payment page
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is about the inevitability of death. However, it is also a story about disease. The narrator tells the tale of an unnamed medieval country whose population is being decimated by a deadly plague known as the Red Death. Every person who contracts this deadly disease experiences “sharp pains,” “sudden dizziness,” “profuse bleeding at the pores,” and dies within half an hour of contracting the virus. Based on the story’s medieval setting and its emphasis on a deadly disease, one could potentially assume that Poe was inspired by the Bubonic Plague when he invented the Red Death. The Bubonic Plague was a deadly epidemic that killed more than 20 million people in medieval Europe beginning in the mid-1300s. There are two factors that link Poe’s invented Red Death to the Bubonic Plague. As in Poe’s story, the poor were disproportionately impacted by the Bubonic Plague because wealthy individuals, like the fictional Prince Prospero, did not offer much support to the common people who were dying en masse. Another point of similarity is the names of the diseases themselves because the Bubonic Plague was also referred to as the Black Death which clearly bears a striking similarity to the name of Poe’s invented disease.
However, while the Red Death may have medieval roots, it is highly likely that Poe found inspiration much closer to home. Poe published “The Masque of the Red Death” in the mid-19th century when tuberculosis, also referred to as “consumption,” was plaguing America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by the end of the 19th century tuberculosis had killed one out of every seven people in America and Europe. Tuberculosis is an infection of the lungs which causes its victims to cough up blood, inevitably staining the face in the process. In that regard, tuberculosis can be viewed as a viable source of inspiration for the Red Death because excessive bleeding about the face is a defining symptom for both the real and fictional disease. Tragically for Poe, he had a lot of personal experience with tuberculosis. At the age of three, Poe watched his mother, Eliza Poe, die of tuberculosis. Poe then went to live with John and Frances Allan, wealthy theatergoers who knew his parents, both actors, from the Richmond, Virginia, stage. Like Poe’s mother, Frances Allan was chronically ill with tuberculosis and she, too, eventually passed away. Finally, Poe’s wife, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, developed tuberculosis the same year that “The Masque of the Red Death” was published. It is possible, then, that Poe was inspired to write “The Masque of the Red Death” because he had experienced firsthand what tuberculosis did to members of his own family.
