Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
The Masquerade
At masquerades Poe’s characters abandon social conventions
and leave themselves vulnerable to crime. In “The Cask of Amontillado,”
for -example, Montresor uses the carnival’s masquerade to fool Fortunato
into his own demise. The masquerade carries the traditional meanings
of joy and social liberation. Reality is suspended, and people can
temporarily assume another identity. Montresor exploits these sentiments
to do Fortunato real harm. In “William Wilson,” the masquerade is
where the narrator receives his double’s final insult. The masquerade
is enchanting because guests wear a variety of exotic and grotesque
costumes, but the narrator and his double don the same Spanish outfit.
The double Wilson haunts the narrator by denying him the thrill
of unique transformation. In a crowd full of guests in costumes,
the narrator feels comfortably anonymous enough to attempt to murder
his double. Lastly, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the ultimate
victory of the plague over the selfish retreat of Prince Prospero
and his guests occurs during the palace’s lavish masquerade ball.
The mysterious guest’s gruesome costume, which shows the bloody
effects of the Red Death, mocks the larger horror of Prospero’s
party in the midst of his suffering peasants. The pretense of costume
allows the guest to enter the ball, and bring the guests their death
in person.
Animals
In Poe’s murder stories, homicide requires animalistic
element. Animals kill, they die, and animal imagery provokes and
informs crimes committed between men. Animals signal the absence
of human reason and morality, but sometimes humans prove less rational
than their beastly counterparts. The joke behind “The Murders in
the Rue Morgue” is that the Ourang-Outang did it. The savage irrationality
of the crime baffles the police, who cannot conceive of a motiveless
crime or fathom the brute force involved. Dupin uses his superior
analytical abilities to determine that the crime couldn’t have been
committed by a human. In “The Black Cat,” the murder of Pluto results
from the narrator’s loss of reason and plunge into “perverseness,”
reason’s inhuman antithesis. The story’s second cat behaves cunningly,
leading the narrator into a more serious crime in the murder of
his wife, and then betraying him to the police. The role reversal—irrational
humans vs. rational animals—indicates that Poe considers murder
a fundamentally animalistic, and therefore inhuman, act. In “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” the murderer dehumanize his victims by likening
him to animal. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” claims to hate
and murder the old man’s “vulture eye,” which he describes as “pale
blue with a film over it.” He attempts to justify his actions by
implicitly comparing himself to a helpless creature threatened by
a hideous scavenger. In the “Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor does
the reverse, readying himself to commit the crime by equating himself
with an animal. In killing Fortunato, he cites his family arms,
a serpent with its fangs in the heel of a foot stepping on it, and
motto, which is translated “no one harms me with impunity.” Fortunato,
whose insult has spurred Montresor to revenge, becomes the man whose
foot harms the snake Montresor and is punished with a lethal bite.
