Edgar Allan Poe's Masque of the Red Death

The Masque (1842), even where it does not describe everything, draws in the way many successful stories do upon a common human treasury of archetypal fears or secondhand experiences. Like the reign of Caligula, which lasted three years but whose fame reaches us nearly two thousand years later, it feels far longer than it truly was.

It begins without compromise:

THE "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal —the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains [. . .] were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

The prince Prospero shuts himself and his court away from the pestilence.

The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."

He succeeds for around half a year. But his unwise interior decoration schemes already foreshadow doom:

Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. [. . . ] But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. [. . .] But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme [. . .]

Also, the seventh apartment has been furnished with a clock. It rather bluntly suggests that time is running out.

AT THE time of the tale, the Prince holds a grand party for a thousand of his dearest friends, and proposes a masquerade, leading to a savagely chaotic scene:

There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm --much of what has been since seen in "Hernani." There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions.

But then the clock strikes midnight, and a new guest arrives at the party:

The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood --and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

***

The Wikipedia article warns against reading deeper meanings or messages into this story, and indeed — like part of the novel, Castle of Otranto, that is supposed to be Poe's inspiration — it might well be a mere recounting of a nightmare, or of a waking fantasy.

But I think it appeals also because it evidently sparks ideas that it never literally describes. Above all I like the span across times and places of the story. It is akin in spirit to the memento mori of the Middle Ages, the morbid skull in Hans Holbein the Younger's painting of the Ambassadors as well as Shakespeare's Hamlet, and rumination on the 'wages of sin' by figures as heterogeneous as American preachers and William Hogarth.

The lavish colours and wealth might be a reference to the Catholic Church, too — the gilding of inner corruption. But I'm thinking that mainly due to this week's lavish party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in honour of the Catholic Church's influence on high fashion.

*

This tale, like his works generally, is even more striking against the background of Edgar Allan Poe's own life's story, I think. He certainly saw enough death and led a gruelling Dickensian life: in Boston and Virginia as a neglected or badly raised child*, over gambling tables as a youth, in and out of the enlisted army ranks and West Point (if I understand correctly, at least he never saw war), through the early deaths of his mother, brother Henry and wife Virginia from illnesses, etc. And there was his alcohol abuse.

***

* Worthy of the Child-Rearing Horrors hall of fame:
"the infant Edgar was farmed out first to grandparents and later to a nurse who dosed him and an infant sister with laudanum and gin."
From: "Eulogy for a master" by Hilary Spurling, in The Observer (January 27, 2008)

The Masque of the Red Death (Wikipedia)
Edgar Allan Poe (Wikipedia)

Illustration: From Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867–1939). Via Wikipedia

Masque of the Red Death quotations taken from The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe on the website of the University of Virginia.

Mysterious Demises at Cornwall, with Sherlock Holmes

"High Cove Typical Cornish rocky cove, with small sandy beach"
by Mike Hancock, 1995
via geograph.org.uk at Wikimedia Commons
CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.

It was a singular spot [...] From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered [...]

I realized afresh when I read this passage in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventure of the Devil's Foot, that one of the charms of the Sherlock Holmes tales is its perhaps semi-journalistic survey of Britishness. His stories are of their time, too, and feel at least to me very Victorian and very Edwardian. But I think that less time-specific aspects of England peep out, even if it is the description of an Atlantic-battered holiday getaway — Sherlock Holmes leaves London at the beginning of the story, so that he can recruit his health by the seaside — in western Cornwall.

Alongside a far from bashful self-advertisement of the short story — Watson claims that this adventure is a problem 'more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London' — Doyle also enumerates his set of characters with well-practiced celerity. For example, Mortimer Tregennis is introduced in this sketch: "his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs."

Mortimer Tregennis and the vicar, Mr. Roundhay, are the ones who request Sherlock Holmes's professional assistance in this story. Tregennis's sister has died and his two brothers descended into madness, for no apparent reason, seated in the dining room after an evening game of cards. (What happened wasn't common knowledge. The housekeeper was the one who found the victims the next day, hours after the mysterious catastrophe had occurred.)

Watson, never one to dilute drama, writes that as he and Holmes — having accepted the request — were walking with the others to investigate the death scene, a carriage drives by to transport the maddened brothers to an institution. "As it drove by us I caught a glimpse through the closed window of a horribly contorted, grinning face glaring out at us. Those staring eyes and gnashing teeth flashed past us like a dreadful vision."

"Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot (1910), Illustration by Gilbert Holiday, in The Strand Magazine"
via Wikimedia Commons

That morning, Sherlock Holmes sifts the evidence at the Tregennis house. He wants to know amongst other things what might be behind the tale that a face had peeked in through the window, the previous night, at the card-players. There are no footprints near the window. Also, the night was too dark and a card-player in the room could not have seen very much. Eventually, Holmes leaves the Tregennis home again for his cottage, without pointing fingers at any culprit. But in his mind, the links have formed in a strong chain of evidence.

Ibid., here

Later, that afternoon, a neighbour of the Tregennises enters the scene, calling on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and wishing to keep informed about their investigation. He happens to be the Edwardian equivalent of a celebrity:

The huge body, the craggy and deeply seamed face with the fierce eyes and hawk-like nose, the grizzled hair which nearly brushed our cottage ceiling, the beard--golden at the fringes and white near the lips, save for the nicotine stain from his perpetual cigar--all these were as well known in London as in Africa, and could only be associated with the tremendous personality of Dr. Leon Sterndale, the great lion-hunter and explorer.

All of the dramatis personae are introduced to the story at that point; and Holmes speedily resolves the mystery. Retelling it would require many spoilers, which I won't mention here.

*

I don't know why this gruesome tale is the first one I think to post on Valentine's Day; but in a way I think the mystery, once resolved, doesn't make it an entirely undeserving candidate for this day. Loyalty and love, although mangled and lost under the violence of fictitious and sensational tragedy, are still at the emotional centre of the story.

***

"The Adventure of the Devil's Foot" is a later Holmes story, in The Last Bow, and was published in 1910.
The quotations are from the Project Gutenberg edition, here, and this is the Wikipedia article: here.