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A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

On Tuesday, we put together a brief plot summary of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ , Edgar Allan Poe’s short but terrifying story about a prince who retreats to his castellated abbey with a thousand of his courtiers, to avoid the horrific and fast-acting plague known as the ‘Red Death’. You can read Poe’s story here . Now, it’s time for some words of analysis concerning this intriguing story which, like many of Poe’s best stories, seems to work on several levels.

First, there is the literary precedent for the basis of Poe’s story: the Italian writer Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work The Decameron is about a group of noblemen and noblewomen who retreat to an abbey to flee the plague, or Black Death. All that’s changed in Poe’s basic setup is the colour of the plague, to the fictional ‘Red Death’. Interestingly, Poe originally titled the story ‘The Mask of the Red Death’, which places the emphasis on the masked figure who shows up at the end; in replacing ‘Mask’ with ‘Masque’, Poe shifts the focus onto the masquerade which Prospero stages for his courtiers. (A masque doesn’t have to involve wearing masks: it was a private ball popular in Italy for many centuries. Masks were optional.)

The fact that Prince Prospero and his wealthy entourage all believe they can avoid the Red Death – that they can, indeed, cheat death itself – is obviously naive hubris (although they were very far from being wealthy, it’s worth bearing in mind that when Poe wrote ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ in 1842, his wife Virginia had recently been diagnosed with tuberculosis – another then incurable disease involving blood, specifically when victims coughed up blood). Nobody, young or old, rich or poor, can escape the clutches of plague (or tuberculosis). And, indeed, nobody’s riches will prevent them from death – and this is clearly what the masked figure symbolises at the end of the story.

Prince Prospero, the only named character in the whole of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, has a name which immediately has two related meanings. ‘Prospero’ suggests prosperous and prosperity , reminding us that the character is a prince, wealthy, and able to shut himself away with a thousand of his closest friends to sit out the plague that’s ravaging the city. But the most famous Prospero in literature is the magician in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest . Is there an intertextual allusion going on here? Might Poe have intended to summon (as it were) Shakespeare’s island-dwelling mage?

We can almost certainly respond with a firm ‘yes’. For Poe’s Prince Prospero, like the exiled duke and magician of Shakespeare’s play, becomes insulated or ‘islanded’ in the abbey where he walls himself and his followers up: both Prosperos are thus set apart from the rest of the world, and both are noblemen who use their power to control those around them, to create their own world, in a sense. But the ironic twist in Poe’s tale is that it is ‘rough magic’, or at least some supernatural force, which destroys his Prince Prospero, in the form of the intangible masked visitor who breaches the walls of the abbey and kills everyone there.

But the thing about the Red Death is that it can strike people down before they’ve had a chance to experience all seven stages of their threescore years and ten, so there’s something unsatisfying about this analysis. Instead, perhaps the colour symbolism is where Poe wants us to place significance: the first room is blue, and then, we learn,

The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange – the fifth with white – the sixth with violet.

Although these colours don’t precisely correspond to the colours of the spectrum – the rainbow, if you will – the presence of violet, and the significance of the number seven, imply the idea of totality, of all colours being present. These colours are a reminder of the gaudiness of the Prince’s life: he has the money to be able to afford such rare colours as royal purple (and this cluster of rooms is called, remember, an imperial suite).

But it’s the presence of red in that seventh and final room which is the most significant detail:

The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet – a deep blood color.

Black for death; red for the Red Death. And the black velvet of those tapestries adorning the walls – the walls of the room in which Prince Prospero and all of his friends will meet their doom – suggests the softness of death, the ease with which life slips away from those afflicted by the Red Death (death can occur in as little as half an hour, we’re told at the beginning of the story).

But all of this assumes that the events in the story really happened . Did they? Obviously on a literal level they didn’t, because Edgar Allan Poe made them up. But did Prince Prospero actually dream or hallucinate everything: the masquerade, the abbey with its coloured chambers, the ‘intangible’ visitant who kills everyone? Is it probable that a prince, even a ridiculously wealthy one, would really be able to hole himself up in one of his residences with a thousand companions? Perhaps.

But several details give us pause. First, we are told of Prince Prospero, ‘There are some who would have thought him mad.’ Second, there is the dreamlike aspect to everything in those colourful rooms:

To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these – the dreams – writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away – they have endured but an instant – and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods.

Poe was attracted to the idea of the palace as a symbol of the mind: he even wrote a poem, ‘The Haunted Palace’ , which uses this very metaphor as a way of exploring his own troubled mind. Could the final surprise in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ be that the events which we are told never happened at all, except in the mind of the ‘mad’ Prince Prospero? Poe was a pioneer of the ambiguous supernatural tale, as ‘ The Tell-Tale Heart ’, ‘ William Wilson ’, and others testify. He often leaves a story open for doubt as to whether what we have been told is reliable, or whether the events of the story really were supernatural, or merely the product of a character’s unsound mind.

The story, then, is ambiguous: it invites both a supernatural and psychological interpretation. However, one final piece of evidence might be submitted in favour of a psychological analysis: Prospero’s name. If he does summon Shakespeare’s magician, he summons someone who is capable of dreaming up the world he inhabits, through magic. Does Prince Prospero dream up the abbey and its coloured rooms, through the power of his own troubled imagination? We’d be wise to remember Prospero’s own words from Shakespeare’s play:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

If you found this analysis of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ helpful, you might also enjoy our discussion of Poe’s classic story ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ .

7 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’”

A pithy analysis of this fascinating story. I always enjoy the colour imagery, and your suggestion that the whole thing was a dream or hallucination is a new one for me.

Thank you, Audrey :) And I think Poe was a pioneer of that supernatural/psychological explanation for many of the phenomena in his tales. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ is a great example of that ambiguity – later to be used to great effect by Henry James in his The Turn of the Screw.

I hadn’t connected the rooms with Jacques poem, instead I thought of the the seven deadly sins list: https://www.britannica.com/topic/seven-deadly-sins I wonder which one influenced Poe.

That’s a much more attractive interpretation – as you’ll see, I found something unsatisfying in the Seven Ages interpretation, but couldn’t think of a more convincing reason. I think the Seven Deadly sins makes much more sense. I’ll have to add that to the post. Thanks!

Knowing Poe, I think the Seven Deadly Sins makes sense.

Well done and interesting. What goes through my practical mind is, how many servants would be required to tend to 1000 guests,? But if it is a dream or a supernatural occurrence, no problem.

Thanks, Marie! That’s a very good point. I don’t know whether the servants are numbered among the thousand (as part of that extensive retinue of hangers-on, entertainers, and fellow nobles). As you say, if the whole thing is an elaborate dream/delusion, such a practical concern is easily explained away!

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Edgar Allan Poe

Literature Notes
"The Masque of the Red Death"
Edgar Allan Poe Biography
About Poe's Short Stories
Summary and Analysis
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
"The Purloined Letter"
"The Tell-Tale Heart"
"The Black Cat"
"The Cask of Amontillado"
"William Wilson"
"The Pit and the Pendulum"
Critical Essays
Edgar Allan Poe and Romanticism
Poe's Critical Theories
Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis "The Masque of the Red Death"

In "The Masque of the Red Death," Poe presents an age-old theme, a theme as old as the medieval morality play Everyman. In this ancient play, the main character is named Everyman and early in the play while walking down the road, he meets another character called Death. Everyman cries out to him: "O Death, thy comest when I had thee least in mind." Similarly, Poe's story deals with the inevitability of death and the futility of trying to escape death. This essential theme is presented directly and with extreme economy through the plot, or narrative element. This is the method that Poe chose to achieve his unity of effect (see section on Poe's "Critical Theories").

The story opens with a recounting of a plague, the "Red Death"; it has long been devastating the country, and the narrator describes the process of the disease, emphasizing the redness of the blood and the scarlet stains. The disease is so deadly rapid that one is dead within thirty minutes after he is infected. Thus, in the short opening paragraph, Poe uses such words as devastated, pestilence, fatal, hideous, horror of blood, sharp pains, profuse bleeding, scarlet stains, victim, disease and death — and all these words, gathered together, create an immediate effect of the horror of death caused by the "Red Death."

