I just read “Masque of the Red Death”. I haven’t bothered to read Pandemic-themed classics (The Plague, which I read in high school anyway, or The Decameron) during our travail. I’ve read “Masque” before but a Facebook friend posted a link to it yesterday so I partook.
The story offers little plot. Poe just paints a formidable atmosphere. Like Hawthorne, Poe sets scenes as a state of mind. And that state is of a nervous intensity. Perhaps Hawthorne shows more Puritan restraint while Poe works out of night sweats. Both have a sort of stoned fascination with morbid consequences.
As I mentioned, “Masque” presents little by way of plot. Prince Prospero has opened his castle to his thousand most intimate hangers-on as they ride out a plague. My mind’s eye uses the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston to picture the scene. Once the residence of Gardener, the museum is a castle-like testament to the virtue of money transformed into courtyards, balconies, tapestries, and shadows. Poe describes the scene and the actors within it with an avid wildness of colour and detail. Think the shining nothingness of Studio 54. Poe’s story “Hop Frog” comes to mind too for its similar setting. That story has a plot, however, and the soothing delight of revenge. “Masque” simply brings Death personified into the tacky horror of Prince Prospero’s upper class playground, and Death don’t have no mercy. It is simply a consequence.
Poe’s language is lush yet lightly handled. The pulse of his heart pounds in each word. Words are not distant things to him. He knows each one he uses possesses ample charge. He was a learned but not schooled person. Last in his class at West Point, yet he often writes as if out to prove how brilliant he is. He writing is brilliant in its unsealed vigour. The vision he sees of the decrepit celebrants leaves him with eyes wide. Now slide partying college students into the picture, or avid participants at rallies, or any avoidable crush of people at the end of the world. See the child Trump enjoying his Halloween fun.
