Who Is Prospero In The Masque Of The Red Death

Exploring Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, Prospero can be identified as an uncaring ruler. To the incisive reader, there is an implicit meaning within the text which creates strong suspicion that this man is deranged, for we are told that “Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious” (687 Poe) even though most of the people in his kingdom had been abolished by the Red Death. The same man, motivated by a morbid fear of death, selfishly decides to carry out the immorality of secluding himself from most of his subjects by evacuating with a thousand friends to avoid a similar fate. While in that state of quarantine, he preoccupies his carefully selected guests at a masked ball in the seven rooms of his imperial suite.
Biblically, the average lifetime consisted of seventy years, similarly to Shakespeare’s seven ages of man; it can be inferred that each of the prince’s seven rooms represent a decade of his life. Prospero’s abstract world is revealed through the ordering from east to west and can be further explored by understanding the colors chosen to engulf this unconventional
His greatest fear being death, he isolates himself from it, yet entertains the idea by decorating his suite in a visualization of his lifespan. The prince’s ball, a final attempt to construct beauty, signifies his artistic temperament that deteriorates to the inevitable cessation of life. If Prospero’s suite is a metaphor of nature and mortality, one naturally asks why the Prince, consumed by the concept of liberation from death, should have patterned his suite after the very reminders of mutability, decay, and the Red Death. Poe is writing a fable of the imagination striving to control and transform the corrosive elements of nature and to gain, through immortal beauty, the artist’s triumph over