In contrast, we hear that Prince Prospero, a name that connotes happiness and prosperity, has summoned a thousand of his "lighthearted friends" from the nobility to join him in a "castellated abbey" which has strong and lofty walls and "gates of iron." The prince has very carefully provided entertainment of all types, and they are all happy and secure within, while outside the "Red Death" is rampaging.

After setting the tone, Poe next underscores his theme by suggesting the folly of these foolish people who think that they can escape death by such physical barriers as high walls and iron gates. The contrast of the gaiety within and the ravaging death outside, as described at the beginning of the story, contributes to the overall effect the author is after. Likewise, the people are entertained by the merriment of a "masked" ball, described in almost surrealistic terms. Many critics have looked for a consistent symbolic pattern in the seven rooms in which the ball is held, but Poe eschewed elaborate symbolic structures and, instead, worked for a unity of effect. One method he often used for this effect was to have his stories take place in a closed circle where one has the impression of there being no escape. Consequently, the inhabitants are locked inside the castle by the high walls and the gates of iron, and they are further enclosed during the ball by the circular, enclosed seven halls. Accordingly, when the stranger, masked as "the Red Death," walks through the room, he passes in close proximity to all of the revelers.

The importance of the seven rooms lies in the seventh and, therefore, the last room. As the narrator describes the rooms, we are told that the window panes look out onto the hall rather than the outside world, and that they take on the colors and hues of the decoration of each room. The first room is decorated in blue and the stained glass has a blue hue. The second is purple and so "the panes are purple." And this continues through the green room (third), the orange room (fourth), the white room (fifth), and the violet room (sixth). However, the seventh room is different. Here the apartment is "shrouded in black velvet," but the panes are "scarlet — a deep blood-color." Furthermore, this black chamber is the most westernly and "the effect of the firelight upon the blood tinted panes is ghastly in the extreme, and produces so wild a look upon the countenance of those who enter it that there are few . . . bold enough to set foot within it."

Poe's purpose in these descriptions, particularly the black room, has no relation to reality. In reality, no such place as the black room would be used as a part of a ballroom. But Poe wants to achieve an effect — a total, unified effect — in order to show the close proximity of the revelry of life and the masquerade to the inevitability of death itself.

As noted above, therefore, regardless of whether or not the first six rooms have any symbolic function, the significance of the seventh room cannot escape the reader's attention. Black usually symbolizes death, and it is usually used in connection with death. Moreover, in describing the black decor of the room, the narrator says that it is shrouded in velvet, shrouded being a word always referring to death. Likewise, the window panes are "scarlet — a deep blood color." This is an obvious reference to the "Red Death." When the masked "Red Death" makes his appearance, he moves rapidly from the Eastern room (symbolic of the beginning of life) to the Western room (symbolic of the end of life). In conjunction with man's quick and brief journey through life is the rapid passing of time, represented by the black clock; every time the clock strikes the hour, the musicians quit playing and all of the revelers momentarily cease their celebrating. It is as though each hour is "to be stricken" upon their brief and fleeting lives. To emphasize the brevity of life, the fleeting of life and time, and the nearness of death, Poe reminds the reader that between the striking of each hour, there elapses "three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies."

In spite of all things, the masqueraders continue their gaiety and revelry. Here, note Poe's description: The guests have donned costumes that are often grotesque; there is "much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm"; there are "arabesque figures" and "madman fashions." Poe describes the party in terms of "delirious fancies" and as "beautiful . . . wanton . . . bizarre . . . terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust." These descriptions are reminiscent of orgies which are described in other great Romantic works (in Goethe's Faust, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Byron's Childe Harold, for example). Furthermore, because the maskers are so bizarre themselves, when the mask of the "Red Death" appears, it is shocking. The reader discovers that this "guest" is even more fantastic and strange than all the other guests. He is horrendous by comparison. Significantly, the appearance of the "Red Death" at midnight is propitious and symbolic. This is the end of the day and, by analogy, the end of life. His appearance strikes a note of "terror, of horror, and of disgust." The figure is "shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave." His mask is that of a corpse which, we gather, died from the Red Death and to create more horror, his entire outfit is sprinkled with blood and "all the features of the face were besprinkled with the scarlet horror." Again, the reader should note how effectively Poe, by his choice of words, captures man's universal fear of death and its horrors.

When Prince Prospero sees the stranger, he is indignant at such an intrusion. (It would almost be too simplistic to say that all people are indignant at the intrusion of death on their lives.) The prince immediately instructs the stranger to be seized, but all are universally frightened to seize this Red Death. Infuriated, the prince draws a dagger and rushes 'hurriedly through the six chambers," but as he approaches the figure, his dagger stops, and he falls dead upon the black carpet. The other revelers fall upon the black "mummer" but to their "unutterable horror," they find nothing under the shrouds or behind the corpse-like mask. One by one, all of them drop dead. The "Red Death," Poe tells us, holds "illimitable dominion over all."

Poe's story possesses no real characters. The greatness of the story lies in his use of an age-old theme — the inevitability of death — and in the way that Poe creates and maintains a total unity of effect, he brings us into the horror of the story.

The story makes no effort to present a realistic view of any known aspect of life. We do not even know what country the story takes place in, but, due to the name of the prince, we assume it to be a southern European country. The story achieves credibility simply through Poe's powerful unity of effect that he creates so marvelously. Each word of each description contributes to one single, unified mood of fear and horror. An atmosphere of strangeness, a bizarre situation, and an evocative style all combine to make this one of Poe's most effective stories.

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Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story Essay

Edgar Alan Poe’s short story The Masque of Red Death is a unique piece, allowing the reader to experience Gothic fiction and analyze death’s inevitability through the author’s allegoric instruments. The central topic of the plague sets a specific mood to the story, helping a reader better understand the content and writing setting. The spirit is reflected through the writer’s tone, which directly represents their subjective perspectives.

The tone of The Masque of Red Death starts to translate from a story’s title, anticipated to be dark and grievous. Indeed, the opening lines indulge a dreadful mood, followed by a permanent feeling of intimidation: 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” (Poe 1). The narration sets a mysterious tone, with Poe’s vivid imagery easily controlling the reader’s attention through suspense.

One of the most mysterious symbolist elements in the story describes the seven coloured rooms. Each reader may elaborate on their perception of the colors; however, a common point of view is the representation of seven life stages, starting from birth to death. For instance, black and blood-red rooms exemplify death and life intensity. However, with no Poe’s elaboration on the symbolism, each reader is left to reckoning on the individual meaning, which induces mystical and somewhat anxious tones.

The Red Death is one of Poe’s primary symbolist elements, which unmistakably is a representation of death. The author’s detailed portrayal of death attracts and simultaneously intimidates the reader, setting a frightful and ominous mood of the overall story: “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night” (Poe 4). The Red Death image haunts the reader through the short story, constantly leaving a haunting feeling of inevitable death.

The tone of the story is an essential tool for each writer for setting the correct atmosphere for readers, which Edgar Alan Poe masterly did in The Masque of Red Death. Throughout the story, the mysterious and dreadful symbolism retains the reader’s attention, constantly anticipating the next plot twist. The overall dark and menacing tone of the piece manifests itself, especially in the ending, where everyone dies. Thus, the mood is easily identified, expressing a frustrating deadly mood.

Works Cited

Poe, Edgar Alan. The Masque of the Red Death . 1850. ASU Public Library . Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, September 17). Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mood-in-poes-the-masque-of-red-death-short-story/

"Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story." IvyPanda , 17 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/mood-in-poes-the-masque-of-red-death-short-story/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story'. 17 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story." September 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mood-in-poes-the-masque-of-red-death-short-story/.

1. IvyPanda . "Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story." September 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mood-in-poes-the-masque-of-red-death-short-story/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story." September 17, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mood-in-poes-the-masque-of-red-death-short-story/.

