Kaitlyn Marlin

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a tale immersed in toxicity. In a traditional reading of the work, one may easily assume that the tragedy of Beatrice’s death lies at the hands of her father, whose dedication to science led to Beatrice’s condition, and Giovanni, who ultimately turns on her and instructs her to drink the “cure.” While some critics do acknowledge that Baglioni plays a role in Beatrice’s death, as he is the one to create the so-called medicine, many underestimate the extent of his character to the story. Indeed, it is easy for readers to assume that Baglioni is only meant as a side character, as the focus of the story stays on Giovanni and Beatrice. It is here, however, that I make the argument that Baglioni serves not as a secondary character, but rather as an essential figure meant to serve as the true undercover villain of the story and the true toxic figure. 

To begin to understand this, it is important to first examine the character of Dr. Rappaccini. In a typical reading, Dr. Rappaccini stands to readers as the conventional antagonist to the story, a sort of ‘mad scientist’ who curses his daughter to live a life of isolation due to her becoming, like the plants he works with, poisonous. In looking through another lens however, readers can recognize that Dr. Rappaccini is actually just a father acting out of love. Albeit perhaps not the most logistically healthy long-term, Dr. Rappaccini’s intentions are never to harm his daughter, or anyone for that matter. 

In the introduction to his character, readers learn through Lisabetta, a maid of the house Giovanni is staying in, that Dr. Rappaccini is a “famous doctor… (having) been heard of as far as Naples,” additionally, she notes that Dr. Rappaccini “distils plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm” (230). This note of his character indicates to readers that Dr. Rappaccini’s reputation precedes him as a capable and trusted physician by those not just in his community but throughout the country. Rather than using his knowledge of poison for malicious intent, it is clear that Dr. Rappaccini’s obsession with the plants is purely scientific with the intent of making medicines from them. Giovanni goes on to observe Dr. Rappaccini, “Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was looking into their inmost nature” (232). Again readers are presented with a man who just seems to be very focused on his work. 

When taking into account his relationship with Beatrice, it is vital to point out that Beatrice’s mother is absent. It can be assumed, therefore, that Dr. Rappaccini is the sole caregiver for Beatrice. By infusing Beatrice with the poison Dr. Rappaccini believes he can keep his daughter safe in a world where a woman’s chastity was highly important. With the lack of a mother to also keep an eye on Beatrice, this plan would seemingly work well for a father- any man who tried to act immorally on his daughter would succumb to the poisonous nature of her person, therefore preventing any issues from arising in concern of her purity. Although he has in turn isolated his daughter from the world, Dr. Rappaccini sees what he’s done as a gift. Baglioni makes the comment to Giovanni that “all the young men in Padua are wild” (235) about Beatrice, giving evidence that there is reason for Dr. Rappaccini to believe this is necessary for his daughter’s safety. Furthermore, this becomes extended when taking into account his reaction to her denouncing the desire to be poisonous, he states “Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy… wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none” (253). Dr. Rappaccini makes it clear that his intentions with Beatrice’s condition were not out of malice but an action to protect his daughter from a society which seeks to corrupt the soul. Dr. Rappaccini believes that he has truly endowed his daughter with a grand gift, not a curse. As critic M. D. Uroff puts it, “In this sense, he is the most protective of fathers… he has tried to use his scientific experimentation towards the human end of safeguarding his daughter” (68). Here we come to see Dr. Rappaccini not as an evil scientist but as a respected doctor who went too far in the intent of keeping his daughter safe, a sentiment that holds for many a father.

Moving forward, Giovanni comes in as another character whom readers quickly assume to be a villain. It is through him that Beatrice ultimately dies as she attempts to cure herself for him; however, many readers fail to notice the intense manipulation happening behind the scenes which lead Giovanni to turning his back on Beatrice. From the beginning Giovanni can acknowledge that something is amiss with Beatrice. After tossing her a fresh flower bouquet on their first meeting he observes that “his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to wither in her grasp” (238). He then decides to ignore his suspicions and see her more anyway, being characterized as having “a quick fancy, and an ardent southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch” (238). It is not until his final conversation with Baglioni that Giovanni begins losing faith in Beatrice. Hawthorne writes, “On such better evidence had Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice… his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which earlier enthusiasm of passion had exalted it; he fell down, groveling among earthly doubts” (248). Once Baglioni ‘poisons’ the mind of Giovanni, it is then that he becomes a villain to the story. Meanwhile the mastermind Baglioni can hide behind the exploits of Giovanni’s young character. From the beginning Baglioni knew that Dr. Rappaccini’s work was with poisonous plants, and furthermore that Beatrice was poisonous as well, however rather than strictly tell Giovanni the danger of the Rappaccini’s he instead plants seeds of interest into the young man’s mind. As Charles Chappell states, “If Baglioni were actually concerned about the welfare of Giovanni, he assuredly would do all in his considerable power to force Giovanni not to enter Rappaccini’s garden” (61). The idea of Baglioni’s hidden manipulation becomes clearer when we also take into account that Baglioni seemingly was the one to arrange the lodging for Giovanni, as he is the only person Giovanni knows in Padua. In the scene of Beatrice’s death, Baglioni is also seen to be in Giovanni’s window indicating that he had knowledge of the building beforehand as well. Taking these details into account it becomes clear to readers that Baglioni played a significant role in influencing Giovanni. 

To this end, we can begin fully discussing the character of Baglioni, coming to view him as Hawthorne’s true intended villain. Baglioni makes it clear that his intentions throughout the story are to best his rival Dr. Rappaccini. Although some critics argue that Baglioni is ambiguous and seems to care for Giovanni, Baglioni’s true intentions are not acting out of care but out of jealousy. As previously mentioned, Baglioni does not go out of his way to fully explain to Giovanni why he should not to go to the garden and stay away from Beatrice, rather he speaks vaguely of the Rappaccini’s and plants curiosity in the young man’s mind which he uses to his advantage to get close to the Rappaccini’s. Additionally, Baglioni makes the comment that “Rappaccini is said to have instructed (Beatrice) deeply in his science… perchance her father destines her for mine” (235). It is clear here that Baglioni believes that Beatrice is a threat to his career, as well as seeing her as the prize experiment of Dr. Rappaccini. As Uroff states, “Baglioni is suspicious of her vast knowledge of science and fears that she might be destined to fill the professor’s chair he now holds” (70).  In consequence, it becomes clear to readers that Baglioni’s ‘cure’ was not truly intended to help Beatrice; rather Baglioni knew that it would destroy her, and thus he triumphs over Dr. Rappaccini. After giving Giovanni the vial he enthusiastically thinks, “We will thwart Rappaccini yet,” (248). Rather than being sincere in his claim to want to cure Beatrice, readers can see through his internal thoughts that his true intentions are much more villainous. Indeed, Baglioni feels triumph after watching Beatrice die, being described as crying out “in a tone of triumph mixed with horror… ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! And is this the upshot of your experiment? ‘” (253). Rather than feel guilt at the death he has caused, Baglioni instead focuses on making sure Dr. Rappaccini knew he had bested him.

Chappell puts it well by stating, “Pietro Baglioni readily qualifies as one of Hawthorne’s craftiest and most diabolical villains” (56). Baglioni is, through and through, the true villain and most toxic character of the story, hiding right in front of readers the whole time. While Dr. Rappaccini and Giovanni are positioned to take the majority of the blame in the death of Beatrice, Baglioni, like poison, is able to carefully disguise himself as an ambiguous figure. Hawthorne illustrates through the character of Baglioni that the most ‘poisonous’ characters are often ones whom we don’t initially recognize, emphasizing the role of deceit in toxicity and challenging readers to examine the true intentions of those around us.

Works Cited 

Chappell, Charles. “Pietro Baglioni’s Motives for Murder in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 18, no. 1, 1990, pp. 55–63, https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.1990.0032.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013, pp. 228–253.

Uroff, M. D. “The Doctors in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’” Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1, 1972, pp. 61–70, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933037.

The Black Cat, among Poe’s works, stands apart from many others for a variety of reasons. Generally speaking, the story is one of Poe’s more violent and gory works, alike to that of “The Pit and the Pendulum” as well as “The Tell-Tale Heart” which is an interesting parallel in itself as they were all written/published with a relatively short breadth between one another. Similarly each possesses an unreliable narrator at the core of the story, though this is not exactly a rare occurrence in Poe’s canon. That being said, despite the 3 narrators’ shared unreliability, the protagonist of The Black Cat among them stands out particularly for his progressive decline throughout the story hinting at something more between the lines of this work. For the duration of the post I will seek to prove that this narrator is, unlike many of Poe’s other works, based on the author himself, serving as a reflection of Poe’s own anxieties for the future as well as an allegory for his struggles with alcoholism.

The Black Cat was published in August of 1843 during one of Poe’s most productive periods during which a number of his most well known and acclaimed works were written, however a year prior his wife caught tuberculosis, causing great emotional turmoil to the author. Poe, despite popular perception, was not a chronic alcoholic but instead relied on its vices in times of great stress or anguish as a coping mechanism. This can be observed rather directly in a variety of letters written by or about him to others on the subject.

