Barn Burning Essay, Research Paper

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” he deals

with an unusual theme: the attempts of a group of wealthy people

to insulate themselves from the plague by shutting themselves up

in a mansion and throwing a ball. Although Poe was never to write

another story precisely like this one, his work throughout his

lifetime dealt with the theme of morbidity and death. Recently

some critics, notably Kenneth Silverman, have postulated that the

source of this morbid imagination may have been the loss of so

many of Poe’s relatives and loved ones. His short stories and

poetry can thus be seen as a process of working through his grief

by playing up its morbid aspects. This process can be seen in

“The Masque of the Red Death.”

Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809, in Boston, the

son of actors in a traveling company. After the death of his

parents when he was two (although some sources, including

Silverman, say three), Poe was taken in as a sort of “foster

child” by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, VA.

Our first clue that Poe had a somewhat abnormal interest in

death occurred when he was yet a child; he enjoyed playing

practical jokes, dressing as a ghost or a corpse and frightening

family guests. This is not in itself an unusual sport for a young

boy, but Edgar seems to have done it so realistically that people

were actually frightened (Silverman, 32). He also wrote letters

describing in the most graphic terms fights and accidents he had

witnessed at school: “I saw the arm afterwards — it was really a

serious matter — it was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow –

and it is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be

obliged to be cut out” (Poe, quoted by Silverman, 31). Again,

this is not odd by itself, but the intensity of his reports

seemed to his family a little extreme.

When he was fourteen, Edgar suffered through a trauma which

would greatly influence his creative life. Poe, who apparently

had a somewhat loveless relationship with his foster parents, the

Allans, developed a deep fondness for the mother of his friend

Robert Stanard. Edgar’s affection for this kind maternal figure

seems to have gone far beyond the normal fondness of a child for

the mother of a friend; in fact, Poe described his relationship

with her as his first “ideal” love (Campbell, 18). About a year

after Edgar became so attached to her, Mrs. Stanard suddenly

died. The shock left Edgar severely depressed (Campbell, 23-4).

It seems hardly believable that so many of Poe’s most

impassioned poems and stories could be predicated on the death of

the mother of a classmate, but it must be remembered that Poe’s

own mother departed life in a similarly abrupt fashion when the

boy was very young, and the pain of her loss was all the keener

in that his entire childhood would pass without finding anyone to

even remotely take her place. Edgar saw in his friend’s mother

all the perfection that much younger boys normally attribute to

their own mothers. In addition, he also clearly saw death as

something that was likely to snatch away happiness without

warning, and which nothing could prevent.

According to various Poe biographers, his loss of both his

natural mother and Mrs. Stanard was compounded by his unusual

choice of a bride. In 1831, after the publication of his third

book of poetry, Edgar moved to Baltimore and moved in with his

aunt, Maria Poe Clemm, and her eleven-year-old daughter Virginia.

Two years later he and Virginia were married; Edgar was

twenty-four and Virginia was thirteen. Even in an age when women

married much younger than they do now, and occasionally married

people more closely related than we would think proper, Edgar and

Virginia’s relationship was considered extremely peculiar. Edgar

did not move his bride out of her mother’s home, but all three

continued to live together in complete happiness; he called Maria

“Muddy” and Virginia “Sissy” (Kellogg, online source). It seems

likely that Edward could not grow up, nor could he deal with the

possibility of rejection that a woman his own age might have

offered.

But despite his marital bliss, the pattern for his morbid

imagination had already been set. Many of his stories, such as

“The Masque of the Red Death,” deal with death in an extremely

macabre way, relying on symbol and allegory to evoke the terrors

of our darkest nightmares. For example, in “Masque,” Poe mentions

the sun setting in the west. In many cultures the newly dead sail

westward to reach eternity, so it is no accident that none of the

maskers revel in this room; this room is too close to death. And

how is it furnished? It has sable carpeting and sable draperies.

Sable connotes both richness and the color black, so the image

gives us a double message; it reminds us that no expense has been

spared to keep these revellers from the Red Death, but it also

assures us it will do them no good. That the night is waning away

can also be taken on two levels; on the one hand Poe is simply

mentioning the lateness of the night, but these party-goers’ time

is also running out. Similarly, the windowpanes are blood-colored

because the setting sun streams through them, but they are also

blood-colored because there is no escaping the Red Death which

will claim the revellers that very night. The clock which chimes

the hours is ebony — black — and although its sound is muffled

by the sable carpeting — its day-to-day impact is staved off

because of the Prince’s wealth — it sounds its knell of doom

nonetheless.

The references to the trappings of death clearly reflect the

many funerals Poe experienced in his lifetime, but why would he

choose to write a story about a plague? The answer to that is

fairly simple; the sheer number of deaths in his immediate circle

must have seemed like a plague to him. Not only his mother, but

Mrs. Stanard, succumbed to illness, leaving him bereft; by 1842

when he wrote “The Masque of the Red Death”, his beloved Virginia

was already showing signs of infirmity. (Eventually she, too,

would sicken and die, passing away at the age of twenty-five.)

Edward Davidson observes that the details about the plague may

have been suggested to Poe by accounts of either the cholera in

Philadelphia in the 1790s or the outbreak of the disease in

Baltimore in 1811 (Davidson, 501), but the germ of the story –

people dropping like flies despite their best efforts to insulate

themselves from death’s inevitability — must have seemed

implicit in Poe’s own life.

So many deaths in Poe’s life not only affected his ability

to deal with life on a personal basis, but accounts for his

work’s peculiar power. Poe suffered tremendously from the deaths

of his loved ones, and his psychological wounds seemed to remain

unhealed by time. For Poe, the curtain between the dead and the

living, between normal everyday life and unspeakable horror,

seemed thinner than it does for most of us, and worse, could be

ripped cleanly in two at any minute. Many writers have lived with

the presence of death in their lives, dealt with it, and

continued living healthy lives. For Poe, however, it became an

inseparable part of his being.

Works Cited :

Campbell, Killis. The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1933.

Davidson, Edward. “Introduction” to Selected Writings of Edgar

Allan Poe, Riverside Press edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

1956.

Kellogg, J. Online source.

http://www.calpoly.edu/ jkellogg/bio1.html

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death”, from Selected

Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Riverside Press Edition,

Cambridge, Mass., 1956.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Neverending

Remembrance. HarperCollins, NY, 1991.