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The Masque of the Red Death

Background of the Story

“The Masque of the Red Death” was published in 1842 by an American writer Edger Allan Poe. The story is an account of Prince Prospero, who tries to avoid the dangerous plague, the Red Death, to hit his abbey. Along with many other nobles, he hosts a masquerade ball in seven differently decorated rooms. In the middle of the party, a mysterious figure enters the party in a disguise of the victim of Red Death visits each of the rooms. After confronting the stranger, Prosper dies, and the guests also die.

The short stories of Edgar Allan Poe are written in the tradition of Gothic fiction. These stories are often analyzed as an allegory that shows the inevitability of death. Various interpretations of the story have been presented by critics and readers. The readers attempt to find the true nature of the disease.

Initially, the story was published in Graham’s Magazine in May 1842. Since then, the story has been adapted in many different forms, including a film in 1964. This story has been eluded by many other literary works.

The story “The Masque of the Red Death” has been directly influenced by The Castle of Otranto , a Gothic novel by Horace Walpole. In the story, Poe employed many traditional elements of Gothic fiction that also include the castle setting. The many single-toned rooms of the castle symbolize the human mind and show different types of personalities.

In the short story, there is an imagery of blood and time which shows the corporeality. The plague symbolizes the typical characteristics of human life and death, which makes the story an allegory of man’s useless attempt to prevent death. There are many disputes over the interpretation of the short story. Some assume the story should not be interpreted as an allegory, as it will make it didactic. Poe has a distaste for morality, and if there is any moral lesson in the story, it has not been explicitly stated.

The Masque of the Red Death Summary

The story opens with the account of the plague in a fictional country. A disease named Red Death plagues the whole country. The victims of the disease quickly die in a horrible state. Even though the disease is quickly spreading in the country, Prince Prosper does not appear to be worried about it. He orders to lock the gates of the palace so no disease could enter the palace, and ignores that his people are dying of the disease.

After some months, Prince Prospero throws a masquerade party along with some other wealthy aristocrats. For the party, he decorates the seven rooms of his palace in seven different colors. He decorates the easternmost room in blue with blue windows. The other room is decorated in purple color with purple windows. Moving towards the westward, the rooms are decorated in the color order are green, orange, white, and violet.

The seventh room is painted in black with red windows. In this room, there is an ebony clock. The clock rings each, and the sound of the clock is so loud and distracting that everyone stops talking; even the orchestra stops playing. They appear to be so beautiful and filled with dreams when the clock is not ringing. Most of the guests avoid going into the black-and-red room as it contains the clock and has an ominous atmosphere.

A new guest appears at midnight. He is dressed more chillingly and darkly than the other. His mask appears to be a face of the corpse and wears a garment resembling the funeral shroud. His face has spots of blood that suggests that he has been a victim of Red Death. The sight of the new guest makes Prospero angry. He is amused about how someone can join the party with such low humor and levity.

However, the other guests are so afraid of the masked man and cannot prevent him from going into the rooms. Prosper, eventually, catches the guest in the black-and-red room. Prosper dies as soon as he meets/confronts the figure. When other people at the party go inside the room to attack the masked man, they find that there is nobody in the costume. Everyone at the party dies and the Red Death has crept into the castle. There is a victory of “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death.”

Characters Analysis

Prince prospero.

Prince Prospero is a wealthy aristocrat. He tries to prevent the Red Death by locking the gates of the palace. However, he ultimately becomes the victim of the Red Death. Prospero’s wealth and riches turn out to be insufficient against the natural cycle of life and death.

The kingdom of Prince Prosper is devastated by the plague that results in the loss of the population. Instead of helping and supporting his people in such a difficult time, Prince Prospero locks himself in his palace to hide from the problems. He let the external world take care of itself.

He sends a special invitation to the nobleman and ladies to avoid the disease and have a party in his palace. His subjects are dying of illness and hunger while the elite class is throwing parties behind the walls of the palace. When the last guest arrives, he shuts the door of the palace so as to protect himself. The party ends in a tragedy when an unnamed and uninvited guest arrives and kills all the people.

Prosper’s character is in conflict when he decides that he has nothing to do with the world outside. He puts himself at odds with society to avoid death. He behaves unethically by thinking that he is above his subject and does not want to die like them. Prospero does not appear to be a poor Prince; he is also an indecent human. The ultimate focus of the king is survival. He tries to assure his survival through any means.

Nature appears to respond to the ignorance of the prince and send death for him. He and his companions in the palace think that they are above death; however, death manages to find them.

Mysterious guest

The mysterious guest that arrives at the end of the party is the embodiment of the Red Death. He is dressed more chillingly and darkly than the other. His mask appears to be a face of the corpse and wears a garment resembling the funeral shroud. His face has spots of blood that suggests that he has been a victim of Red Death.

This mysterious guest brings death for the people who shut their eyes on the miseries of other people and deny their own death.

Death as Natural and Inevitable

In the short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” the image of the Red Death is used to cast horror in the story and shows death as a villain. However, death is also shown as a natural and inevitable part of life. The Red Death is connected to life by blood as blood is the vital component of the body and the Avatar of the disease. It is impossible for life to exist without blood.

The connection between life and death is emphasized by the arrival of death at midnight. Since midnight ends the previous day, it also starts the new day. Death is also the end of physical life and the beginning of spiritual life after death. Death not only has “illimitable dominion,” it is natural as well, and nobody can avoid it no matter how much one tries to avoid it.

The Red Death as a Moral Decay

The privileged class of people is shown in the story in the character of Prince Prospero and his friends. Such people try to avoid plague/death by using money. However, the true nature of the disease is not mentioned in the story. Blood is mentioned, and the “Avatar and seal” of the Red Death. This statement carries a dual meaning. The blood can be taken in a literal sense of it can be a reference to the bloodlines.

In the short story, the abandonment of the poor common people and living a hedonistic lifestyle makes the nobility immoral. The ending of the story can be taken as a sort of divine judgment. And the gruesome demise of Prospero and his friends can be attributed to their arrogance.

Safety is an Illusion

The mansions or palaces in which Prospero and his friends live is isolated from the common community and does not contain any reminder of the death or Red Death. The people dwelling in these palaces are sounded by distractions like parties and wine. They try to forget about their problems and other problems through these distractions.

Such a description of the time highlights that Prospero and his friends believe that they have escaped death. They allow themselves to be less attentive to the passage of time. However, the black-and-red room and the ebony clock shows the fragility of this illusion. Both of these things intrude on the world of fantasy in which Prospero and his friends have created for themselves.

The ebony clock functions as a reminder that they are constantly pushed towards death; even the black room is a symbol of death. Moreover, the aggressive reaction of the people to the masked figures shows how far they can go hide from death and preserve their illusion.

As shown by the title, the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is about death. Everywhere in the story, we see that there is death. The story opens with the description of the Red Death and closes with the dominance of death. The story is filled with images and symbols of death, which consistently reminds the characters and reads that death cannot be avoided.

The characters struggle to avoid death by ignoring and escaping. They preferred to focus on living life at its fullest. However, it is not possible to avoid mortality. They are reminded of the death when the Red Death crashes the party.

Versions of Reality

The setting and atmosphere described by Edgar Allan Poe in the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” appears to be dreamlike rather than real. There is no small part of the dreamlike vision; the readers are constantly drawn towards the imaginary world of Prince Prosper as the story progresses.

Prince Prospero is an unconventional artistic figure. He appears to be mad as everything in the throws in the masquerade ball bears the mark of his artistic genius. The ball is held in the seven elaborated colored room in a writhing, whirling, costumed masquerades. Everything in the party appears to be imagined and fantastic, just like a dream or world of art that has spun out of control.

In this world, like the world of dream and art, everything has a symbolic meaning. It is impossible to figure out what is real and what is imaginary in this world – the product of the half-mad mind of Prospero. Moreover, there is an overlap of the imagination of Poe and the imagination of Prospero.

The main purpose of writing the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is to create dread and fear in the hearts of readers. The story starts with the description of the dreadful disease and then builds straight to the dark climax of the story.

