The Masque of the Red Death

Without was the "Red Death'" (Poe, 1982, 269). But the outside is transcendentally, not empirically, exterior: it's already inside you - there is no inside, that's the Horror ... Poe understood that, in the Master realm of idealism, everything is read as metaphor, signifier, symbol. Hence the vicious irony that the plague can come disguised as itself: 'the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death' (Poe, 1982, 272). It never occurs to Prince Prospero that security could be breached, that matter could interpose itself into the world of the ideal, so he assumes that the Red Death costume is simple impertinence. ''Who dares" - he demanded of the courtiers who stood near him - "Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery~ Seize him and unmask him ..." (Poe, 1982, 272). There is of course no true subject beneath the mask. The masque or fiction is the means by which the plague - abstract disorder, total disorganization - enters the frame, and destroys it. 'Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpselike mask, which they handled with so violent a mdeness, untenanted by any tangible fmm' (Poe, 1982, 273).