EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH”

The Red Death, shuttling freely among the seven rooms, is the plague who brings death to Prince Prospero's masquerade. His presence is omnipresent and omnipotent. Poe makes the Gothic abbey in the story a metaphor, an uncanny space where an omnipresent and omniscient power enters and brings termination to all those who are enthralled in their mundane “paradise,” and have an illusion of escaping from death. In other words, Poe's Gothic abbey executes the will of the Red Death, which kills all. What is less known about the Red Death is its expression of divinity in a corruptive world, and this is what the paper seeks to present. The Red Death “is not a random source of evil in a chaotic universe, spreading death without rhyme or reason, but rather is an expression of the will of God” (Haspel 62). The paper thus aims to prove that both the Red Death and all the objects in the Gothic abbey express divinity in the mundane, corruptive world.