In the fantastic world of the story, there is nothing that makes the readers feel home. There is no source of comfort and stability. Everything is dreadful and horrifying. The fear of the readers is reflected in fear of the guests of the masquerade party towards their death and the things that remind them of their death. The fears of the characters are built in a noticeable manner. Their fear starts as a nervous discomfort to an “unutterable horror” at the climax of the story.

Foolishness and Folly

The main character of the story, Prince Prospero, lives his life mainly for pleasure, and so as his friends. They only believe in enjoying life and not to think and grieve about the poor lives of people dying from the plague. They do not give time to ponder on death. And when the plague hits the country, they lock themselves in their palaces and start partying with alcohol and buffoons. Poe creates his horrifying story by contrasting the happy-go-lucky court of the Prospero, who believes that they can easily avoid death and the looming presence of death.

Literary Analysis

Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is an allegory and features a set of recognizable imagery and symbols. When combined together, the symbols and imagery convey a message. An allegorical story always has two layers of meaning: the literal or the surface meaning and the symbolic meaning, which also involves complex philosophical concepts.

Considering “the Masque of the Red Death” as an allegory of life and death and the helplessness of humans to avoid death, the Red Death is the symbol of both literal and allegorical death. The story illustrates the idea that no matter how large and beautiful the castle is, how much luxurious food and clothing you have, humans are mortal, and every mortal has to die one day, whether you are a prince of an ordinary human being.

Considering the story in another sense, the story intends to punish the arrogant beliefs of Proper that he can utilize his wealth to avoid death, a natural and tragic process of life. This arrogance combines with his insensitivity to the problems and plight of poor countrymen. Even though he has the wealth to help the poor people, he uses wealth to protect himself. His self-indulgence to give a masquerade party shows him like a caged animal that has no possibility of escape.

The rooms of Prospero’s palace are situated in series symbolizing the stages of life. By arranging the room from east to west, Poe tries to make a point. This progression symbolically represents the life cycle of the day as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Moreover, the night in the story symbolizes death.

The progression of Prospero and his guests from east to west symbolizes the progression of humans from birth to death. The Last room in the palace is crafted in such a way that the guest fears it just like they fear death. Moreover, the ebony clock that is presided over the room is a constant reminder of the final judgment of death. The bell rings hourly and reminds the guest of passing the time.

In many stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the naming of characters and things contributes to assign symbolic meaning to the context of the story. Such naming also suggests another allegorical interpretation. For example, the name of Prince Prosper suggests financial prosperity. However, he exploits his own wealth to avoid the Red Death. The way he tries to protect his palace from destruction suggests the economic system that is doomed to fail forever.

Poe also portrays the hierarchical relationship between the peasantry and Prospero. He shows how unfair the feudal system is. He also points out the lavish lifestyle of the aristocracy and the suffering of the poor. The way Poe uses the feudal imagery in the story is historically accurate. When the actual Bubonic plague overwhelmed Europe in the fourteenth century, the feudal system was at its peak. The disease the Red Death shows radical egalitarianism as it attacks both poor and rich. The same is the case with the present-day coronavirus.

Along with the color red, blood serves to have a dual symbolism. It represents both life and death. This symbol is emphasized by the masked figure. The masked figure does not explicitly state that he is the Red Death; however, he is the only partygoer in the costume of Red Death. The Mask figure makes his initial appearance in the easternmost room, which is then painted in blue color – the blue color is often associated with birth.

The “Red Death”

The Red Death is a fictitious disease. The disease has been described as “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” that leads to death within half an hour.

At the time the story “The Masquerade of the Death Red” was written, Poe’s wife Virginia was suffering from the disease of tuberculosis. This disease could have been a source for the Red Death in the story. Just like Prince Prosper, Poe ignored the true nature of the disease. Poe’s brother William, his mother Eliza, and his foster mother Frances, died because of tuberculosis.

Moreover, the red Death may also represent Cholera. The epidemic of cholera breaks in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1831. Poe witnessed this epidemic. However, some readers and critics also suggest that the disease refers to the bubonic plague that breaks in Europe in the fourteenth century. This thought of bubonic plague is emphasized when at the climax of the story features Red Death in the black room.

A scholar also gives an explanation by describing the Red Death, not as a disease but the weakness of man that is shared by humankind.

The tone of the short story “The Masquerade of the Red Death” is grave, dark, and ominous. At moments the tone also becomes delirious. From the start, the short story is dreadfully serious. The story is ominous as it is impossible to escape from the looming threat. Moreover, the dark tone of the dark setting is also prevalent. For example, the opening lines of the story are read as:

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.

Moreover, the imagery of the story is dreamy to the extent that the narrator appears to be caught up in the delirium and dizzying whirl of the masquerade he is narrating and describing.

The short story “the Masquerade of the Red Death” belongs to the genre of Gothic fiction, literary fiction, and fantasy. The story got the feel of Gothic as everything appears to be dark, scary, vague, and threatening. The narrator does not narrate a comfortable moment in the story. The readers do not feel at home at all while reading the story. Like any Gothic story, there is a castle that has creepy and “dark images,” which makes the story terrifying.

Moreover, the story also contains supernatural elements that appear to most of the gothic stories. All these Gothic elements and supernatural stuff makes the “fantastic.” Thus one can say the “The Masque of Red Death” is literary fiction because of its experimental and usual form. The story appears to be more about the setting and atmosphere than the plot and characters.

Title of the Story

The title of the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” represents the masquerade ball. In the party, someone shows up in a costume of a victim of Red Death. The masked figure actually turns out to be the Read Death that kills all the people at the party.

The title of the story originally was “The Mask of the Red Death.” In order to emphasize the costume of the Red Death that he wears on the ball then the ball itself, Poe changes the word “Mask” to Masque.”

The setting of the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is a palace or the castle which is remote and cut off from the rest of the world. It is situated in a kingdom that is struck by the plague and death.

The short story is set in the luxurious “castellated abbey” Prince Prospero which is hidden somewhere in the kingdom. The doors of the castle are shut so that no one can enter the house. Everyone in the house is having a party while poor people outside the castle are dying.

The main action of the story takes place in the seven differently painted rooms of the castle. Prospero holds the party in the seven rooms designed by Prospero and runs in a line from east to west. However, the alignment is roughly irregular. The lighting of the castle is also interesting. On either side of the room, there is only one window in each room. The candles are placed to light each room and are placed outside the room; therefore, it creates a unique effect.

The most unique and memorable thing about the rooms is that each room has a different color theme. All of the decoration and paint in a room is of one color. The easternmost room is blue in color, and the next ones are in a color sequence of purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black.

The window of each room is painted with the same color; however, the last room has red windows with black decoration. Moreover, the room also contains a horrifying clock that rings at every hour. The black room is the horrifying room and symbolizes death.

The main goal of such a complicated setting was to produce an effect on the readers. As the story is all about setting and atmosphere, the effect of such a setting is very much important and matters.

Writing Style

The writing style of the story “The Masque of Red Death” is precisely composed, elegant, and colorful. The writing of Poe has two parts: color and line or structure, just like a painter. In the story, everything is clearly described, and the structure has no vagueness at all. The structure is composed and put together into one large unit from lots of individual units. The story is beautifully divided into both sentence-level and paragraph level.

Most of the paragraphs of Poe are either very short or very long. Even the long paragraphs deal with only a single thing. For example, the first paragraph deals with the Red Death, the second paragraph deals with Prospero’s castle retreat, the third is short; the fourth describes the suite, and so on.

The paragraphs contain short sentences with simple structures. The sentences appear to be like an atom, each with one or two details. Sometimes, the sentences also form a list of details. For example:

“There was much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm –much of what has been since seen in “Hernani.” 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.”

The sentences of Poe are identical because of their simple structure and appear to be small.

Edgar Allan Poe then fills the clear and simple structure with color. The word choice he has in his stories makes his writing colorful. Sometimes it also depends on the dramatic quality or vividness of the words, for example, “arabesque figures” and delirious fancies.” Also, in the figurative language, he used it in his stories.

