Poe in the time of Coronavirus
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| The Phantom of the Opera (1925) |
In times of COVID-19, it is impossible for a Poe buff not to think of The MRD. You have a highly infectious plague ravaging the planet. There is no test, no cure, and no stopping the spread of the contagion. The only recourse to those who wish to survive is to self-quarantine. But this is Poe, so the isolation is not behind hermetically sealed, Ebola-styled plastic enclosures, but—wait for it—in a “castellated abbey”. The quarantine party consists of Prince Prospero and a thousand of his closest friends in the nobility, who turn their medical seclusion into an extended abbey rave. However, at their titular masquerade ball, an uninvited stranger, who signifies and represents the Red Death, crashes the party.
The first striking passage in the story is the description of the plague. Coronavirus has nothing on the “Red Death,” TBH.
The "Red Death" had long devastated the country. No
pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its
seal — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden
dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The
scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were
the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his
fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were
the incidents of half an hour.
So, none of this 5.1 days’ incubation, 14 days till symptoms
arise, like with COVID-19. It’s half an hour and you’re out! Frankly, if you want to
approximate the symptoms of Coronavirus, you’re better off with Poe’s “For
Annie” (1849), which describes a condition similar to how doctors describe
COVID-19:
The sickness—the
nausea—
The pitiless pain—
Have ceased, with
the fever
That maddened my
brain
“For Annie” describes a real-life health crisis that Poe walked away from; “Red Death” has no such pretense to reality or realism—a point that becomes clear in the latter part of the story that we discuss below. But, here, at the start, we begin with a sharp, crisp, and somewhat black humor-laced deadpan of the description of the disease. This is vintage gothic stuff; there’s always some gallows witticism underlying the dread with a good goth, and Poe is the best goth.
Poe continues to bombard us with campy, melodramatic descriptions as he sets up the scene inside. Poe sets up a clean contrast: within the castle were safety and all manner of pleasures: “Without was the ‘Red Death’.” To his refugees/revelers, “the Prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure,” Poe tells us. “There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.” The descriptions continue—and intensify—around the masked ball:
There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and
appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There
was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something
of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To
and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams.
At the end, as noted, a mysterious masked stranger
representing The Red Death shows up unannounced and makes mincemeat of the revelers.
The scene is very reminiscent of that presented in Poe’s “The
Conqueror Worm” (1843), in which revels are interrupted by a monstrous predator:
But see, amid the
mimic rout
A crawling shape
intrude!
A blood-red thing
that writhes from out
The scenic
solitude!
Both The Worm and The Red Death are morbid archvillains and antiheroes that symbolize the inevitability of our mortality. Their grotesque triumph is a certainty in Poe-world, where “from a proud tower in the town/Death looks gigantically down” (“The City in the Sea,” 1831).
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