What Does The Masquerade Ball Symbolize

The fires in each of the suite rooms serve as a representation of death. Poe depicts

For instance, the panes were scarlet, a deep blood colour. The "bloody" red room thus becomes a place of ending not only due to the westward location, but also because of its color. Poe describes the last, black room as the dreadful endpoint, the room the guests fear just as they fear death. The room is feared by the guests because it reminds them of death, which is why no one enters the room. The room is involved in all of the main scenes throughout the course ofthe story. For example, this is the room Prince Prospero and his guests die from the Red Death and also where the clock is located. The reader sees how important the rooms are throughout the story and its main contribution to the theme.

In the "Masque of the Red Death," the first sentence, "The Red Death had long devastated the country," sets the tone for the whole story. Poe describes the horrors of the disease, stressing the redness of the blood and the scarlet stains. The disease kills so quickly that one can die within thirty minutes of being infected with the disease. To create a frightening effect

Poe used the rooms of the fortress as a symbol of the progression of a human life. The fortresses design contains seven distinctly different rooms. H.H. Bell, Jr., an expert on Edgar Allan Poe, has suggested that Poe seems to represent these rooms as an “allegorical representation of Prince Prospero’s life span” (Bell 241). The greatest piece of evidence for this is the order in which Poe arranged the rooms. The first room is positioned in the far eastern side of the mansion and the last room’s placement resides in the far western side. Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west each day, the arrangement of the rooms suggests the beginning and the end of life. Poe exemplifies this idea with the coloration of the last room. Black, a color connected with night and death, covers the walls in the last room. Also, the color of red seeps through the stained glass windows representing the bloodiness often incorporated with death, particularly the Red Death so feared at this party. Prospero’s guests avoid the last room out of fear, just as the living avoid reminders of death. Meanwhile, music and dancing

Through using the deathly symbolism in this story skillfully, Poe allude to people to the part of life that people have to go through without the controled by people . First he described seven chambers ( seven rooms in the palace ), “In blue…….. falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue” ( Poe 43) . Seven room were represent to 7 part of life : the blue room, which is farthest to the east, represents birth.. The next room is purple, a combination of blue (birth) and red suggests the beginnings of growth. Green, the next color, suggests the young of life the age of spring , orange is the summer and autumn of life is the age of adult . White, the next color, suggests age with white hair, and bones the age of old . Violet is a shadowy color, the color represents people were near the death . And black is death. Otherwise, 7 rooms were set up East to West like the position of the Sun. That means that no matter who you are you

At the end of the first paragraph Poe uses foreshadowing when he writes “And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour” (1). I see this as foreshadowing the event that ends the party and the lives of all those present. The entire thousand assembled die when the Red Death came. The “last chime had utterly sunk” (3) also foreshadows the end where each individual “died in the despairing posture of his fall” (4). Combining both these instances together shows that the whole situation or incident, from the “presence of a masked figure” (3) to “one by one dropped” (4), ended before the clock chimed the next passing hour. The “seventh apartment” (1) also foreshadow the presence of the Red Death. The entire apartment was “shrouded in black velvet tapestries” and the window “panes here

Michael Ruiz once said, “Everyone dies. There’s no point in fighting it.” In Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, there is a disease that kills almost everyone in a country so the king brings all survivors into a castle to prevent it from killing anyone else, although it still ends up getting in from a ghost, and wipes everyone else out. In Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, Poe uses gothic elements such as a gloom setting, supernatural beings, curses, and air of mystery and suspense.

the Red Death shows the futile attempts by a prince and his guests of a party,

But we will never know the real reason. It could be because of William Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Men”, or Christianity’s seven deadly sins. There are more speculations, but my personal perception would be one of these two. Although Poe was not very religious in his later years, he went to church a lot when he was a child which could have influenced his stories. The vivid colors used in each room would lead me to assume that the rooms actually represent the stages of life. On the most eastern side (where the sun rises) would be infant, then the colors in-between would be your years after infancy, then lastly on the furthest western side (where the sun sets) would be death since the room is black.