“Please express my regret to Mr Fuller for making such a fool of myself in his house, and say to him (if you think it necessary) that I should not have got half so drunk on his excellent Port but for the rummy coffee with which I was forced to wash it down” (March 16,1843: Poe’s written apology to friends for his behavior)

“Edgar A. Poe . . . has become the strangest of our literati. He and I are old friends — have known each other from boyhood and it gives me inexpressible pain to notice the vagaries to which he has lately become subject. Poor Fellow! — he is not a teetotaler by any means and I fear he is going headlong to destruction, moral, physical, and intellectual” (May 20, 1843: written by Lambert A. Wilmer to John Tomlin)

These particular quotes are notable for their proximity to both the publication of The Black Cat, and Virginia’s diagnosis.

There are a number of interesting parallels to the story in question and Poe’s true experiences. The normally agreeable narrator becomes abusive to all including his wife when under the influence of alcohol, stand for Pluto, until the event which seems to mark the narrator’s decline past the point of no return, in which he gouges out the Cat’s eye in a drunken stupor. Despite his initial remorse, he soon hangs it from a tree, though alcohol is not mentioned in this particular instance. Instead the author shows visible remorse as he commits the deed.

Thereafter the narrator is haunted by a cat startlingly similar to Pluto, as though an apparition of the original. As the narrator descends deeper into the depths of depravity, in his eyes, at the hand of the faux Pluto, he grows more and more irritable, eventually coming to slay his wife in his attempts to purge himself or the apparition, and indeed in the narrator’s perception this same cat revealed his sin to the world.

In my interpretation, I feel that there is a distinct point of no return written  into this story’s thematic framework, which also relates to Poe’s own experiences. The first part represents the narrator’s gradual steps towards a point beyond humanity which ends when he lashes out at his seeming last bastion of selfhood, Pluto. In relation to Poe himself, I feel that the most pertinent parallel lies in Virginia’s diagnosis with tuberculosis. Though it is no fault of his own, her aliment and inevitable march towards death undeniably affected Poe for the worse, seen most prominently in his liaisons with alcohol.

Because of this, the second half of the story in an autobiographical reading seems to me rife with fear for what will become of Poe after Virginia passes. At the time Tuberculosis was effectively a death sentence to all who caught it. It was effectively a matter of when she will pass, not if. The apparition of her coming demise likely haunted him to no end, every waking moment. Another few quotes relating to his struggles with alcoholism come to mind.

“Poe is now in my employ — not as Editor. He is unfortunately rather dissipated, — and therefore I can place very little reliance upon him. His disposition is quite amiable. He will be of some assistance to me in proof-reading — at least I hope so . . .” (September 8, 1835: T. H. White, Poe’s employer. He was fired a few weeks later)

“Here [in Richmond] his [Poe’s] habits were bad. . . . Poe was the only man on White’s staff capable of doing this [proofing classical quotations] and when occasionally drinking (the habit was not constant) he was incapacitated for work” (Written in 1875 after Poe’s death by R. M. T. Hunter)

His fears for what would become of him proved to be premonitory and far from unfounded.

Something worth noting is that The Black Cat was written contemporaneously with the temperance movement in the United States. A political movement that sought to instate prohibition of alcohol and often used literature in order to convince the masses of the horrors of alcoholism and what it does to people. The Black Cat is somewhat frequently noted as one of these works, however I feel that it stands apart from these works in a few key ways.

First, as of the writing of The Black Cat Poe had not yet pledged himself to temperance as he did in 1849, and though he did not think of his habit in a positive light, he clearly did not abstain from social circles conducive to drinking.

Second, the language in The Black Cat is too dissimilar to that of contemporary temperance tales. Take for example the slogan “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.” Temperance tales were generally highly direct in their condemnation of alcoholism, and similarly were very clear about alcohol being the cause of a given character’s woes. (ie. Six Nights With The Washingtonians) The Black Cat in contrast, seems to name alcohol as the initial cause for the slaying of Pluto, but later fades into the background, and is indeed scarcely mentioned at all in the latter half of the work. Though this could be dismissed as quirk of Poe’s own writing style, that in itself to me disproves the possibility of it being a temperance tale. Poe is an extremely deliberate writer, and if his intention was to condemn alcoholism itself it seems highly unlikely to me that he would do it as he supposedly did in The Black Cat.

I feel there is an incessant desire among the public to sublimate the great authors of the past or conversely, tear them down. With an author like Poe in particular, due to the macabre nature of his writing, there is to me an illusory mystique about his life and name in the popular unconscious. In works like this, it is clear to me that Poe’s is abundantly more alike to any of us than his shadowy reputation suggests, with struggles and fears just as human as anyone else’s. Whether to his vices or his circumstances, Edgar Allan Poe was a struggler to his core.

“During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had, indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife” (January 4, 1848: written a year before his death)

Mackenzie Chaiyabhat

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story titled “The Masque of the Red Death” depicts a country devastated by a deadly plague. This “Red Death” causes severe symptoms; its victims feel “sharp pains and dizziness,” and “scarlet stains” appear on their bodies as an outward manifestation of the illness (299). The story’s main character, Prince Prospero, chose to quarantine himself and one thousand of his friends and acquaintances in one of his castles, locking the doors and allowing absolutely nothing in or out, or so he thought. Traditional scholarly analysis of the story is typically framed around the themes of elitism and its effects, or attempts to dissect the symbolism of the different colored rooms. Most interpretations of “The Masque of the Red Death” focus on Prince Prospero’s exclusionary actions and lack of morality. The story is typically read as a nightmarish allegory in which death ravages humanity with indiscriminate violence. Yet the story becomes far more provocative when the Red Death is reinterpreted not as a malevolent destroyer, but as a benevolent force that restores moral balance.

Prince Prospero is a victim only of his own folly in his decision to attempt to subvert natural law. The story’s themes make it clear that Prospero was never supposed to be interpreted as a moral protagonist, as seen in his belief that the “external world could take care of itself” while he indulged in extravagant masquerade balls (300). He left all those that he did not consider “friends” to face the hellish landscape of a country decimated by plague on their own. His substantial wealth affords him the privilege of shielding himself from a deadly pandemic and continuing to enjoy magnificent pleasures and security. This decision marks an attempt to seal off not only physical danger but also moral responsibility. His retreat is an effort to create a space in which the privileged may exist exempt from consequence and obligation. This isolation is fundamentally an act of hubris in which he assumes that human authority and wealth can suspend natural law. The Red Death, then, is the only force capable of penetrating the prince’s illusion and reasserting the moral and natural order that he has abandoned. In this way, the Red Death and Prospero serve as foils of one another. Prospero attempts to defy the order of natural law, and the Red Death restores it.

Though the climax of the story is presented as a violent end to the lives of the elite that are sequestered away from death itself, Poe’s personification of the illness is not a malevolent character. He is first presented as a “tall and gaunt figure” wearing the “habiliments of the grave… besprinkled with the scarlet horror” (303). Initially, he strikes anger and fear into the crowd simply because they are unfamiliar with his presence and he is dressed as the one thing they have hoped to avoid. Here, the partygoers attempt to maintain some of their morality, claiming that the plague is the one matter “of which no jest can be made,” but the figure is not making a joke; he is Death himself (303). Death does not attack the crowd unexpectedly, nor is there any real violence to be perceived from the scene. He “[stalks] to and fro among the waltzers” in a solemn and calm fashion, rather than end their lives in a violent frenzy (303). Each of the elite attendants of the party falls dead where they stand. This can be representative of the Red Death killing them mercifully, and without pain. He could have infected each of them and allowed them to die an excruciating death at the hands of the plague, but his character is not needlessly cruel. He claims their lives as penance for their attempts to circumvent their inevitable demise, restoring moral order.

Moreover, the Red Death acts with a kind of ethical impartiality that is absent from Prospero’s world. He arrives silently, as though participating in the masquerade in an almost gentle manner. Its presence is disruptive only because Prospero has constructed a realm built on denial. Prospero’s reaction to the figure’s presence is aggressive, calling for its hanging from the battlements based solely on its masquerade costume (303). When he chases the figure with a dagger, it becomes clear that the actual aggression stems from the human attempt to resist natural limits. Prospero’s reaction depicts his refusal to accept that morality governs all beings equally. His collapse before the Red Death is the inevitable result of his own refusal to recognize the truth that the figure embodies. In this context, the Red Death’s intervention is less an act of destruction than the termination of a delusion that has distorted moral reality.

Poe’s depiction of Death as a personified character is comparable to Emily Dickinson’s depiction in her lyrical poem “Because I could not stop for Death”. While Poe’s story is often interpreted as a gothic condemnation of mortality and Dickinson’s poem as a willing acceptance of it, the two works share the idea that death acts as a necessary force that reveals truths the living try to avoid. In her interpretation of the journey to the afterlife, Death is a kind, benevolent character that greatly inspired this reading of “The Masque of the Red Death”. Dickinson’s personified Death “kindly stopped” for the speaker of the poem and took her on a journey through the stages of her life, leading her past schoolchildren, fields, and the setting sun (2). Prospero and the Red Death’s chase through each of the different colored rooms mirrors this journey, and each room may represent a different stage of life. Death acts as a guide rather than a threat. Furthermore, Dickinson’s Death’s ‘knows no haste’ and takes the speaker to the afterlife at a leisurely pace, just as Poe’s depiction stalks slowly through the crowd in his pursuit of Prospero (5). Both characters are portrayed as calm and benevolent, as if they are guiding their “victims” to the afterlife and maintaining order with gentle care. Read together, the two works present complementary portrayals of benevolent mortality and resist the concept of death as a purely destructive force.

