Edgar Allan Poe example essay topic

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death,' he deals with an unusual theme: the attempts of a group of wealthy people to insulate themselves from the plague by shutting themselves up in a mansion and throwing a ball. Although Poe was never to write another story precisely like this one, his work throughout his lifetime dealt with the theme of morbidity and death. Recently some critics, notably Kenneth Silverman, have postulated that the source of this morbid imagination may have been the loss of so many of Poe's relatives and loved ones. His short stories and poetry can thus be seen as a process of working through his grief by playing up its morbid aspects. This process can be seen in "The Masque of the Red Death. ' Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809, in Boston, the son of actors in a traveling company.

After the death of his parents when he was two (although some sources, including Silverman, say three), Poe was taken in as a sort of "foster child' by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, VA. Our first clue that Poe had a somewhat abnormal interest in death occurred when he was yet a child; he enjoyed playing practical jokes, dressing as a ghost or a corpse and frightening family guests. This is not in itself an unusual sport for a young boy, but Edgar seems to have done it so realistically that people were actually frightened (Silverman, 32). He also wrote letters describing in the most graphic terms fights and accidents he had witnessed at school: "I saw the arm afterwards – it was really a serious matter – it was bitten from the shoulder to the elbow – and it is likely that pieces of flesh as large as my hand will be obliged to be cut out' (Poe, quoted by Silverman, 31).

Again, this is not odd by itself, but the intensity of his reports seemed to his family a little extreme. When he was fourteen, Edgar suffered through a trauma which would greatly influence his creative life. Poe, who apparently had a somewhat loveless relationship with his foster parents, the Allan, developed a deep fondness for the mother of his friend Robert Stanard. Edgar's affection for this kind maternal figure seems to have gone far beyond the normal fondness of a child for the mother of a friend; in fact, Poe described his relationship with her as his first "ideal' love (Campbell, 18). About a year after Edgar became so attached to her, Mrs. Stanard suddenly died.

The shock left Edgar severely depressed (Campbell, 23-4). It seems hardly believable that so many of Poe's most impassioned poems and stories could be predicated on the death of the mother of a classmate, but it must be remembered that Poe's own mother departed life in a similarly abrupt fashion when the boy was very young, and the pain of her loss was all the keener in that his entire childhood would pass without finding anyone to even remotely take her place. Edgar saw in his friend's mother all the perfection that much younger boys normally attribute to their own mothers. In addition, he also clearly saw death as something that was likely to snatch away happiness without warning, and which nothing could prevent. According to various Poe biographers, his loss of both his natural mother and Mrs. Stanard was compounded by his unusual choice of a bride. In 1831, after the publication of his third book of poetry, Edgar moved to Baltimore and moved in with his aunt, Maria Poe Clem m, and her eleven-year-old daughter Virginia.

Two years later he and Virginia were married; Edgar was twenty-four and Virginia was thirteen. Even in an age when women married much younger than they do now, and occasionally married people more closely related than we would think proper, Edgar and Virginia's relationship was considered extremely peculiar. Edgar did not move his bride out of her mother's home, but all three continued to live together in complete happiness; he called Maria "Muddy' and Virginia "Sissy' (Kellogg, online source). It seems likely that Edward could not grow up, nor could he deal with the possibility of rejection that a woman his own age might have offered.

But despite his marital bliss, the pattern for his morbid imagination had already been set. Many of his stories, such as "The Masque of the Red Death,' deal with death in an extremely macabre way, relying on symbol and allegory to evoke the terrors of our darkest nightmares. For example, in "Masque,' Poe mentions the sun setting in the west. In many cultures the newly dead sail westward to reach eternity, so it is no accident that none of the maskers revel in this room; this room is too close to death. And how is it furnished? It has sable carpeting and sable draperies.

Sable connotes both richness and the color black, so the image gives us a double message; it reminds us that no expense has been spared to keep these revellers from the Red Death, but it also assures us it will do them no good. That the night is waning away can also be taken on two levels; on the one hand Poe is simply mentioning the lateness of the night, but these party-goers' time is also running out. Similarly, the windowpanes are blood-colored because the setting sun streams through them, but they are also blood-colored because there is no escaping the Red Death which will claim the revellers that very night. The clock which chimes the hours is ebony – black – and although its sound is muffled by the sable carpeting – its day-to-day impact is staved off because of the Prince's wealth – it sounds its knell of doom nonetheless. The references to the trappings of death clearly reflect the many funerals Poe experienced in his lifetime, but why would he choose to write a story about a plague? The answer to that is fairly simple; the sheer number of deaths in his immediate circle must have seemed like a plague to him.

Not only his mother, but Mrs. Stanard, succumbed to illness, leaving him bereft; by 1842 when he wrote "The Masque of the Red Death', his beloved Virginia was already showing signs of infirmity. (Eventually she, too, would sicken and die, passing away at the age of twenty-five.) Edward Davidson observes that the details about the plague may have been suggested to Poe by accounts of either the cholera in Philadelphia in the 1790's or the outbreak of the disease in Baltimore in 1811 (Davidson, 501), but the germ of the story – people dropping like flies despite their best efforts to insulate themselves from death's inevitability – must have seemed implicit in Poe's own life. So many deaths in Poe's life not only affected his ability to deal with life on a personal basis, but accounts for his work's peculiar power. Poe suffered tremendously from the deaths of his loved ones, and his psychological wounds seemed to remain unhealed by time.

For Poe, the curtain between the dead and the living, between normal everyday life and unspeakable horror, seemed thinner than it does for most of us, and worse, could be ripped cleanly in two at any minute. Many writers have lived with the presence of death in their lives, dealt with it, and continued living healthy lives. For Poe, however, it became an inseparable part of his being.

Bibliography

Campbell, Kill is. The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1933.
Davidson, Edward". Introduction ' to Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Riverside Press edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956.
Kellogg, J. Online source. web kellogg / bio 1. html Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Masque of the Red Death', from Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Riverside Press Edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1956.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Neverending Remembrance. HarperCollins, NY, 1991.