"The Masque of the Red Death" and the Disappearance of "A Fantasy"

“The Masque of the Red Death” has been my favorite Poe work since I was old enough to read. However, reading it in conjunction with Pasteur, Holmes, Semmelweis (and Chadwick last week) has made me aware for the first time of the story’s medical and historical contexts.

Whenever I have encountered Poe’s “plague” story, it has always been titled “The Masque of the Red Death.” However, the story included in Otis is “The Mask of the Red Death,” and is subtitled “A Fantasy.” Confronted with the difference in titles, I did a little detective work, and visited the Baltimore Poe Society’s website (which I have found useful in researching Poe) at eapoe.org. I found that the story was published under two titles. “The Mask of the Red Death” (subtitled “A Fantasy”) was published in Graham’s magazine in 1842. Three years later, Broadway Journal published the story under the altered title of “The Masque of the Red Death.” The historical record seems to indicate that this word change and the deletion of the phrase “A Fantasy” were made at Poe’s request. In 1850, a year after Poe’s death, Rufus Griswold published Poe’s collected Works, including this story under the later title “The Masque of the Red Death.” Like the Broadway Journal’s title, the phrase “A Fantasy” is missing from Griswold’s publication. Griswold’s choice of title became customary to employ when printing this Poe tale.

Although title changes may seem at first to be ephemeral to interpreting the whole of Poe’s story, I believe that Poe’s decision to alter the story’s title is crucial to interpreting the emotions he may have wished to evoke in the minds of his readers. Literary critics have often commented on this Poe title and its allusionary significance. Critics like G.R. Thompson (editor of Norton’s The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe) have largely agreed in their interpretations of the change from Mask to Masque, citing that this change is indicative of Poe’s attempt to evoke the literary form of “the Renaissance courtly masque…[in which] It was the custom to perform masked balls and plays that symbolized the interpretation of the realms of Heaven, Earth, and Hell” (see Thompson’s introduction the this story in the Norton edition, page 299). I believe that the disappearance of the phrase “A Fantasy” has a different effect on the narrative. During Poe’s era, the reality of cholera epidemics in America and across Europe could not be avoided. It is this absences of Fantasy, this inescapable reality of death and loss that makes “The Masque of the Red Death” even more terrifying as a “reality” than if it were read as a “fantasy,” a fable of the unsympathetic and proud aristocracy receiving their just desserts, as it were, for ignoring the suffering surrounding them.

Poe’s deletion of “A Fantasy” also indicates that Poe may have been aware (or originally inspired) by true events. Scholars locate an interesting document that may hold a clue to Poe’s inspiration for “The Mask of the Red Death.” In the June 2, 1832 edition of the New York Mirror, an article was published anonymously and titled “First Impressions of Europe: The Cholera—A Masque Ball—the gay world—Mobs—Visit to Hotel Dieu.” Literary critics and historians assume that Poe read this article because his work had been reviewed in the Mirror in 1831 and he contributed to the New Mirror at least three times in 1843. The 1841 article describes the cholera outbreak in Paris, including a masque ball in which “there was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera-galopade” and “one man, immensely tall, dressed as the personification of the Cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence” (Mirror 389). This description of the masque is compelling, but the author’s later description of the “constant succession of funerals” and of his visit to the sick, dying, and dead in the Hotel Dieu, gives the reader insight into the sheer number of casualties caused by cholera epidemics. The author’s observation that the poor in Paris make up a large number of the casualties echoes Chadwick’s declaration of cholera in Britain: “The amount of pauper sickness in considerable, the deaths not few” (Otis 169).

Like the masque described in the 1832 Mirror article, Poe’s Masque is centered on the gay revelry of the upper classes during the epidemic of a disease to which doctors are unaware of methods for prevention and in which treatment is virtually nonexistent. The author of “First Impressions” describes his relief upon leaving the Hotel Dieu when he writes that “the suffering and misery I had seen oppressed and half smothered me.” But there is manner of escape for the revelers in Poe’s story. Poe’s last paragraph reveals the inescapability of the sickness despite the extensive precautions taken to bar the epidemic from reaching the revelry (see page 172). The last paragraph of Poe’s story is an allusion to two bible passages: “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night…And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Otis 177).This passage echoes 1 Thessalonians 5: 2-5,

(2) For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. (3) For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. (4) But ye brethren are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a thief in the night (King James Version).

Poe’s last paragraph also echoes 2 Peter 3: 10- 11,

(10) But the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works therein shall be burned up. (11) Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolve, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness (12) Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God (KJV).

Thus is it appropriate that the coming of the Red Death is described with the word “Avator” (Otis 171), the definition of which indicates the descent of a deity to earth, the incarnation of a god, or a concrete manifestation of an abstraction or of something outside or above the natural world (OED). The Red Death as symbol of the cholera epidemics sweeping the world is as inscrutable as a god. Without an understanding of how cholera was transmitted, how to prevent it, or how to treat it, the plague became nearly unstoppable, claiming hundreds of victims a day and coming like “a thief in the night.” The disappearance of the subtitle “A Fantasy” in the title of Poe’s story is an indication of just how real and terrifying cholera was to the people of the nineteenth century, who could neither explain nor control the disease, and who through their ignorance, were unable to prevent thousands of deaths around the world.