The spot-on word choice adds feelings to his works and shows how well put-together his work is. Everything appears to be selected with great care.

Quite often, Poe also produces one monstrous sentence. For example, in the fifth paragraph of the story, there is a sentence that is very long:

“Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken,…, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound;… and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation.”

This sentence is the perfect example of how Poe puts the details in his writings. Poe loves to use lots of descriptive words, even if the sentence is short. For example, while describing the swing of the pendulum, he uses more than one adjective as “a dull, heavy, monotonous clang.”

Ultimately, one can say that the writing style of Edgar Allan Poe is extremely elegant.

Narrator Point of View

The short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is narrated by the third person omniscient narrator. The narrator is not a part of the story or occupies any particular character. He does not have anything to do with the characters at all. The narrator appears to be interested in describing the setting of the Masquerade party. He takes a “birds-eye” view of the guests of the party rather than lodging in the head of any of these characters.

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

The seven colored rooms.

The seven differently decorated rooms in the story represent something symbolic. The black-and-red room obviously symbolizes dead. However, the other rooms also symbolize different stages of life, which is suggested by its color. The suit of the masquerade party can be taken as allegory. The first evidence for being allegorical is it is arranged from east to west direction. East is usually associated with the beginning and birth as the sun rises in the east, whereas the west is associated with death and endings.

Considering this reading, the blue room in which the easternmost symbolizes birth. The color proposes the “unknown” from which a human arrives into the world. The next room is decorated in the color purple, which is the combination of blue and red. The purple color suggests the start of the growth. The next room is decorated in green color. It suggests youth, the spring period of life. The orange color symbolizes the summer and the autumn of life. The next color is white, which suggests old age i.e., white hair and weak bones. Violet is the combination of purple and blue and results in shadowy color representing darkness. And the color black is for death.

One surprising thing is there is no room in red color. Red is the better color to show the autumn and spring of life. However, maybe, Poe wants to save the color so as to associate it with blood, fear, and death. It always goes with black and black is the color of death such as Red Death, and the darkness is associated till the end of the story, the color red and black both are present in the last room.

Through the allegorical reading of the story, one can also observe that the partygoers do not go to the black room as they appear to be afraid of death. Moreover, the Red Death walks from one room to another in a sequence as if it is walking the course of life that leads from birth to death.

While chasing the Red Death, Prospero also goes from the blue room to the black room and eventually dies there. In order to attack and unmask the Red Death, the partygoers also go to the black room and die. So the characters in the story walk both metaphorically and literally from the course of life to death.

There is a big creepy black ebony clock hanging in the black room. The clock reminds the partygoers of the passing time and approaching death. Certainly, it shows the time that flies and the inevitability of death. It rings at the hour regularly and consistently reminding that life is drifting away. The sound or noise of the clock stops all the dancing and music, so the clock has a more enhanced effect.

The “Castellated Abbey”

The “Castellated abbey” is a confined place and cut off from the rest of the world. It is hidden where no one can easily find it. Moreover, the doors of the castle are also locked from inside so that no one can enter or leave the palace. This means that everyone inside the house is trapped. To create a threatening atmosphere of the story, the sense of confinement is necessary.

The abbey is a symbol of worldly power that stands above the poor peasants who are ravaged by the Red Death. The castle and abbey can symbolize both church and the state. It is also suggested that the castle is made fall to the Read Death symbolizes some sort of apocalypse.

The Red Death

A scholar also gives an explanation by describing the Red Death, not as a disease but the weak man that is shared by humankind.

The Masquerade/Dream Imagery

The short story “The Masque of the Red Death” appears to be a scary dream. The dreamlike feeling gets stronger when the suite for the Masquerade ball is arranged by Prince Prospero. Everything appears to be strange, wild, grotesque, frenzied, and intense. There are the masqueraders and their glaring and glittering costumes. All of these images make a mad collage of images. Even Poe uses dram language while describing these images.

For example, in the seventh paragraph, he writes:

“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.”

All of these images are too real to be true. It appears to be the creation of a mad imagination or a strange and weird dream. Poe suggests a dizzying and frenzied scene by describing the “writhing” dancers, “swelling” music, and the “giddiness.” All the things are uncontrolled, chaotic, and mixed-up. The whole world appears to be spinning around and seems to be a bad dream.

Everything in the suite appears to be representing something, whether it is colors of the room, the clock, or the party itself. The descriptive language employed in the story is overly meaningful or “oppressively meaningful.” This kind of excessive symbolization is found in dreams or artwork or in the mind of a mad artist.

One can also say that to cut the whole setting of the story from reality, Poe also does something. For example, the setting of the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is a palace or the castle which is remote and cut off from the rest of the world. It is situated in a kingdom that is struck by the plague and death.

Art Imagery

The things in the short suggesting that the masquerade ball is a dream are because it gives a sense of unreality and hyper-meaningfulness. There is exaggerated imagery and colors, which also suggests that masquerade is the production of pure imagination – the imagination of an artist.

The Shakespearean Connection

The name of the main character of the story “The Masque of the Red Death” resembles that of the protagonist of The Tempest by William Shakespeare. In fact, the beginning of Poe’s story and Shakespeare’s play are linked.

There is one well-designed connection that appears to be really important for some of the scholars. There is the mention of “red plague” in the play The Tempest. The Cabilan characters early in play utter a curse, which shows up as “red plague.”

More than the similarity between “red plague” and Red Death,” there are other connections too. These connections between the two are explored by observing the “Prosperos” of the two works. There are great similarities between the two characters. However, the two characters are unique in their own way; Shakespeare’s Prospero is soccer, while Poe’s Prospero is a great artist.

Apocalyptic Symbolism

The line about the Red Death approaching “like a thief in the night” seems familiar because it is the most famous line in the Bible. It is written in Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonian. In this letter, Paul refers to the last judgment. According to the letter, Jesus Christ will come back into the world when the world is not at all, expecting his arrival.

He will arrive “like a thief in the night” to judge the sinner for all of perpetuity. One should be prepared for that day as if you are caught unprepared; you are going to be in real trouble. It is between expecting a day of the judge and preparing oneself for it rather than focusing on the pleasures of the world.

Poe applies the phrase of Paul about Jesus to Red Death. While doing so, he makes the Red Death as an “apocalyptic figure.” Apocalyptic figure symbolizes the end of the world. Prince Prospero and his friends, like sinners, foolishly ignore the inevitable end of life and engage themselves in the pleasures of life. Like sinners, Prince Prospero and his friend, pay the price for their ignorance.

In “The Masque of the Red Death,” the characters do not cost too much for the pleasure of the world. However, unlike Jesus Christ, instead of choosing the sinners among the partygoers, the Red Death kills everyone. The end that Poe envisions at the end of the story is not among the judgment and salvation or suffering. This inevitable is summed up in the last line as “ And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion overall.”

The lines can be explained in a deeper way by exploring the means through which the masquerade can be taken as the symbol for the world. The term “the world” has a negative connotation in the apocalyptic literature. It usually refers to the evil, base, and profane life that we live on earth, as compared to the spiritual and high life with God. Before the judgment, the world will become chaotic, frenzied, topsy-turvy, violent, grotesque, and absorbed in sin, just like the masquerade ball.