The imagery and symbolism of the seven different colored rooms also contribute to our overall understanding of the Red Death as a kind and benevolent character. H.H. Bell, along with other scholars, interprets the seven rooms as an “allegorical representation of Prince Prospero’s life span,” based on the distinct path from east to west that is often symbolic of the “beginning and the end of things” (1). In a more unique approach, Brett Zimmerman posits that Prospero’s suite is shaped like a half-clock and “each of the seven rooms [is] an allegorical representation of the hours between 6 p.m. and midnight” (1). Poe’s emphasis on the description and importance of these rooms has prompted many different interpretations of them, though I believe that they are representative of the seven deadly sins. It is impossible to say which of the colors represents which sin, but it is most likely that the final black and red room is representative of Prospero’s wrath. When he first meets the figure dressed as the Red Death, Prospero’s face “reddened with rage” that only ceased upon his death, portraying his true internal character (303). The blood-red and black coloring of the final room is another physical manifestation of his violence, rage, and moral decline that is seen in his attempted attack on the Red Death. In this way, the climactic confrontation between the prince and Death serves as retribution for the sins and follies committed during a time of despair and destruction; he exposes the ritualized display of sin and corrects it according to natural law.

Ultimately, reinterpreting the Red Death as a benevolent force rather than a purely destructive one brings the deeper moral logic of Poe’s story into sharper focus. Throughout the narrative, Prospero’s attempt to outrun natural law and moral responsibility shapes every decision he makes, from locking out the suffering world to surrounding himself with extravagance while others endure devastation. When the Red Death enters the abbey, he behaves far more like Dickinson’s calm, guiding figure than a violent monster, moving slowly and deliberately through the masquerade as if revealing the truth that the elite refuse to confront. The symbolic journey through the seven-colored rooms, whether read as stages of life, the hours of the night, or manifestations of the seven deadly sins, ultimately leads Prospero to the black and red chamber, which mirrors his own wrath and moral decay. His final encounter with the Red Death is not a senseless slaughter but a moment of correction in which his attempt to escape consequence finally collapses. Seen this way, the Red Death restores the balance Prospero tried to disrupt, acting as a necessary force that ends Prospero’s circumvention and maintains moral order. This reading not only reframes the story’s climactic moment but also reveals how Poe portrays death as something more complex than mere fear; it is an inevitable force that is not guided by wrath or vengeance, but rather restoration of natural law.

Works Cited

Zimmerman, Brett. “Prospero’s Clock-Architecture in “the Masque of the Red Death” Revisited.” Poe Studies 50 (2017): 126-30. ProQuest. Web.

Evelyn Sanchez

I’m going to say something that might completely change the way you think about Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”: I don’t think the Usher siblings are real. At least, not in the way the narrator presents them. Instead, the entire story is an illusion; one long, terrifying hallucination acted out inside the narrator’s own mind after he returns to the childhood home he grew up in. When we look closely at how the narrator describes the setting, the siblings, and even his own reactions to everything around him, the tale starts to look less like a Gothic horror story about a dying aristocratic family and more like the psychological unraveling of one man forced to revisit the darkness of his childhood.

A second reading of this tale leaves the reader with a single question: what if the narrator was the only Usher? 

From the beginning of the story, one thing that is very strange about this story is that we never learn the narrator’s name. We don’t know who he is, where he’s coming from, or why he seems oddly compelled to accept Roderick Usher’s letter summoning him to the house. It’s almost as if the narrator isn’t fully formed as a person, or that he’s hiding something from us and from himself. When Poe writes that he arrives at the House of Usher “during the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day,” the scene immediately sets the emotional tone. But more importantly, it feels like we’re entering a dream or memory, not a straightforward visit to a friend’s home. Even the house seems more like a psychological symbol than a real building as the narrator says he feels “an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart” the moment he sees it, as though the house is tied to something deeply personal and painful for him.

Reading the story with the idea that the narrator is returning to his own childhood home changes the entire opening. Suddenly, that weird, sick feeling he can’t shake makes complete sense. Who hasn’t felt a rush of dread or anxiety when revisiting the place where old trauma once lived? The narrator doesn’t just see a house, but instead he sees a reflection of himself. Poe even uses this imagery when he describes how the mansion stands above a “black and lurid tarn” that mirrors it perfectly. The house literally stares back at him like a memory he can’t avoid.

The next major clue that the narrator might be experiencing everything inside his own head is the strange relationship between him and Roderick Usher. In the traditional reading, they’re simply old childhood friends. But the narrator admits they were never very close when he describes their boyhood connection as only “somewhat intimate.” Yet Roderick somehow considers him his “only personal friend.” This fact is strange because it leaves the reader wondering why the narrator would be the only friend of a grown man he hasn’t seen in years? Unless, of course, Roderick is not another person but a fragment of the narrator’s own identity—an imagined double who represents the parts of himself he doesn’t want to face.

Poe goes even further in linking the narrator and Roderick. The narrator is obsessed with Roderick’s appearance. He describes his face in an almost loving, over detailed language, describing  the “cadaverousness” of his skin, the “luminous” eyes, the “delicate Hebrew model” of his nose. This isn’t just a normal description but it’s like the intensity of someone staring into a mirror. Roderick becomes a kind of emotional or psychological twin, one that is a broken, anxious, and over sensitive version of the narrator that he recognizes but won’t consciously claim as himself.

And then there’s Madeline. Madeline Usher appears in such a fleeting manner that she barely exists as a character at all. She never speaks. She rarely moves. She shows up just enough for the narrator to register her, almost like an intrusive thought. She suffers from a mysterious illness that causes “a gradual wasting away of the person” as well as trances so deathlike that she can be mistaken for dead. Symbolically, she feels less like a sibling and more like a buried emotion, maybe grief, maybe childhood pain, maybe guilt, but certainly something inside the narrator that he keeps trying to shove back into the recesses of his mind. If Roderick represents the narrator’s conscious madness, then Madeline may represent his unconscious trauma, the part he avoids looking directly at. In other words, Roderick and Madeline together might be the narrator split into two halves, the part of himself that is clearly unraveling and the part that refuses to die no matter how deeply he tries to bury it.

This symbolic reading becomes even more compelling when the narrator helps Roderick entomb Madeline in the family vault. The scene feels like a metaphor for repression. The vault is described as “small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light.” That sounds less like a physical space and more like the deepest, darkest part of one’s mind, the place where painful memories are shoved in the hopes that they never come back. The narrator notices that Madeline and Roderick look strikingly similar, emphasizing the theme of doubling. But we might also notice that he recognizes their similarity because they resemble him. At this point, the story begins to slip further into dream logic. The narrator admits he is becoming more and more influenced by Roderick’s nervousness, writing, “I felt creeping upon me… the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.” If Roderick is an aspect of his own mind, this line becomes almost darkly funny. The narrator is being influenced by himself, spiraling under his own anxieties rather than anyone else’s.

Everything that happens next seems designed to push the narrator to a breaking point. There is a raging storm. The house appears to breathe and shift. The narrator reads a story aloud called “The Mad Trist”, and begins hearing real sounds that mirror the fictional ones. He struggles briefly to reason with himself, telling us he is trying to “shake off” his growing fear, but he can’t. It feels like a panic attack hitting in real time.

Then comes the moment that makes the psychological reading feel almost inevitable: Madeline returns from the tomb. She does not simply enter the room but bursts in dramatically, “with blood upon her white robes,” collapsing onto Roderick. The imagery is chaotic, surreal, and almost operatic. It’s exactly the kind of visual that might erupt from the mind of someone in the middle of a manic or dissociative episode.

The narrator doesn’t stay to check if any of this is real but instead he runs away.

He flees the house in sheer terror and doesn’t turn around until he’s safely far away. When he finally does look back, he sees the entire mansion split down the middle and collapse into the tarn, disappearing “silently” into the water. This is not how buildings behave. This is how metaphors behave. This is how psyches behave when they can no longer contain what’s inside them. The house’s dramatic collapse feels like the moment the narrator’s carefully constructed emotional defenses finally shatter and all the memories and secrets he tried to bury erupt, overwhelm him, and sink.

If the house represents his childhood home, or even his mind, its destruction symbolizes a complete internal breakdown. This theory becomes even more meaningful when we consider Poe’s own biography. Poe knew what it meant to be orphaned, abandoned, and emotionally adrift. He lost his mother at two. He lost his foster mother as a young adult. He fought endlessly with the man who raised him. The theme of orphanhood, of homes that are haunted by absence rather than ghosts, appears throughout his writing. In “Usher,” the absence of any parents is conspicuous. There are just the two siblings with no caretakers and no family history. If the narrator is returning to his own past, the missing parents might represent his earliest wounds, which are the people who weren’t there when he needed them most.

This makes the narrator’s identity crisis, and the collapse of the House of Usher, feel deeply personal. Maybe the narrator is not just the witness to the Ushers’ decline. Maybe he is Roderick. Maybe he is Madeline. Maybe the only real character in the story is the narrator himself, reenacting his trauma through symbolic “others” because facing the truth directly would be too unbearable.

When the narrator runs from the house at the end, watching it sink behind him, we might imagine not a man escaping a haunted mansion, but a man escaping a terrifying episode in his own mind. He is fleeing the unburied memories, the grief, the guilt, the sense of being fundamentally alone, with the entire psychological architecture collapsing behind him. The house doesn’t fall because of a supernatural curse. It falls because he can no longer maintain the fractured, doubled self he has created to survive his own trauma. 

