Poe in the time of Coronavirus

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The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
When I started this blog and throughout its life, I have resolved to focus exclusively on the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Today, I write about one of his short stories—“The Masque of the Red Death” (1842)—because of its relevancy given the Coronavirus pandemic. But I will also focus on its poetry rather than its value as a short story, and I will contrast the themes it presents with those I have analyzed in Poe’s verse.

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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