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Death Themes in The Masque of The Red Death

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Published: Mar 25, 2024

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The Masque of the Red Death Introduction

" The Masque of the Red Death " is a deliciously creepy and wonderfully bizarre story written by that early American master of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe . Poe first published it as "The Mask of the Red Death. A Fantasy" in the May 1842 issue of Graham's Magazine , a Philadelphia literary magazine for which he served as editor. He later published a slightly revised version of the story under the title by which it's known today, "The Masque of the Red Death," in a July 1845 issue of a magazine called the Broadway Journal . Edgar Allan Poe (who lived from 1809-1849) was a poet, essayist, and short story writer, particularly famous for writing dark, mysterious, and death-centered pieces. (His life, it turns out, was just about as mysterious as some of his stories – check out a biography .) Poe had a talent for writing terrifying and spine-tingly tales: many of his short stories are now considered horror classics. He also had a mad sense of style and an incredible imagination, which allowed him to paint vivid and unforgettable images with words. Both qualities are on display in "The Masque of the Red Death," which is among the most colorful and the creepiest of his stories. It's the tale of a dreamlike masquerade ball thrown by the half-mad Prince Prospero during the height of a terrible plague. Most intriguing of all, however, is the arrival of a most unfortunate guest… Besides his poems and stories, Poe is also famous for his unique theory of writing. He thought that every work of poetry or short fiction should aim to create a single " effect ": one particularly intense feeling, emotion, or experience in the reader. Everything in the story, down to the level of the individual words, is supposed to be carefully selected by the author to bring about the effect. "The Masque of the Red Death" is one of Poe's most brilliant successes on that front. From the opening line every element of the story feels perfectly designed to create a growing sense of dread. At the same time, Poe's wildly imaginative setting gives the story a make-believe feel (he did call it a "fantasy," after all) that draws the reader in completely. It's as if Poe is able to pull you right out of reality, into his (or is it Prospero's?) own dream. Which happens to be one heck of a nightmare.

What is The Masque of the Red Death About and Why Should I Care?

Being reminded that nobody escapes death just doesn't get any more fun than this. In only fourteen paragraphs, Poe creates a Gothic wonderland that will give you a serious case of the spine-tinglies and set your imagination all atwitter. The story's imagery is just as wonderfully weird and dramatic. The language is so grave and dark it practically screams to be read aloud by Christopher Lee . And if you're into solving puzzles, the story's got enough allusion and symbolism to keep you figuring it out for a good long while. Besides being a horror buff's dream, "Masque of the Red Death" may also have some interesting things to say about art. In what ways is an artist like a sorcerer? Do art and madness always go together? Is art above morality? What's the relationship between art and death? Those are all questions Poe explores through the surprisingly complex character of Prince Prospero. So read "The Masque of the Red Death," and let yourself discover the fantastic world of Poe and Prospero's madness. Find out why some have called this Poe's own twisted remake of Shakespeare's The Tempest . And witness for yourself the mother of all party crashes.

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The Masque of the Red Death

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Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the sets of questions given. Include details from the story as examples to support your points.

1. Did Prospero bring his death on himself? Why or why not? Explain with references from the text.

Is it Prospero’s own fault that he died? ( topic sentence )
What quotes/moments in the text best support your response to the prompt?
In conclusion, could Prospero have avoided his death?

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2. Choose one of the following symbols: mask or clock. Describe its role and significance in the text, with references.

What is the clock or mask’s symbolic meaning? ( topic sentence )
What does the writer seem to be saying by his use of the mask or clock as a symbol?

3. Throughout the story Poe switches between first- and third-person narration. Identify two examples of each type of narration in the text and describe their significance to the passage and the story at large.

What is significant about Poe’s switches between the first- and third-person narration? ( topic sentence )
What are two examples of the first-person narration in the text?
What are two examples of the third-person narration in the text?
How does the switch from one narrative point of view to the other affect the impact of the story?

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Civil War History Shows the Danger of Comparing Trump to Jesus

City Of Richmond Plans To Take Down Statue Of Confederate General Robert E. Lee

D onald Trump has been in full Messiah-mode lately, telling his followers that he’s suffering for their sake , sharing a faux courtroom sketch of Christ at his side, and circulating actor Jon Voight’s bizarre claim that he is being “destroyed as Jesus.”

The last time America’s political scene witnessed such heavy Christ-comparisons was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when Unionists and Confederates both deified their heroes. This practice had ominous consequences, including the perpetuation of a violent white supremacist ideology in the South. This Easter it’s important to remember why analogies to Jesus should stay out of the political realm. The results are always ugly.

In the wake of Lincoln’s assassination on Good Friday, 1865, grieving Unionists, from politicians to faith leaders, began comparing the fallen president to Jesus. Within five hours of the shooting, James Garfield — who would become America’s second assassinated president 16 years later — told a Manhattan crowd : "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."

Ministers across America echoed the sentiment. “Heaven rejoices this Easter morning in the resurrection of our lost leader,” the Reverend Henry W. Bellows declared on Easter Sunday. In paintings, etchings, and cameos, Lincoln was depicted as the nation’s Savior .

Inevitably, this reverence produced a backlash in the South. Before the Civil War, Southerners were already enraged by Northern comparisons of the radical abolitionist John Brown to Jesus. In October of 1859, when Brown was awaiting execution, Henry David Thoreau delivered a speech in Concord , Mass., in which he declared that: “Some eighteen hundred years ago, Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung....He is not old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”

The apotheosis of an anti-slavery zealot like Brown was bad enough, but when Lincoln replaced him as the Christlike martyr, Confederates boiled over. Southern anger about Lincoln and the war he presided over was still too raw. One Kentucky editorialist denounced the late president as “head centre of a hot bed of thieves, knaves, cowards, plunderers, murderers, houseburners, woman murderers, spoon thieves.”

Read More: The Blasphemy of Comparing Trump to Jesus Christ

In 1866, Edward Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner who launched the Lost Cause mythology—which glorified the Confederacy and its fight—bitterly attacked the North’s deification of “the Illinois Ape.” He opened chapter six of The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, by lamenting that “A large portion of the Northern people have a custom of apotheosis.”

This characterization of apotheosis as a Northern phenomenon was a curious move, since Northerners and Southerners alike had spent 60 years deifying George Washington . But when Unionists combined Washington and Lincoln as " Father and Saviour of the Nation ," Pollard snapped. Idolatry, the editor claimed, was a Yankee sin, typical of a people whose fanatical Puritan ancestors had revered their leaders as “saints.” To Pollard, the “contrast between the Northern and Southern minds” was evident in their different approach to “worship of that great American idol—the Union.” Throughout his book, Pollard condemned what he saw as excessive worship of the Constitution, the Union, Brown, Ulysses S. Grant, and above all—Lincoln. Southerners, he insisted, were more measured in their enthusiasms.

In the coming years the South proved him wrong.

With Northerners and their allies embracing Lincoln as the Union’s savior, Southerners searched for their own messiah. First they honored the incarcerated Confederate President Jefferson Davis as a martyr. During his postwar imprisonment in Fortress Monroe, Davis’ wife, Varina, wove her husband a crown of thorns , while Southern ministers referred to his chains as “the martyr ring.”

Some Southern ministers went so far as to encourage all Confederate veterans to compare themselves to Christ. In Baptized in Blood , historian Charles Reagan Wilson chronicles how “Carter Helm Jones of Louisville reminded his audience of war veterans of ‘the memories of your Gethsemane’ and ‘the agonies of your Golgotha.’”

Robert E. Lee, however, got the fullest Jesus-treatment. After his death in 1870, Lee’s fans were quick to make the comparison. Joseph B. Kershaw, a Confederate general from South Carolina, wrote a commemoration reprinted in multiple Southern papers in which he praised Lee’s form, face and bearing as “god-like in beauty, power and grace,” before asking: “what was his life for the last five years but a constant martyrdom of the spirit—daily dying for us.”

Virginia state senator John Daniel, a rising political star, picked up the ball at the 1883 dedication of the Recumbent Lee monument at Washington and Lee University. Daniel delivered a three-hour speech in which he compared Lee’s tormented decision over whether to join the Confederacy, and his subsequent years of fighting, to “the agony of and bloody sweat of Gethsemane and to the Cross of Calvary beyond.”

This comparison persisted for decades . In 1904, a writer in the Charlotte Observer mused “Since the Christ-man walked the waters of blue Galilee, no man has been as nearly his counterpart as this hero of our Southland, Robert E. Lee.” And in 1917, the Reverend Randolph McKim wrote that Lee’s sufferings had “pressed sorely upon him, a true crown of thorns.”

The sense of Lee as a Southern Jesus is one reason why the landscape south of the Mason-Dixon line is still filled with Lee memorials. Southerners erected Confederate monuments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to enforce racial hierarchies, but in Lee’s case they also provided a counterpoint to Lincoln idolatry. North and South, each culture dedicated hundreds of memorials to its favorite demigod.