In this version of the tale, the “fall” isn’t the fall of the Usher family line. It is the fall of the narrator, the collapse of his internal world after confronting the ghosts of his past in the place where they were born. It’s a breakdown disguised as a Gothic story.

And maybe that’s why the story continues to haunt readers. It isn’t just about madness but It’s about how frightening it is to go home again. It’s about the things inside ourselves we try to bury and the fear of what will happen when they return. It’s about the moment when the house we’ve built inside our minds with our memories, our childhoods, and our coping mechanisms, finally cracks under the pressure of everything we’ve been avoiding. So yes, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a ghost story. But the ghost, in this reading, is the narrator. He is haunting himself.

Works Cited

Allan, Edgar. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of The House of Usher.” Edited by G.R. Thompson, New York, W.W. Norton, 2004, pp. 199–216.

“Silence — A Fable” Is Not the Story You Think It Is

Marlen Rosales

Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence—A Fable” is usually read as a grim allegory about cosmic emptiness, despair, or the futility of human resistance against supernatural power. At first, other readers and I have taken the Demon’s experiment as a demonstration of humanity’s insignificance in a silent, indifferent universe. Silence, in this familiar interpretation, equals nihilism. When the Demon wipes away sound, motion, and life from the landscape, the mortal man’s terror seems to confirm that absolute quiet means absolute void. That is the traditional reading: the silence of the story is the silence of nothingness. But this interpretation, though intuitive, misses the deeper psychological and spiritual logic that Poe threads into the tale. What if the silence is not empty at all? What if the Demon’s manufactured quiet is not the absence of meaning but the absence of noise, noise that normally shields human beings from confronting meaning? Here is my claim: “Silence—A Fable” is not about cosmic emptiness. It is about modern overstimulation; about how humanity has drowned itself in sound, sensation, and distraction to the point that true spiritual encounter has become impossible. Poe’s story is not a warning that God is absent. It is a warning that we have become too loud, too overloaded, too incessantly stimulated to hear anything divine, or anything demonic, when the world finally does fall still.

Once we understand this, the entire story shifts. The Demon’s act is not merely cruel but diagnostic: he creates a silence the man has never experienced, and the man collapses, not because the silence contains nothing but because he contains nothing to bring into it. The world Poe conjures before the silence descends is violently sensory: thick reeds, grotesque lilies, jagged rocks, surging waters, thunder overhead. It is a world of full-volume experience, a world with no room for thought. And this is the world we live in now: a life of constant noise, flashing lights, endless notifications, perpetual activity. We move from screen to screen, sound to sound, sensation to sensation, rarely encountering a moment unfilled by stimulation. Even when we seek quiet, we fill it. For example, music while we drive, podcasts while we cook, chatter while we walk, and even TV or “white-noise” while we sleep. The stillness necessary for meditation or prayer has become alien to us, not because stillness is rare, but because we compulsively avoid it. Religious traditions for thousands of years insisted on silence as the condition for revelation; the desert fathers retreated to caves, monks to cells, contemplatives to solitude. Silence was understood as the space where the self-opened upward and inward, where God’s voice could be perceived, or where the Devil’s temptations might whisper. But in a world of saturation, people often do not even know what silence feels like. And when they finally encounter it, when the power goes out, or the city noise stops, or they sit alone long enough for their thoughts to become audible, the experience is not peaceful but terrifying. We mistake silence for danger because we are unprepared for its demands. In Poe’s story, when the Demon removes all external stimulation, the man does not encounter God or the Devil. He encounters himself. And because he has never built the inwardness required to withstand the encounter, he runs.

This is where Poe’s “Sonnet—Silence” becomes essential. The poem reveals that Poe saw silence as complex; he saw it as having multiple layers. The sonnet speaks of two kinds of silence: one natural, soft, and contemplative, like “the mist upon the hill,” a silence humans can inhabit without fear. But he also describes another silence, deeper and older, the “silence of the eternal things,” a silence that belongs to the sea, the desert, the “regions of the night,” and even to beings who are not entirely human. This is the silence that terrifies, and it is the silence the Demon unleashes in the fable. The sonnet tells us why: this second silence is not empty but immense, not peaceful but overwhelming. It is a silence that exposes the interior life of the listener. Poe makes clear that some beings can dwell in this silence comfortably, the Demon, for example. But mortals panic when confronted with silence they do not understand. The sonnet, therefore, unlocks the fable: the mortal man flees because he is spiritually unprepared for the deeper kind of silence. He meets not emptiness but magnitude, and magnitude crushes him. The silence is terrifying not because it contains nothing, but because it contains too much…too much truth, too much space, too much of the self.

Once the poem and the fable are read together, Poe’s real message emerges. Humans need silence in order to think, pray, listen, and understand. Yet the world we build for ourselves makes silence nearly impossible. Our overstimulation is not just sensory; it is spiritual. Noise becomes a shield protecting us from confronting ourselves. In religious traditions, silence is where revelation happens, where the divine voice breaks through. But it is also where temptation happens, where the Devil whispers. The absence of noise, in other words, creates the conditions for both ascent and descent. Silence is dangerous because it is fertile. Modern life, however, offers none of this. We have lost the ability to discern anything beyond the immediate sensory world because we never leave that world. The man sitting on the rock is terrified not because he meets a supernatural silence but because the silence forces him to notice the emptiness he has been filling with noise. The overstimulation of the modern world becomes a kind of spiritual anesthesia, numbing us from both divine presence and diabolic temptation. Silence is terrifying because it wakes us up.

What Poe dramatizes in the fable is thus a spiritual experiment: What happens when a human being who lives entirely externally, through senses, noise, and distraction, is forced into sudden inwardness? The answer is the same now as in Poe’s fictional landscape: panic. The man in the story does not know how to inhabit his own interior space. His identity is tied to sensation; when sensation vanishes, so does his sense of self. The Demon, meanwhile, belongs to the deeper silence described in the sonnet. He occupies it effortlessly, smiling not with malice but with understanding. He knows that silence is revelation, and revelation requires preparation. The man has been prepared for nothing but noise. Therefore, he flees. He is spiritually weightless, hollowed out by overstimulation, unaccustomed to any form of contemplative reality.

The tragedy of the story is that the man flees precisely the thing he most needs. Silence has always been a site of spiritual formation. In silence, people meet their thoughts, their fears, their desires, and their conscience. They confront who they are and who they are not. But without practice, silence feels like annihilation. Poe shows us a man who mistakes inner revelation for outer threat. It is not the Demon who terrifies him but the sudden recognition of his own inner vacancy. The Demon does not cackle or menace; he simply presents a silence that reveals. The man cannot withstand it because he has never built the internal scaffolding required to endure solitude. Here lies Poe’s prophetic insight: a world that never practices silence will produce souls incapable of facing it.

And what happens to a spiritually deaf world? It loses the ability to hear anything, God’s guidance, the Devil’s temptations, the whisper of conscience, the murmur of intuition. Poe’s story becomes, in this reading, a critique of modernity decades before modernity fully arrives. It anticipates a society drowning in media, stimulation, and distraction, where people fear quiet rooms and unmediated thoughts. It anticipates a world where silence feels unnatural, hostile, even dangerous. And it suggests that this fear is not merely psychological but spiritual. Humans need silence to discern meaning. Overstimulation starves the soul. The man in the fable flees because he has no spiritual muscle to withstand stillness. And we, if we were thrust into the Demon’s landscape, might flee as well.

In the end, “Silence—A Fable” does not depict a world abandoned by God but a world in which humans have lost the ability to perceive God, and everything else that lies beyond their senses, because they have wrapped themselves in noise. Silence is frightening because it reveals what we have drowned. Poe’s story is not about emptiness but about unreadiness. The Demon is not a tormentor but a witness to the human condition. And the mortal man’s terror is our own: the terror of a soul unaccustomed to listening. Poe’s fable is a mirror held up to modern overstimulation, asking whether we, too, would run from the silence we desperately need.

Works Cited

https://www.enotes.com/topics/edgar-allan-poe/questions/the-significance-and-interpretation-of-silence-a-3131278?u

https://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19781e.htm?utm

https://www.enotes.com/topics/edgar-allan-poe/criticism/poe-edgar-allan-79220/criticism/barbara-cantalupo-essay-date-1994

Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” is often read as a meditation on secret sin. However, the story ultimately offers a sharper critique of the fear-driven, repressive, and hypocritical structures that can shape organized religion and distort spiritual authority. Hawthorne is less interested in revealing any singular transgression on Mr. Hooper’s part than in exploring how religious communities respond when a symbol destabilizes their carefully maintained moral order. The veil’s power lies not in Hooper’s supposed guilt but in the panic, fascination, and collective anxiety it provokes, revealing a congregation conditioned to fear anything that threatens the illusion of perfect transparency and communal purity. Their reaction reveals a system in which fear serves as a form of control, and any deviation from the expected public display of righteousness is met with suspicion. However, the deeper unease arises not from the veil alone, but from Hooper himself, his stubborn refusal to remove it, his cryptic detachment from the people he serves, his willingness to wield mystery as a moral weapon, and his final, sweeping condemnation of the congregation on his deathbed. Through these choices, Hooper becomes more than a man in mourning cloth: he emerges as a haunting embodiment of religious extremism, a figure whose self-imposed isolation and relentless symbolism expose the spiritual rigidity and institutional hypocrisy that Hawthorne saw embedded in Puritanism.