By twelve midnight, all the guests saw a scary and bloody strange figure wearing a mask, they became very anxious, so the prince commanded all the guests to snatch this unknown guest and expose his identity. Obviously no one did. They were all terrified and shocked so they marched away from that unidentified stranger. After wards the prince caught him all by himself. He started running after the stranger trying to catch him but he couldn’t, the stranger kept going from room to room. At last, he reached the dark, gloomy, gory and bloody room where the stranger had to face the prince. Right before the prince was about to to stab the intruder, the prince fell on the ground dead. After the incident, the presence of the Red Death” was acknowledged (Poe). Then suddenly and bizarrely, all the guests started falling one after the other. Blood started splattering all around the halls. Then the clock stopped; with the last person dying in the

In “Mask of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe uses setting and symbolism to deliver the theme that no one escapes death. The story follows the naïve and pompous Prince Prospero, and his feeble attempt to escape dying from the Black Plague. As the plague spread through his kingdom, the prince called one thousand of his closest friends to reside within the safety of the castle in order to seclude themselves from the horror and death going on outside. During the last months of their seclusion, the prince decided to hold a masquerade ball in order to amuse his many guests living within the confines of the rather odd castle. The dance takes place in a variety of unusual apartments within the castle, spaced apart so the guests would only see one room at a time. The apartments flowed east to west, each decorated in a different color and theme while following a pattern of blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet and finally ending in black. During the ball, guests enjoyed a dreamlike atmosphere as they danced through the many colored apartments, each of them avoiding the final black room. This final dark patterned room contained a large ebony clock which chimed eerily every hour, causing the party goers to pause their merriment for a few moments of uneasy silence. As midnight drew near, a new guest arrived, sporting a costume more ghastly and morose than any other. The mask he wore resembled that of a plague victim, and his clothes resembled a funeral shroud. Prospero became angry

Poe uses allegory to allude to the double meanings of the characters Prince Prospero and the masked figure, as well as the setting of the chambers. Prince Prospero represents prosperity. While his nation is suffering from the “Red Death”, “…he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and lighthearted friends…and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbey” (420). His nobility and wealth give him the ability to ignore the horror around him and live in luxury. This refers to real life in that the privileged are the ones who are able to still live comfortably even if others are in a crisis. Prince Prospero also represents an ignorance, selfishness, and arrogance that come with wealth through right instead of hard work. He believes that “[t]he external world could take care of itself” and that it is “…folly to grieve, or to think” (420). Instead of taking action to help his people, he just leaves them in the grips of the “Red Death”. The “Red Death” is

The setting presented in this story has a very dark and gloomy atmosphere which has been used as a technique to help outline the scene. It is set in the one location; a bedroom. Poe describes the room as being “black as pitch with the thick darkness,” which deepens the effect of terror. The night setting gives the text an eerie feel as it focuses on the horrors of night time. This horror creates a noticeable impact which is recognisable when the victim cried out “who’s there?” against the backdrop of frighteningly still silence. Ultimately, the way in which Poe’s story is set builds anxiety and fear in the reader.

In this movie instead of the rooms representing life there were cloaked figures to represent the different colors and the number seven. In order to make Poe’s short story into an hour and a half long movie, they definitely added quite a bit. There is a love story in the movie with a girl named Francesca and a boy, Geno. Francesca is a very religious person and believes that God is the true God and she will go to paradise. On the other hand Prince Prospero worships Satan thinking that he could have immortal life if he was loyal to him and gave him all his friends lives. While he stayed very loyal to who he thought would save him, in the end he ends up being the face of death himself and

He had published several other literary works, but these had not brought him fame and a reputation in the horror scene. With Poe’s writing of the poem, The Raven, with its darker setting and inclusion of death brought him more recognition from the general public as well as fitting into the gothic horror type of writing. The Masque of the Red Death, which is another of Poe’s short stories, had direct inspiration from Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto, with its setting and ending to the plot. The Masque of the Red Death is set in an abbey owned by the main character, Prince Prospero, here all of the wealthy and powerful people go so that the Red Death can’t get to them. There are seven rooms which are all different colors, the last one being painted black with a scarlet light lighting up the room, giving the room a sense of being covered in blood, and in the corner a frighteningly white ebony clock. Very few people went into the room due to the room being “decorated in black and illuminated by a scarlet light, ‘a deep blood color’”, because of this combination these people were not brave enough to step into that room. Later in the story a figure comes in and wreaks havoc, Prince ended up chasing this figure only to find out that this figure is the Red Death itself, and when everyone comes to see who it is they end up dying soon after