In 1922, when Lincoln was "enshrined" in his enormous "temple" on the National Mall , the United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to counter with a huge carving of Lee at Stone Mountain, Ga., unveiled two years later. Their effort floundered when the sculptor of the Lee carving, Gutzon Borglum, feuded with the UDC over finances and personality clashes and left to carve presidents, including Lincoln, at Mount Rushmore. Borglum’s Lee was later blasted off the mountain, making way for Henry Augustus Lukeman’s sculpture of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.

Read More: Tim Alberta on What Fuels the Evangelical Devotion to Trump

In 1924, at the unveiling ceremony for Borglum’s short-lived Lee, Plato Durham—former dean at Emory University—gave an address in which he, too, deified the general. This time Lee was described not as the Son of God, but as a Roman sun god: “Oh Mountain, speak your message well…When the rain of heaven beats upon your majestic face, let all men say ‘Lee is weeping for the sorrows of a people.’ When the sun of morning strikes along your altitudes, let mankind behold a newer Sol Invictus and exclaim ‘The Invincible Light.’”

The deification of Lee had deadly consequences. Memorials to the general depicted him in uniform, exalting the Confederate cause and its faith in white supremacy—what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the religion of whiteness.” By honoring Lee as a martyr to a noble cause, Southerners could resist looking inward and reconsidering the truth about slavery and the Civil War. Instead, with Lee as their idol, Southern believers in whiteness unleashed a century of violence: from the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan, burning crosses and murdering Black Americans, to the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017, who came to rally round a statue of Lee, wielding torches and running down pedestrians.

Donald Trump responded to the violence in Charlottesville by saying that there were “very fine people” on both sides. And now that he is the Christlike martyr—whose faithful followers proved willing, on Jan. 6, 2021, to storm the Capitol, attack police officers, and threaten to hang then-vice president Mike Pence—Americans are left to wonder what further violence might emerge from such twisted faith.

Laura Brodie teaches at Washington and Lee University. She is author of numerous books, including. Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women .

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here . Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors .

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What I Saw Working at The National Enquirer During Donald Trump’s Rise

Inside the notorious “catch and kill” campaign that now stands at the heart of the former president’s legal trial.

Credit... Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

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By Lachlan Cartwright

Lachlan Cartwright has been a journalist for 20 years. He is currently a special correspondent at The Hollywood Reporter covering media, entertainment and politics.

Published April 3, 2024 Updated April 4, 2024

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, I was outside Manhattan criminal court. It was a sunny spring day, and the Secret Service and the Police Department had blocked off the streets with barricades. The sidewalks were clogged with news crews from around the world. Supporters of Donald Trump roamed a pen that was set up to house them. Eventually, the former president was rushed out of the courthouse after being charged by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, with 34 counts of falsifying business records. His convoy departed to cheers from fans.

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I pulled up the indictment and the statement of facts on my iPhone. At the center of the case is the accusation that Trump took part in a scheme to turn The National Enquirer and its sister publications into an arm of his 2016 presidential campaign. The documents detailed three “hush money” payments made to a series of individuals to guarantee their silence about potentially damaging stories in the months before the election. Because this was done with the goal of helping his election chances, the case implied, these payments amounted to a form of illegal, undisclosed campaign spending. And, Bragg argued, because Trump created paperwork to make the payments seem like regular legal expenses, that amounted to a criminal effort at a coverup. Trump has denied the charges against him.

The documents rattled off a number of seedy stories that would have been right at home in a venerable supermarket tabloid, had they actually been published. The subjects were anonymized but recognizable to anyone who had followed the story of Trump’s entanglement with The Enquirer. His affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, of course, was the heart of it. There was also Karen McDougal, the Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1998, whose affair with Trump was similarly made to disappear, the payments for the rights to her story made to look like fees for writing a fitness column and appearing on magazine covers. (Trump has denied involvement with both women.) There were others that were lesser known, too, like Dino Sajudin, a former Trump World Tower doorman who claimed that Trump had a love child with one of the building’s employees; the story was never published, and Sajudin was paid $30,000 to keep quiet about it.

For me, reading the indictment was like stepping through the looking glass, because it described a three-year period in my own professional life, one that I have come to deeply regret. Dino the Doorman? During my time at American Media Inc. (A.M.I.), The Enquirer’s parent company, I was one of the editors pushing our reporters to confirm that story. McDougal’s fitness columns were published only after I instructed a colleague to work with the model to put them together. These were all pretty normal things to do during my time there, a life-changing detour in my career, which happened to coincide with a bizarre period at A.M.I., when it was allegedly enlisted — in some ways that I saw and in others that I didn’t — into the service of helping Trump become president. Now, as a former president faces a criminal trial for the first time in American history, I’m forced to grapple with what really happened at The Enquirer in those years — and whether and how I can ever set things right.

In a sense, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman who got me the job. In February 2014, while I was working at The New York Daily News, an editor there told me that Hoffman had been found dead in his West Village apartment. He asked for my help on the story. Our crime reporters tracked down the name of the person who found the body, David Bar Katz, a close friend of Hoffman’s and a playwright, but all our attempts to reach him had not borne fruit.

Soon, The National Enquirer hit newsstands with an “exclusive” interview with Katz. He said that he and Hoffman were “homosexual lovers” and that he watched Hoffman freebase cocaine the night before his death. The story quickly unraveled: The Enquirer had been talking to a David Katz, but this one was a freelance TV producer based in New Jersey. After being bombarded with calls from reporters — and consuming several beers, he later told The New York Post — he apparently decided to have some fun. The actual David Bar Katz sued A.M.I. for $50 million.

The magazine withdrew the story and settled out of court. In the end, The Enquirer took out a full-page ad in The New York Times acknowledging the error and paid Katz enough that he was able to establish an annual prize for playwrights in Hoffman’s honor. David Pecker, the chief executive of A.M.I., removed the top editor. In his place, Pecker pulled a young editor named Dylan Howard over from another A.M.I. publication, Radar Online.

Howard and I met a few years earlier in New York. He attended the same university I did in Melbourne, though we weren’t friends in Australia. Now, two Aussie journalists in New York, we swapped gossip and hit it off. I helped land him one of his biggest scoops; in 2010, I passed Charlie Sheen’s private cell number to him, and he figured out that texting Sheen when he was partying would get his attention. The two developed a rapport, and after a series of well-publicized meltdowns, Sheen invited Howard to Los Angeles to watch him take a drug test and reveal the results live on “Good Morning America.”

In March 2014, Howard and I started talking about the possibility of my coming to The Enquirer as his No.2. During a booze-fueled night at the Electric Room, a nightclub in the Meatpacking District, he walked me through the offer. A $60,000 bump in compensation — which worked out to a 75 percent raise. And I would be running a national news operation with the resources, he promised, to break agenda-setting stories.

Photographs of David Pecker in 2017, holding up an issue of The National Enquirer, and Dylan Howard at a desk in 2014.

I had never paid that much attention to the supermarket tabloids, but I knew enough to know what The Enquirer was. It published a sensational mix of celebrity scandal, true crime and “triumph over tragedy” real-life stories. It might not have been a respected newspaper, especially because of its tendency to print cover lines that stretched the truth to the breaking point. But it’s not as if it published stories about Bat Boy either. (That’s The Weekly World News.) The Enquirer’s reporters were fearless, and they did sometimes win the respect of the mainstream press. During the wrongful-death suit brought against O.J. Simpson by the parents of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, it was The Enquirer’s reporters who found photos of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the same type that left prints in blood at the scene of the murders. The revelation helped a jury decide that Simpson could be held responsible for the deaths.

By the time I started, The Enquirer’s weekly newsstand-sales figures hovered around 360,000, down from a high of about four million in the 1990s. Still, even in recent years, The Enquirer had broken big stories. In fact, the tabloid most likely altered the course of the 2008 presidential election when it exposed John Edwards’s affair and love child with a campaign staff member. That investigation showed the muscle and drive of The Enquirer’s reporting. Stakeouts, door knocks, documents. Reporters flying across the country. Persisting until they got the story right. Howard told me that he wanted the magazine to land ambitious stories like that. “All things going well,” he texted me, a bit hyperbolically, “you and I will be youngest editors of a national US publication ever.”