Hawthorne uses the townspeople’s reaction to Mr. Hooper’s veil to expose how fear functions as a mechanism of religious control within Puritan society. It shows a community conditioned to respond to the unfamiliar with spiritual panic. The veil itself is a simple cloth, yet it provokes panic, suspicion, and supernatural speculation, revealing how quickly a community conditioned by strict doctrines interprets it as threatening. The quote “Such was the effect of this simple piece of crape, that more than one woman of delicate nerves was forced to leave the meeting-house”(Hawthorne,122), suggests that the congregation’s response to a harmless cloth was exaggerated. It reveals how Puritan religion conditions people to fear anything that deviates from rigid norms. Their fear arises not from Hooper’s actions; his sermon is “nothing terrible,” but from the possibility that the veil signals hidden sin or divine judgment. Rather than seeking understanding, the townspeople recoil, whisper, and project their anxieties onto Hooper, suggesting that their faith is less rooted in spiritual confidence than in a constant fear of moral deviation. Hawthorne emphasizes that the true terror lies not in Hooper’s supposed secret sin but in the community’s fragile, fear-driven religiosity. Fear is not merely a reaction to religious symbols, but a tool that religious leaders, whether intentionally or not, can embody and amplify. The veil also draws attention to the culture of repression that undergirds Puritan religious structures. Hooper’s refusal to explain the veil forces the community to confront their own discomfort with the hidden aspects of the self. Those impulses, doubts, and desires that Puritanism demands be suppressed rather than acknowledged are suggested in “There was nothing terrible in what Mr. Hooper said—at least, no violence; and yet, with every tremor of his melancholy voice, the hearers quaked”(Hawthorne,122). People react not to his message, but to the symbol of hidden interiority. Their discomfort suggests the community represses any acknowledgment of private moral struggle. The congregation is unsettled not because Hooper preaches anything radically new, but because the veil represents a part of themselves they prefer to suppress. The town’s distress reveals how deeply they rely on the illusion of moral transparency and how unsettling it is to face a physical reminder that human beings harbor private interiors. Hooper’s own conduct compounds this repression: by refusing to remove the veil even in private moments with Elizabeth, he demonstrates an unnerving commitment to abstraction over human feeling. His self-imposed isolation becomes a physical enactment of Puritan repression taken to its extreme. In showing how quickly the community seeks to avoid or silence the unsettling presence of the veil, Hawthorne critiques a religious system that prizes outward conformity over genuine self-examination.

Hawthorne exposes the hypocrisy inherent in Puritan authority by showing how the villagers condemn Hooper for wearing a symbol of hidden sin, while refusing to acknowledge their own. It is stated, “Not one ventured to put the plain question to Mr. Hooper, wherefore he did this thing”(Hawthorne,125). Their refusal to ask directly reveals the community’s hypocrisy: they judge him severely while avoiding honest moral inquiry themselves. Their insistence that Hooper’s veil is uniquely shameful reflects a double standard. Hooper’s behavior intensifies this critique. Instead of dispelling their misconceptions, he leverages their discomfort, becoming “a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin”(Hawthorne,128). The people project judgment onto Hooper even as they privately sense that the veil reflects something universal, “the black veil” that all humans carry in their hearts. Their insistence that he must remove the symbol, even though it unsettles them, reveals a community more concerned with maintaining appearances than with pursuing truth or humility. His final accusation makes clear that the community’s outrage is a form of moral evasion, a way to project their darkness onto him so they never have to confront it themselves. In this way, Hawthorne suggests that the fundamental moral failing is not Hooper’s secrecy but the community’s refusal to confront their shared moral imperfection.

Hooper can be read as a sinister presence, but his “sinisterness” arises less from any inner corruption and more from the community’s projection of fear and religious anxiety onto him. Hawthorne presents Hooper’s impenetrable seriousness, emotional withdrawal, and willingness to disturb his congregation as the natural extension of a Puritan minister pushed to extremes. In this sense, Hooper becomes unsettling not because of what he is, but because of what he reveals: that religious authority can manipulate symbols, induce fear, and promote moral surveillance without ever needing to articulate its intentions. It is mentioned, “A subtle power was breathed into his words. The veil kept him in a saddening mystery, and the mystery made him the most powerful preacher”(Hawthorne,122). Hooper is aware that the veil magnifies his religious authority. His continued use of it suggests he knowingly cultivates fear and moral influence. This reflexive terror illustrates how Puritan faith has become entangled with superstition and moral anxiety.

Furthermore, while the veil triggers this fear, Hooper himself soon becomes its focal point. His calm acceptance of the congregation’s alarm and his refusal to explain the symbol turn him into a figure of unknowable spiritual authority. Hawthorne leaves us unsure whether Hooper is a moral reformer, a misguided ascetic, or a proto-theocratic disciplinarian, and that ambiguity is precisely what makes him feel dangerous. Ultimately, Hooper embodies a larger problem: the way religious institutions can weaponize morality, silence, and symbolism to exert power over a community. When analyzing Hooper, it is essential to consider him both as a character who makes intentional choices and as a symbolic figure representing the structural issues inherent in Puritanism. As a character, Hooper is mild-mannered, gentle, and not outwardly tyrannical, which complicates any reading that paints him as a villain. His personal humility contrasts with the outsized impact of his veil, suggesting that he becomes “sinister” only through the religious culture that interprets (and fears) him. As a symbol, however, Hooper represents the internal contradictions of Puritan authority: the demand for transparency paired with an obsession with hidden sin, the repression of emotion alongside spiritual absolutism, and the communal desire to judge others while avoiding self-reflection. He does not want to remove the veil: “This veil is a type and a symbol, and I am bound to wear it ever”(Hawthorne,126). Hooper explicitly identifies himself with the symbol, making his character inseparable from the object’s meaning. His commitment transforms him into an embodiment of spiritual rigidity. Treating Hooper symbolically allows the veil to stand not for his private guilt, but for the collective moral blindness and fear-based religiosity of the community. In this reading, Hooper’s role is less about confessing personal wrongdoing and more about exposing what Puritanism refuses to see about itself.

Ultimately, Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” employs both the veil and Hooper’s increasingly unsettling presence to expose the spiritual anxieties and moral contradictions inherent in organized religion. The veil strips away the community’s façade of purity, revealing how fear governs their faith, how repression defines their moral expectations, and how hypocrisy shapes their judgments. However, Hawthorne’s critique extends beyond the congregation, for Hooper himself becomes a troubling symbol of religious extremism. An authority figure who embraces isolation, cultivates mystery, and wields moral discomfort as a kind of spiritual power. His refusal to remove the veil, even at the cost of human intimacy, suggests a deeper corruption in the religious structures that shape him: a devotion to principle so absolute that it becomes destructive. Through Hooper’s transformation into a figure both feared and revered, Hawthorne ultimately reveals that the darkness haunting the community is not confined to a piece of crape, but is woven into the very fabric of the religious culture that made such a figure possible.

Work cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Minister’s Black Veil.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013, pp. 120–131.

Grace Cherewko

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death is often interpreted with a lens focusing on plague and pestilence, and aptly so, given the antagonist’s attire being reminiscent of the Red Death that plagues the story’s world. However, while the story is rife with images and themes of hubris and arrogance, it is also full of particularly crafted images of wealth, garishness, and aristocracy that are difficult to avoid. While the arrogance of the high-class cast is certainly palpable throughout the story, so is their fear; they fear intermingling with the diseased lower class, so much so that they seal themselves off from them, and now that they have, they fear what might befall them if they face the people they’ve left to perish. With a focus on the metaphorical and literal division and distance between the high and low classes of the story, I aim to read The Masque of the Read Death as a story centered around a class-based revolution; in this reading, the Red Death is the lower class themselves, bringing death to the arrogant aristocracy amidst their frivolity, bearing many similarities to the French Revolution.

The story opens by the narrator describing the Red Death itself. The first thing the narrator details is that “the ‘Red Death’ had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avator and its seal– the redness and the horror of the blood” (Poe 299). In the first three sentences of the story, the narrator describes the titular Red Death as a seemingly unnatural force, yet a very real disease, one that is marked by profusive bleeding from the pores and a violent seizure (Poe 299-300). However, the word “pestilence,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, has multiple meanings that could incite alternate readings of the Red Death and the story. One of the definitions of “pestilence” is very literal, being, “a fatal epidemic or disease, affecting people or animals,” or “a plague” (“Pestilence, n1”). With this definition, the narrator would be depicting the Red Death as an actual plague, virus, or disease. Interestingly, however, the OED also includes a second, figurative definition of “pestilence.” This defines a pestilence as something, “that which is morally or socially pernicious” (“Pestilence, n2”). This second, figurative definition of the word would change the interpretation of the Red Death from a literal illness to a metaphorical plague. However, this figurative interpretation would raise the question of what the Red Death as a figurative pestilence might be referring to.

The narrator, though, in their further illustration of the setting and exposition of the story, divulges an interesting depiction of a harsh division between Prince Prospero’s court and the rest of his people. In a perverse method of self-preservation, Prospero holes up himself and his court in his abbey. The narrator writes that, “when his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court” (Poe 300) to inhabit his garish abbey. This alley is fortified with, “a strong and lofty wall” to “bid defiance to contagion” (Poe 300). Poe, and the narrator by extension, utilizes a very literal image of division between Prospero with the higher-class and the lower-class of the kingdom. The massive walls and vast security keep the court far away from the struggles of the lower class, and the narrator themselves says that “the external world could take care of itself” (Poe 300). Not only is there a physical difference between the classes, but the narrator also suggests that there is a vast emotional distance between them, as well, especially on the side of the aristocracy. This division between classes is vital towards the story in both the traditional and this unconventional reading, as well.

