, hides from the
plague known as the “Red Death”, a disease which has been killing off hundreds
of his subjects, in a royal suite, along with a number of other nobles. The
escapees celebrate in their hideout and have a wonderful time every day. Until,
one night, a stranger comes in, uninvited, wearing a mask that took the form of
a corpse’s face, blood-drenched garments, and had blood sprinkled onto his
face. The prince demands the stranger’s arrest, but none of the guards move.
None of the guests move, either. Prince Prospero pulls out his dagger and
endeavors to kill the stranger himself, but the figure turns around, and the
prince drops dead, along with everyone else in the castle, revealing the figure
as the Red Death.
At the beginning of the
story, Prince Prospero hides from the Red Death in his heavily fortified
castle. To increase his efforts in cheating death, he has a wall built around
the castle. This symbolizes the various efforts humans undertake to avoid the
inevitable death.
Prince
Prospero’s castle contains seven rooms, each with a different colored décor and
stained glass window: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black.
The black room had a scarlet stained glass window. There are multiple
interpretations for the concepts these rooms represent, one of which states
that the colors of the rooms are similar to the colors of a prism, which might
mean that these rooms symbolize life, despite the fact that the rooms are not
arranged in the order of colors reflected off a prism, which might reflect
either Prince Prospero’s “bizarre” sense of style or his twisted sense of
fairness. Another interpretation might be that Poe based the seven rooms on
Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” from the latter’s famous play As You
Like It:
“All the world’s a stage, /
And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their
entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven
ages. At first the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s
arms. / And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And
shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school. And
then the lover, / Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad / Made
to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, / Full of strange oaths
and bearded like the pard, / Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, /
Seeking the bubble reputation / Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the
justice, / In fair round belly with good capon lined, / With eyes severe
and beard of formal cut, / Full of wise saws and modern instances; / And so he
plays his part. The sixth age shifts / Into the lean and
slipper’d pantaloons, / With spectacles on nose and pouch on side, / His
youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide / For his shrunk shank; and his big
manly voice / Turning again toward childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his
sound. Last scene of all, / That ends this strange eventful history, / Is second
childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything.” (II, vii, 139-66)
Symbolism
also lies in the way the rooms are arranged. The first room is in the east side
of the castle, where the sun rises. The last room is in the west side of the
castle, where the sun sets. Poe has described the arrangement of the rooms in
“that vision embraced but little more than one at a time”. This implies to the
fact that one cannot look very far into the future, the same way one can only
see a small part of the royal suite at a time. There is also “a sharp turn at
every twenty or thirty yards”, which could symbolize the troubles and problems
humans face in their lives as they move from one stage to another.
The
last and darkest room in the castle contains an ebony clock which, when the
hour strikes, “there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was
clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical…..the musicians of the
orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to
hearken the sound”. The room represents death, the last stage of human life, an
implication further supported by the fact that the lit tripod inside had no
effect on the room and that no one in the castle dared to step within the room.
The clock is a reminder of the inevitability of death, and how it is always
looming over us, and could strike at any moment; this is supported by Poe’s
words that as the clock struck the hour, “the waltzers perforce ceased their
evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and,
while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew
pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in
confused revery or meditation”, which symbolizes fear of death.
The
Red Death, the mysterious figure that appears at Prince Prospero’s masquerade
uninvited, represents the plague tearing the country apart. It also, in a way,
represents death itself, arriving suddenly and without invitation. Poe hints at
this symbolism with his description of the figure: his mask resembling the face
of a pale corpse, his blood-covered clothes and face sprinkled with flecks of
blood. Prince Prospero is at first irritated by the arrival of this mysterious,
uninvited guest. When he orders his men to seize him, no one does so,
symbolizing the human fear of death. Prospero tries to kill him himself, but
the Red Death turns around and takes the prince’s life and that of everyone in
the castle, proving that a human can do the impossible to escape death, but
death will still find him.
The Tell-Tale Heart:
In The
Tell-Tale Heart, a narrator tries to convince an audience he is speaking to
that he is not mad. He tells them that the “disease” (which we might deduce as
insanity) has sharpened his senses; he can now hear things in Heaven, Earth,
and Hell. He then tells them the story of how he killed an old man he worked
for, but neither for his fortunes nor for a personal object of the narrator’s.
He murdered the old man simply to be freed from his pale blue eye, covered in
film, resembling that of a vulture, which “chilled the marrow in his bones”
whenever the narrator looked at it. He would enter the old man’s chamber every
night for a week, and open a tiny opening in his lantern to cast a thin ray of
light over the dreadful eye, but he always found it closed, so he could not
kill him. On the eighth night, the man had woken up to the sound of the
narrator in the room and sat up in bed. When the narrator cast the ray, this
time the eye was open. The narrator heard a steady beat which he described as
“the sound a watch makes when enveloped in cotton,” which stimulated him to
fulfill the deed. He killed the old man and hid the corpse beneath the
floorboards. Three police officers then knocked on his door, claiming that a
neighbor had heard a scream emanating from the house and contacted them. The
narrator confidently invited them in and had them search the house; he even let
them search the old man’s chamber. The narrator then brought chairs into the
chamber and invited them to rest, placing his own chair upon the corpse hidden
beneath the floor. He then heard the same rhythmic beat he had heard before
killing the old man. The sound intensifies, causing the narrator to break down
and admit the murder.
The
eye serves as part of the narrator’s identity that he does not want to accept:
evil and murderous. On another hand, the narrator despises the eye because he
had a feeling that the eye was constantly watching him, penetrating into his
soul, sensing his fears. The heart might have even acted as a protector for the
eye, as when the narrator shone the ray of light on the open eye, the heart
began beating, trying to alert the old man of his coming doom, and when the
police officers sat over the hidden corpse, the heart beat to try and grab
their attention.
Before
the narrator kills the old man, the narrator hears a ticking sound. He assumes
it to be the old man’s heart beating in terror, signifying that the old man’s
time to die had come. The ticking could also be the time the old man has left
to live, counting down the seconds until his death. When the narrator hears the
ticking in the presence of the police, the ticking could then be described as
the narrator’s guilt over the horrendous deed or his conscience rebuking him
for the same reason. The ticking proceeds to a point where the narrator could
bear it no longer, and confesses his crime.
At
one point, the narrator says that he has been “hearkening to the death watches
in the wall” every night for a week. Death watches are beetles that live inside
walls and bang their heads on them to attract mates. But back then, the sound
made by death watch beetles were believed to be a countdown to someone’s death.
The Masque of the Red Death
reminds us all of the inevitability of death, no matter how hard we try to deny
or avoid it, while The Tell-Tale Heart delves deep into the mind of a deranged
man, who must ultimately face the guilt caused by his crime. Edgar Allan Poe
tackles timeless themes in both stories that are still recurrent in our modern
day, and that will remain so for centuries to come.
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