Color Symbolisms of Diseases: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

Abstract

Four months before the publication of the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” in Graham’s Magazine, Edgar Allan Poe’s wife contracted tuberculosis. While singing at the piano, nineteen-year-old Virginia began coughing up blood (Quinn 347-48; Silverman 178-81). In the following months, Poe took to drinking heavily, which led to a period of alcoholic amnesia in June 1842 (Silverman 184; Kennedy 24, 45). “The Masque of the Red Death,” published in May 1842, bears the traces of Poe’s despair over his wife’s illness and his deepening dependence on alcohol. In this short story, the masque is brought to an abrupt end with the appearance of the Red Death, who lays low the revelers and dancers. Remarkable for its color symbolisms, this short story also reveals how the physical symptoms of diseases can provide visual cues to explore the unknown processes of transmission and infection. The color symbolisms can also be associated with the symptoms of epidemic diseases throughout nineteenth-century Europe and America. In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis (or consumption) was a widespread killer, leading to more deaths than cholera and smallpox combined (Byrne 1). Pulmonary tuberculosis caused a fifth of all deaths in England in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with deaths declining from 1830 (Byrne 12). In America, tuberculosis caused up to an estimated fourth of all deaths in the nineteenth century (Silverman 182). Katherine Byrne writes that, during this period, tuberculosis was “the biggest single killer of men and women in their physical and productive prime ... those aged between fifteen and thirty-five” (12). Both Poe’s parents likely died from tuberculosis in the early 1810s, shortly after his birth (Kennedy 19). Besides tuberculosis, cholera epidemics also spread through Europe and America from the early 1830s. Cholera had earlier struck Europe in 1832 before spreading to Canada and America in 1833. The various symptoms of these diseases invite literary exploration through color symbolism, which is a marked feature of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red