Here, the narrator draws the image of the higher-class members of the court hiding in the abbey away from the rest of the kingdom, and those below them to preserve themselves from the Red Death. By this, it is implied that the Red Death, whether a literal or metaphorical disease, is carried by the lower-class people. Since none of the court members, presumably, had ever caught the Red Death, it might be possible that the Red Death is the peasants themselves, with their own overwhelming numbers and spilling of blood being an immediate threat to the aristocracy, very similarly to the manner in which the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution played out in the 1790s.

Another large part of the division between the high and low class, and the former’s preference for ignorance towards the latter, is emphasized through the garish parties. The narrator notes that part of the appeal of Prospero’s abbey was the isolation from the rest of the Red Death-infected kingdom, for “the prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure” (Poe 300). The story itself is also set during one of these elaborate parties, where “Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball if the most unusual magnificence” (Poe 300). These grand parties seem to be a statement towards Prospero and the aristocracy’s hubris; while the majority of the kingdom is suffering, they place themselves above it in several ways, gathering and partying in spite of it. However, there is an interesting link to the French Revolution present in the presumed frequencies of which Prospero throws these parties and balls.

In his book, Taste and Fashion: From the French Revolution to the Present Day, James Laver discusses the nature of the grandiose lives the higher classes lived both before and after the reign of terror. He writes that, “the frivolity which the Republicans thought they had extinguished for ever with the blood of aristocrats burst forth with renewed intensity once the thread of the guillotine was removed” (Laver 18). This is a very similar, if not the same, phenomenon present in Prospero’s court; within the fortified walls of the abbey, none of the theoretically infected peasants can enter. Because of this, “it was folly to grieve, or to think,” because of Prospero’s entertainment “and security were within,” while “without was the ‘Red Death’” (Poe 300). Further, Laver makes an interesting note about a phenomenon known as “dance mania.” The term “dance mania” refers to a phenomenon in which groups of people would dance wildly until they collapsed from either exhaustion or death. Interestingly, “dance mania” is often referred to as an outbreak, or as a “dancing plague.” Laver writes that it, “seems to be a universal result of great catastrophes” (18). He highlights that, similar to Prospero, the Directoire’s surplus of balls and dances, though they were not exactly like bouts of “dance mania,” they were in such high numbers that it bears some resemblance to the phenomenon. Like the Directoire was free from the fear of the Reign of Terror, once Prospero and his court were free from the fear of the Red Death, he just about succumbed to another figurative plague of a frivolity akin to “dance mania.”

Along with the physical and figurative distance between the high and low class, Poe includes careful detail about the garishness and extravagance of the attire of Prospero’s court. The narrator notes that “the tastes of the duke were peculiar,” and that “he disregarded the decora of mere fashion” (Poe 301). He is very particular about the fashion of his guests during the grand masquerade ball, flying into a rage when the mysterious, Red Death-embodying guest arrives, shuddering “either of terror or distaste” (Poe 303). To Prospero, it seems fashion holds a great deal of importance to him, and perhaps it stands as a staple for his status.

Interestingly, fashion, as a staple part of most if not all cultures, was a large facet of French society during the Revolution, as well, for all people involved. Taste and Fashion, Laver spends a chapter discussing the fashion among both the bourgeoise and the aristocracy during different portions of the French Revolution. There were many different trends of dress and fashion throughout the years of the revolution; Laver details French modesties who had fled to England adopting English fashion and hobbies (16), revolutionaries invoking Greek and Roman dress along with their ideals (17), and the greater exposure of the female form in fashion thanks to the many balls put on by the Directoire at the end of the Reign of Terror (18-19). Although the development and evolution of fashion and clothing trends is an inevitable part of any culture, the French Revolution seemed to carry particular types of fashion in higher esteem during different parts of it, almost similar to Prospero’s particular choice of fashion and design deemed unusual by the narrator and his court.

There was also a particular piece of fashion that was a very symbolic part of the French Revolution: the bonnet rouge. The bonnet rouge is a red cap that was, “possibly the most potent symbol of freedom from tyranny” during the Revolution (Harris 283), as described by Jennifer Harris in her article, The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans 1789-94. Harris explains that the cap, “became symbolic of republican sentiment,” often alongside the tricolor cockade (Harris 285). Though it was possible for one to hide their “aristocratic sentiments,” as Harris explains (285), it was primarily conflated with being a revolutionary. Through this particular form of dress, members of the revolution made their stance and existence public, embodying a threat towards the aristocrats and their sympathizers.

The Masque of the Red Death features a bonnet rouge of its own: the masquerade attendee in Red Death-inspired attire. Immediately upon their arrival, the attendees of the masquerade connect the attendee’s attire to the ongoing plague outside of their walls. No one, including the narrator, believes that the costume is artistic or satirical towards the plague, as when they arrive, the narrator says that “even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made” (Poe 303). The costume symbolizing the Red Death appears to be a universal symbol for the plague itself, rather than being a form of commentary on it. Prospero’s reaction, as well, can be used as an indicator for the graveness of the social trespass the attendee seems to have made. Despite being previously described as having a peculiar sense of fashion and more than willing to ignore the decorum of fashion, the costume seems to paralyze him at the sight of it. Again, the narrator points out two possible reasons for his reaction: “either terror or distaste” (Poe 303), though it is likely both. Prospero likely finds the attire distasteful to believe it was a regular attendee, but the fear and the reality quickly sink in that it is not just a representative of someone who has caught the Red Death, but that it is actually the Red Death.

The Masque of the Red Death is the titular bonnet rouge of the story, both embodying the thing the court fears and enforcing that fear, as well. The story ends with the nameless attendee bringing Prospero to his knees and ultimately killing him, despite his attempts to have the attendee thrown out or even his own attempts at attacking his pursuer. However, the attendee follows Prospero through every one of the colored rooms until the prince is cornered, where he finally meets his bloody demise (Poe 304). The attendee kills other court members that were present, as well, as “one by one dropped the revellers [sic] in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel” (Poe 304), indicating that this assassin, whether physical or not, was not solely fixated on Prospero, but all of the members hiding away in the abbey. Regardless of whether the Red Death was a physical or figurative plague, the guest dressed like it was a carrier and utilized their attire as a calling card of sorts, as a living threat towards the court.

The Masque of the Red Death, regardless of whether the titular plague is a real plague or a figurative one, there are heavy images and themes regarding class and class divisions, which Poe pays careful attention to describing and detailing. Additionally, there are certain details throughout the story that very closely parallel the fashion, classes, and culture of the French Revolution. While the story regardless carries messages and themes about hubris and wealth, the layers of details in this story can also lend itself to a reading about a class-based revolution, or at least as a story that greatly resembles and reframes the bloodiness and brutality of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

Works Cited

Harris, Jennifer. “The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans 1789-94.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1981, pp. 283–312. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2738492.

Laver, James. Taste and Fashion: From the French Revolution to the Present Day. George G.Harrap and Company ltd, 1937.

“Pestilence, N. & Adv.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2025, https://doi.org.10.1093/OED/6719734220.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004, pp. 299-304.

By: Emily Abigail Crider

The Lady Ligeia is an incomparable otherworldly beauty. Our narrator speaks of her as if she were a divine being who is unreal. She is supposedly the most knowledgeable person known to our narrator and incomparable to others. The common interpretation is that Ligeia dies, sending our narrator into an opium-based psychosis. In this post, I hope to offer a new perspective. Instead of thinking of this story as a story of a mourning, drug-addicted husband, you will hopefully see my view: A demon that makes a man fall for her and sacrifice his new wife to get the demon back in a ritual that uses drugs and poison. In this post, I will be using evidence from the story “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe and some articles published by various individuals to make my argument. 

First, I would like to start with my argument that Lady Ligeia is a demon. She is described as having an ethereal, inhuman look to her. On page 160 of the Norton Critical Edition, we have a quote that says, “Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen.” This quote shows that she looks inhuman and also looks like something or someone a pagan would worship. A different quote on that same page says, “although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed ‘exquisite,’ and felt that there was much of ‘strangeness’ pervading it.” This quote furthers the idea that she is pretty, but not in a normal or human way. Our narrator goes on to talk about some of her specific features that are “strange.” On page 161 of the Norton Critical Edition, we have a quote in the last paragraph that says, “For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race.” The way that he separates her from humans in these sentences is quite fascinating. He also, in that same paragraph, compares her to something called a Houri. According to the footnotes, a Houri is a woman from Muslim mythology who awaits men in heaven. They are supposedly known for their big dark eyes and for being sensual and ethereal. The reason I think this is important for proving she is a demon is the relation of fallen angels or creatures from heaven. In the Abrahamic mythos, demons are angels or other heavenly beings who fell with Lucifer when he rebelled against God. That means that her being ethereal and compared to a creature from heaven would make sense for a demonic woman. There is also a quote from the Britannica article “angel and demon” that has further evidence of how demons may appear. “They may be semihuman, nonhuman, or ghostly human beings.” This quote shows that demons can appear in any number of ways, including slightly off-looking humans. 

