December 7, 2020

By John Giarratana

“…. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts . They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned . With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to the contagion. The external world could take care of itself….” — The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe

In the Poe tale, the Red Death is an actual contagion. The disease is a hellish one, striking fast and without warning. It leaves the victim in a feverish delirium, wracked with pain and bleeding profusely from  the body’s pores, especially from the face. Death, is inevitable, and the victim suffers in agony until that end.

There have been several major actual pandemics in history. In 1918, in the last few months of World War 1, the Spanish Influenza pandemic killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, with more than 500,000 in the US alone. But what was scariest was its rapid devastation, how quickly the illness spread. And unlike most other less deadly influenza outbreaks, many otherwise healthy teens and vibrant young adults succumbed — and quickly. There were accounts of twenty-year-old workers on the job in the morning, and dead by nightfall.

There have of course been others: e.g., the Bubonic Plague, Cholera, Smallpox, HIV-AIDS. Of course, these were all precursors to our current pandemic: COVID.

 In Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, as in much of his poetry and prose, there are literal forces at work, as well as symbolic ones.  The Red Death is not just a literal disease; metaphorically, Poe uses it to represent the obsessive desire of the wealthy to be separated from the masses — to be immune from the disease of poverty. The rich want to be protected from the plague, but also protected from the needy, the ever-”troublesome” poor .  

In the Poe tale, the privileged wall themselves behind the battlements of Prince Prospero’s castle. Today,  they jet from gated mansion to mansion and tropical island to island to be protected from the teeming masses in seclusion- surrounded by only their private security forces. And of course, they may invite a complement of fawning courtiers, who provide that unquenchable need of the wealthy to be reminded continually of their greatness. These may include corporate CEOs, their stooges in Congress, or the newly anointed super-rich from the world of entertainment and sports. All the world is a Mar-a-Lago.

Ultimately though, most of the “one percent” doesn’t fret about epidemics. Forget COVID-19. Don’t sweat the annual Influenza pandemics, SARS, MERS, or any of the tropical mosquito-carried viruses creeping northward all the time ,thanks to an increasingly warming planet. Hidden away in walled mansions, the “one percent” may very well escape these pathogens. But there is one disease …

…And in Poe’s allegorical short story, It’s the inexorable, unrelenting, inevitable passage of time that cannot hold off a plague. It’s the knowledge of mortality.  It’s personification is the huge, ebony clock standing against the wall of a black-draped chamber within Prince Prospero’s castle- it’s pendulum swinging “… to and fro with a dull , heavy monotonous clang… .”

In the story, wanton Prince Prospero insidiously attempts to assuage the fears of his sychophantic courtiers with all manner of debauchery, but the on-the-hour clanging of the clock pervades: ” …  And there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused revery or meditation… “

It can be pretended that the acquisition of great wealth by the few doesn’t bring pain and suffering to the many. It will be continually denied that greed isn’t bringing the natural world to extinction. It will be pretended that there is little concern that a contagion will reach the oligarchs.  It will be denied and mocked by the wealthy, but,…

… Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made…

… and as Poe so vividly portrays at the end of his short story, the “red death” destroys the most privileged as it rages through their degeneracy. The gates of escape are welded shut, and they fall victim to the plague that even wealth and privilege cannot escape.:

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

In 1842, Poe wrote a metaphor for our times.

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