Next, let’s talk about how smart Ligeia is. Our narrator talks about how knowledgeable Ligeia is many times. On page 163 of the Norton Critical Edition, we get several lines that show Ligeia’s immense knowledge and wit. The first being “In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault.” Demons are quite knowledgeable creatures, and they use this ability to draw people in and make them follow the demons’ will. Another quote from the same paragraph says, “but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding.” This quote is trying to help us comprehend just how much this woman knows. He is trying to give us an idea of the variety of concepts she has mastered. He compares her to all other humans at one point, asking where the man is that can compete with her. At the end of page 163 in the Norton Critical Edition, the narrator says, “wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!” This furthers the idea that she knows things no normal human would. The word forbidden is also an interesting choice. Forbidden implies that no one should have what she does, no one, unless they are inhuman.

Before we get into the ritual, I would like to look at one more thing involving demons: their purpose in a human’s life. According to the Britannica article “angels and demons,”  demons are supposed to “coerce humans into not attaining their higher spiritual aspirations or not performing activities necessary for their well-being in the normal course of living.” This is important because it fits with the plot of the short story. If you think about the story as Ligeia being a demon who is fooling a man, this explanation describes Ligeia’s motivation for the ritual. She wants the narrator to be so in love that he will do a ritual that disrupts what would have been the natural course of his life. When he should have been mourning and accepting his loss, he was instead engaging in a ritual to bring Lady Ligeia back. This completely subverts what he should be doing, meaning if she is a demon, she is doing her job all too well. 

 Rituals are very important to many occult or demonic practices. The narrator in Ligeia is performing a seance to commune with or bring back Ligeia. According to an article on DeadHistory.com titled “A History of Seances,” this type of ritual is used to communicate with or, in a way, bring back the dead’s soul. At the heart of a seance, there is supposed to be a conduit or person/thing the entity can communicate with. The conduit in this story is Lady Rowena. In the story, we see her die and morph into Lady Ligeia at some points; this would make her the medium used to communicate with the dead. There is also commonly a circle or closed shape of sorts to concentrate the energy of the ritual. In this case, that would be the hexagonal shape of the room Lady Rowena sleeps in. Footnotes 8 and 9 at the bottom of page 167, we get more context about the shape of the room. Apparently, this shape is meant to be a gateway to other realms, perfect for a seance. It was also common for seances to take place in private parlors or have things connected to the spirit said or in place to summon the proper entity. This could be compared to the poem/song Ligeia makes the narrator recite while she is on her deathbed. 

Now you may be wondering how drugs come into play with the ritual. Drug use in occult or religious practices has been common for centuries. According to the article “Drugs” by Francis Huxley, drugs are commonly used in religious practices to alter the user’s state of consciousness and give them “supernatural knowledge.” Supernatural knowledge would be incredibly useful if you were trying to commune with your dead wife. According to the article, it is also commonplace to take drugs during a ritual to direct energy and intensify the outcome of said ritual and make physical happenings more spiritual. We can see in the story as the narrator is high on opium, whatever he is experiencing is intensified by the drugs he is on. This also could mean that his wife physically changing into Ligeia could be both physical and spiritual for him. 

At the end of it all, this is just a different way of interpreting the story. You can think and believe what you would like, but after doing this research and truly diving into the specifics of this story, I will never read it the same again. Before, I could read this story as a man who gets driven to drug abuse after the death of his first wife, and in this madness, he hallucinates her coming back to him. I will now always read it as the story of a man who fell in love with a demon, and in an effort to bring her back, he does a ritual using his new wife as a conduit to hopefully see his love again. It is both romantic and heartbreaking as we watch this man destroy another life in the hopes of having Ligeia back. I hope that I have given you some food for thought and made you think differently of Lady Ligeia and her power over our narrator. 

Works Cited 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/angel-religion/Types-of-angels-and-demons 

https://thedeadhistory.com/2025/02/27/a-history-of-seances/ 

Moro, Pamela; Myers, James; Lehmann, Arthur. Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological Study of the Supernatural, 5th ed, p. 123, Drugs by Francis Huxley

    “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a story that has been analyzed a thousand different ways by English classes across the country. Published in 1836, it’s a very popular story in his repertoire for fans of Hawthorne to cling to. Many academics over the years have focused on the themes of secret sin, specifically Hooper’s secret sin, and what it could represent. When I first read the story, I couldn’t help but view it from a queer lens, since, as a queer person myself, I can’t help but apply my own experiences to those of the characters I interact with. In my analysis, Reverend Hooper’s secret sin becomes a symbol for homosexuality. In the story, Hooper exemplifies many queer traits and, over the course of the story, paints a broader picture of homosexual desire in Antebellum America.

     I don’t think it would be too far off to imply that Hawthorne could have been unconsciously writing a queer character, since it is theorized that Hawthorne has engaged in a homoerotic relationship with fellow American author Herman Melville. Historians have found evidence of correspondence via letters between Melville and Hawthorne, indicating a relationship that was more than just friendly. Very little is known about Hawthorne’s side of the relationship, since the only surviving letters that have been found are from Melville. However, these letters are more than enough because, as Jordan Alexander Stein writes for The Los Angeles Review, “Melville wrote of Hawthorne in undeniably sexy language” (Stein, 2015). While Hawthorne’s feelings towards Melville are still unknown, it is safe to say that he was at least familiar with how homosexual desires can present themselves because of Melville’s letters.

     In “The Minister’s black veil”, I believe these homosexual desires are symbolized in the veil itself. In the story, the veil acts as a metaphorical closet for Hooper, letting his community know something is amiss. While most characters within the story are unaware of the sin the veil is communicating, it nevertheless unsettles the members of the town. David Greven, in his book Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature, speaks to this idea. He describes how Americans during this time would have seen homosexuality as something “culturally disturbing” (Greven, 19). This disturbance is reflected in the reactions of the townspeople, exemplified when a woman exclaims, “Are you sure it is our parson?” (Hawthorne). While many sins could produce such a reaction from the community, it’s particularly interesting to me that they are so hesitant to share a community with Hooper. They are shamed by the idea that Mr. Hooper could be hiding something unbecoming, so he can no longer be “theirs,” washing their hands of his behavior. Moving through the story, the veil is referenced with curiosity and fear, but Hawthorne also describes it at one point using gender, curiously enough. Within the story, a bystander states, “’ How strange…that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper’s face”’ This statement leads the audience to the conclusion that what he is wearing would be deemed normal if he were a woman. When looking into it on a more metaphorical level, this statement could be representative of male attraction, since being attracted to men is normal for women, but men being attracted to men would have been seen as abnormal. This implies that some members of the community might be aware, even subconsciously, that Hooper is queer. When analyzing it this way, it further implies the veil’s representation of homosexuality.

     This attraction to men is continuously implied by characters in the story and by Hawthorne himself. The text refers to Hooper’s possession of secret sin as a “scandal” on two occasions in the novel. One instance is when Hooper is on his deathbed, and Reverend Clark remarks to him, “You hide your face under the consciousness of secret sin. For the sake of your holy office, do away with this scandal.” (Hawthorne). Reverend Clark appears to be aware that this sin is something that can be masked or concealed, unlike most sins. Additionally, I do not usually see sinners being labeled as “scandalous”, but more as traitors to Christianity. The choice to use the word “scandal” reminds me of scandals that ring out across communities and families after a member comes out as queer. However, even though his veil is seen as scandalous, there seems to be a melancholy acceptance Hooper has of the veil. This can be seen as him accepting his homosexuality, even if he is not proud of it. I lean toward this conclusion because, as shown with Clark, Hooper’s sin is treated as something that can simply be ignored. This is not the case with others, such as murder or adultery, the latter of which Hawthorne explicitly punishes in his other stories, such as The Scarlet Letter. His acceptance of his sin is further spoken aloud, Hooper saying of the veil, “I am bound to wear it ever, both in light and darkness, in solitude and before the gaze of multitudes” (Hawthorne). This further reads to me as queer because of the way he can never escape his veil, even when alone; his thoughts regarding his sin are inescapable. These feelings are what I also believe led to his reclusiveness. In his town, his sin and role as a mysterious recluse led to him being ostracized from the community. Hawthorne even refers to him as a “Bugbear,” a boogeyman-like creature common in folklore. His being treated like a monster reminds me of the attitude some people hold, in which they believe queer people are pedophiles and a danger to society. His community is afraid of him and sees him as a “bugbear” because they are scared of what his sin means for their safety. The unfamiliarity they have with queerness is what leads to Hooper’s solitude. He expresses this sentiment regarding his loneliness, telling Elizabeth, “You know not how lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone behind my black veil” (Hawthorne). The fact that there aren’t any other queer people or others with a black veil is what causes his loneliness.  He can’t even find solace in Elizabeth, since his queerness means the termination of their engagement.

     As a character, Hooper doesn’t conform to what was considered the stereotypical male during Hawthorne’s time. In his book, Greven explains, “men were to be the Jacksonian man-on-the-make, self-made, aggressive, and market driven; but they were also supposed to be compassionate and nurturing and devoted to upholding domestic value” (Greven, 4). Hooper is not commonly represented by these characteristics in Hawthorne’s writing. It’s actually quite the opposite, since throughout the story, the audience is shown how Hooper fails to conform to these domestic values, Greven Referenced. Throughout the first half of the story, Hooper is engaged to Elizabeth, but her inability to conform to domestic values leads her to break off the engagement. She pleads for him to remove his veil, even sympathizing with him, saying, “There is nothing terrible in this piece of crape” (Hawthorne). This is the man she loves, so nothing can be terrible about him, so long as this secret isn’t the truth. If he removes his veil, he therefore removes his homosexual nature, meaning they can be together. His inability to disregard his true feelings and perform the role of the traditional heterosexual man further portrays Hawthorne’s portrayal of him as different than the typical antebellum man.  This difference is what inspired him to wear the veil in the first place. This is further supported by Greven when he says, “the kinds of pressure placed on gendered subjects in the antebellum period to achieve and maintain gendered subjects…occasionally inspired forms of resistance” (Greven, 22). The veil is his form of resistance in the context of the story. While it suppresses him in certain ways, it also serves as a means to display to his community that he is different, for better or for worse. The negative effects are outweighed by his ability to live in his truth.

      When I began researching this project, I had a feeling that it would be more difficult than I imagined to read “The Minister’s Black Veil” through a queer lens. However, as I read through articles and revisited the store, I realized there are a plethora of queer references hiding just beneath the surface. Hooper, as a character, represents the solemn resistance of queer individuals through time. He embraces his challenges and isolation with the happiness of knowing he is at least being true to himself. I hope throughout my argument, readers are able to also view the story through a queer lens and understand the beauty in knowing queer characters have always existed in literature, and always will.

Works Cited

https://www.routledge.com/Gender-Protest-and-Same-Sex-Desire-in-Antebellum-American-Literature-Margaret-Fuller-Edgar-Allan-Poe-Nathaniel-Hawthorne-and-Herman-Melville/Greven/p/book/9781138273719

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/historys-dick-jokes-on-melville-and-hawthorne/

https://pdcrodas.webs.ull.es/fundamentos/HawthorneTheMinistersBlackVeil.pdf

Emerson Rea

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is usually read as a straightforward moral allegory of mortality. The casual reader might take away a couple of ideas that normally revolve around the idea that no matter how powerful someone is, death comes for us all. While there is no doubt that this is a valid takeaway from the short story, it’s a takeaway that doesn’t fully appreciate the theological aspects of the story. Prince Prospero is often represented as an egotistical ruler who tries to hide from death; however, he is also a figure who, in his attempt to escape from death, also tries to play God. The Prince’s abbey becomes his Eden. Prospero believes he is capable of usurping God’s authority. His death at the end of the story is simply a fitting punishment for his arrogant sins. When read alongside Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim,” it becomes clear that Poe doesn’t fear all aspects of human creation, only those that leave God out of their creation. Ultimately, “The Masque of the Red Death,” is a simple representation of  the catastrophic consequences of ambition without humanity. Prospero dies due to his blasphemy rather than his attempt to shut out death. 

From the opening paragraphs of the story, it is clear that the Red Death is more than just a medical disease, for “no pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal” (Poe 299) The use of the word Avatar suggests something taking a physical form to express a greater power. The Red Death actually functions as more than a disease, it’s mortality itself and it exists well beyond human control. In response, Prince Prospero chooses to act not as a responsible ruler, but instead as a selfish leader who places his own self interest above his peoples. He does not seek a cure or aid his people. Rather, he personally selects “a thousand hale and light-hearted friends” and retreats into his abbey, cutting them off from the outside world entirely (Poe 300). Together, they shut themselves up in “the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys” (Poe 300). The selection process through which Prospero selects his guests is not a neutral one. By choosing who may be saved and welcomed into his abbey, he is mirroring the theological judgment of God. Prospero plays the role of a deity and divides humanity into those who are chosen and those who have been abandoned. After the iron gates to abbey are welded shut, the separation between the two groups becomes absolute. Prospero was sure that “the abbey was amply provisioned,” and that “the external world could take care of itself” (Poe 300). This scene is where the true nature of Prospero’s project is revealed. He doesn’t want to just survive the plague, he wants to create a self-contained world that is completely immune to the actions and fate of the outside world. A universe that bends to his will. Prospero is attempting an act of creation, a role that belongs only to God. 

Inside the walls of the abbey, Prospero created a world that was visually overwhelming, carefully controlled, and completely artificial. Even the layout of the room isn’t natural or symmetrical. According to Poe, in normal abbeys the rooms are set up in a straight line to allow for an unimpeded view; however, Prospero’s apartments were arranged in such a way “that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time” (Poe 300). This unnatural layout reinforces the idea that Prospero’s world only follows his logic. Furthermore, each room is dominated by a different color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and, finally, black. They all contained a stained-glass window which controlled how the light from the outside world entered the room, ensuring that even one of the most basic elements of nature, light, was filtered through the aesthetic vision of Prospero. Prospero refuses to allow his space to be illuminated by the natural sunlight. In his mind, he has purified his world. In this way, his abbey resembles Eden, a beautiful world, enclosed off from the rest of society; however, it is a version that has been corrupted by humanity. Eden is God’s creation, shaped by the divine. Prospero’s world was shaped by his own ego and aesthetic indulgence. The masquerade that is taking place within these rooms further reinforces the artificiality of Prospero’s world, as Poe describes the “multitude of dreams” that could be found wandering the many rooms of the ball (Poe 302). This reference to illusion suggests that this is not a paradise of truth, as the garden of Eden was, but a paradise of false vision, a paradise built on a selfish, thoughtless view of death. 

However, despite all of the attempts Propsero makes to control space, color, and the environment, there is one power that remains completely out of his control: time. This is represented through the great clock that sits in the final black chamber. The clanging of the clock as it strikes the hour halts all activities in the masquerade, as “all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock” (Poe 302). Time always interrupts Prospero’s vision. The clock is meant to demonstrate that, despite all of Prospero’s attempts to reverse the natural order of the world, God will always exist outside of time and humans will always exist within it. By hoping to escape death, Propsero is hoping to achieve a godlike state where he is immune to not just the effects of disease but also the ravages of time. The clock serves as a constant reminder of the futility of his wishes. While Prospero possesses the wealth and power to construct an entire world made in his image, he cannot control the process of time within it. His world cannot last for ever, and every time the clock strikes the next hour, Prospero knows that his doom is that much closer at hand. 

When the figure of the Red Death does finally appear, it doesn’t storm the gates or violently destroy the abbey and all of those in it. Instead, the partygoers began to notice “the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before” (Poe 302). The masked figure’s costume was meant to resemble that of a corpse infected with the plague, as he was “shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave” (Poe 303). His presence is a contamination of the careful world that Prospero has created. It’s an intrusion of reality in a world that is supposed to be entirely distinct from it. When Prospero confronts the masked figure, he chooses to use the word sacrilege when describing the clothing of the individual. This use is extremely significant because it shows that Prosepro believes the figure to have committed an act of blasphemy, but not against God, against himself. He has become so illusioned within his own world that he has replaced references to divine authority with references to himself, and believes that any challenge to his control is, in essence, a religious offense. The figure of nature and divine retribution kills Prospero in the heart of his abbey, surrounded by those whom he “saved.” Prospero attempted to wield unlimited rule, but that is not a power within human possession. 

To further understand where Prince Prospero went wrong, it is useful to place his story alongside that of Poe’s “The Domain of Arnheim.” In “Arnheim,” Poe depicts an individual with immense wealth who wants to reshape the world into something divine. Unlike Poe, Ellison is extremely optimistic and happy. This happiness is achieved, not through power or fame, but by living a life devoted to nature and the natural order of the world. He lives a simple life; in fact, he claimed that the greatest act to achieve happiness was “the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air” (Poe). While Ellison does possess an inclination towards the aesthetical, this line serves as a reminder that he always remains grounded in the natural world. He goes on to assert that the highest form of all of the arts is gardening, because they work directly with nature and rather than trying to imitate it, the two work together to create a shared vision. While Ellison and Prospero are markedly different individuals, they both possess the idea that human design can be used to improve upon God’s world. However, unlike Prospero, Ellison recognizes and appreciates the necessity of nature. Rather than trying to escape the world, he just wants to reimagine it. Prince Prospero, on the other hand, completely rejects the idea of the natural world and the necessity of it. He seals himself off from nature. The story of “The Domain of Arnheim” shows readers that Propsero was not destroyed for seeking a greater beauty in the world; he was destroyed due to his belief that he could create a completely artificial kingdom greater than God’s. 

Ultimately, Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is more than a tale about the inevitability of death. It’s a story on the consequences of human beings confusing their own authority with the authority of God. While Prospero certainly deserves to be punished for his selfishness and his indifference towards others, that’s not why he is. Instead, he is destroyed due to his attempt to recreate reality according to his own design. He tried to replace God’s will with his own, and, in the end, God triumphed. Furthermore, by placing this story beside “The Domain of Arnheim,” Poe clarifies his beliefs a little more. Poe doesn’t believe that Prospero went wrong by trying to create a more beautiful world, he went wrong by trying to replace God with himself. Ellison wanted to reshape nature into something more beautiful, but he never tried to deny it in the way that Prospero did. Poe is reminding us that when man tries to usurp God, not only is death inevitable, it is also deserved. 

Work Cited 

Poe , Edgar  Allan, and G.  Richard Thompson . “The Masque of the Red Death.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , Norton Critical Editions , 2004, pp. 299–304, Accessed 25 Nov. 2025. 

Poe , Edgar  Allan. “The Domain of Arnheim .” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore – Works – Tales – The Domain of Arnheim (Text-04c), www.eapoe.org/works/tales/arnhmb.htm#fn124101. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.