I was agonizing over the offer when the editor in chief of The Daily News, Colin Myler, called me into his office. Myler presented me with a $10,000 raise and thanked me for my work. I thought he might have caught wind of the job offer, so I mentioned it to him. He said I would be making a big mistake if I went to work for David Pecker. Deep down, I was hoping Myler would make a counteroffer, but he didn’t. I took Howard on his word. Ultimately, my hubris sealed the deal.

I started as executive editor of The Enquirer and Radar Online in mid-May. What I soon learned is that Howard, even if he wanted to, wouldn’t be changing the operation; Pecker really ran the place. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, there were “cover meetings,” when Howard and the editors of The Enquirer’s sister titles would go before Pecker and several of his top lieutenants to show a few options and analyze sales figures. If one title had a week-to-week decline, Pecker became apoplectic. I would walk through the back of the newsroom near Pecker’s office and hear him screaming through the walls. Sometimes Pecker would suggest a preferred cover line, forcing us to twist a story to fit the language. In that paranoid environment, all anyone cared about was not incurring Pecker’s wrath and being fired. (Pecker did not respond to requests for comment.)

A frustrating first year spent in a windowless office was suddenly interrupted on the afternoon of March 29, 2015, when a source told me about a woman named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez who went to the New York Police Department after being groped by Harvey Weinstein in TriBeCa. My pulse was racing — finally a worthwhile scoop. There had been rumors about Weinstein and women for years. Affairs, the “casting couch” and worse. I called Howard and was struck by his response: He seemed less interested in the story than in the identity of my source. (In response to questions from The Times, Howard said he was simply vetting the story’s sourcing, a routine part of his job duties.)

I could not figure out his attitude. But before we got any further, The Daily News broke the story, with the help of police sources. But Gutierrez still hadn’t spoken publicly, and Howard went into overdrive trying to buy her side of the story. The Enquirer, like many tabloids, sometimes paid sources for exclusive stories; this is not an acceptable practice in most newsrooms, or in the ones I’ve worked in since. Still, it seemed odd that we were trying to buy a story that we could have had free. “Cash really no object,” Howard messaged me, “so I can sling your source 5k to get it done in addition to her 20k.” But Gutierrez didn’t want $20,000. She wanted her story heard. And it continued to roll out in other outlets, through leaks from law enforcement and “movie industry” sources — who framed the matter in the media as a blackmail attempt.

Howard was in and out of my office asking for updates. “I think the stakes just increased,” he texted me, “and your source could earn some big bucks.” I texted the source saying that Gutierrez could ask for any amount of money and that the source could take a substantial cut. “She’s less concerned w money than the right moves,” the source responded. By the middle of the week, Howard told me to offer Gutierrez $150,000, with a $25,000 finder’s fee to my go-between — an extraordinary amount of money. Most stories we bought cost us about a few thousand dollars. (Howard says he was merely conveying offers at the direction of Pecker.) “She says no,” the source texted back, “don’t ask again.”

Unknown to me at the time, Weinstein had all but secured a guarantee that we would never report on his sexual transgressions. Earlier that year, the Weinstein Company signed a deal with A.M.I. to produce something called Radar TV. The plan was to take our celebrity coverage from Radar Online and use it to make a daily, live TV show in the mold of “Access Hollywood.” The deal entailed lots of lunches between Weinstein and Howard at Tribeca Grill but never resulted in an actual TV show. Still, the partnership did make Weinstein a “FOP” — Friend of Pecker — which entitled him to protection from negative coverage. He was also able to leverage his relationship with A.M.I. to use our vast news-gathering resources to collect dirt on the actresses who he thought might talk to the press.

The New York Post, The Daily Mail and other outlets painted Gutierrez as a gold-digger who had attended the “bunga bunga” parties of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Years later, I learned that one of A.M.I.’s top lawyers had informed someone in the office of Cy Vance, the Manhattan district attorney at the time, that Gutierrez was trying to sell her story to us . Vance’s office eventually announced that it would not pursue charges against Weinstein. (In the end, Gutierrez reached a settlement with Weinstein and went on to tell her story to the press.)

A couple of months later, Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower. Editorial discussions about John Travolta, Lisa Marie Presley and Bill Cosby were now interspersed with chatter about Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. The headlines that resulted were not ambiguous.

“Why I am THE ONLY Choice For President EXCLUSIVE! DONALD TRUMP WRITES FOR THE ENQUIRER.” (He didn’t. A colleague cobbled the piece together, and Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and go-between with A.M.I. — got Trump’s approval for it.)

“WHO’S CHELSEA’S REAL DAD? PREZ HOPEFUL HILLARY’S MOMENT OF TRUTH. EXCLUSIVE DNA TEST RESULTS BOMBSHELL.” (We had mounted an operation to collect Chelsea Clinton’s trash in an effort to get her DNA. But because Clinton lived in a big Manhattan apartment building, it was virtually impossible to get access to her garbage; we instead got a sample off a pen she used to sign a book. The results were inconclusive, but we published the story anyway.)

“HILLARY: 6 MONTHS TO LIVE!” Cruel Bill Forces Her To Stay On Campaign Trail.”

These covers came with doctored images of Clinton looking frail, bolstered by quotes from anyone who would say the right things and had a title that tenuously qualified him to offer an opinion. The Enquirer did employ real reporters who would comb through documents, cultivate sources and use old-school reporting techniques, but I was coming to terms with the other side of the magazine, where a headline was chosen and editors and writers spun up a tenuous story to match.

This all came on the heels of a family tragedy that made my job seem even more detestable and stupid. In the spring, my dad grew ill, and when he finally got to a doctor, irregularities were found in his blood. Stomach cancer. Stage 4. He was told he had three months to live.

I had a contentious relationship with him during my adolescence, and by 22 I had moved to London to pursue journalism. He and my mother would visit, but because I was gay and hiding this from them, it kept us distant. Soon after my younger brother came out, I asked my father how he was dealing with it. “It could be worse,” he told me. “We could have two of them.” When I finally came out several years later, my father took it in and asked me, “Are you sure you’re not bi?” It took a few years, but he came to terms with having two sons who weren’t straight. By the time of his 70th birthday, he had visited me in New York, and we ran around town like teenagers. He would tell me it was one of the best weeks of his life.

I landed back in Melbourne just in time. When I had last seen my dad a few months earlier, he was a fit 71-year-old. Now the color had drained from his skin. His voice was hoarse as we hugged. Just nine days after I landed, he was admitted to a palliative-care facility. He was unconscious, but we talked to him as if he were lucid. We all slept in his room. I lay awake and listened as his breaths got further and further apart. Just after 5 a.m. on May 1, 2015, he took his last.

I buried my father and returned to New York, dazed by grief. I cried in the shower before work. I sat blankly in editorial meetings. I don’t know how I would have responded to the events that followed had I not been so depressed. But the truth is that I was: I was drinking heavily, and life felt hopeless. I was angry. I became lazy. Even a little bit crazy.

In the fall, we got a startling tip over the transom from a former doorman at Trump World Tower, who said that Trump had an affair with a woman who worked in the building and that she had given birth to a secret “love child.” The tip line was a lot of fun but presented its fair share of headaches. Because we advertised that we paid for stories, we got all types of chancers and charlatans trying their luck. So we proceeded cautiously, not only because of that but also because we knew Trump was a FOP. Howard had to check with the boss before we could make any moves.

The word came back that we could proceed, and we quickly signed the tipster, Dino Sajudin, to a source contract that would pay $30,000 if we ran his story. We assigned a team of reporters to firm it up. Before any calls were made, we wanted to ensure that we had photos of both the woman and the “love child” in hand in case they went to ground. There was a stakeout at the home of the woman. Another reporter was sent to the address of the “love child.”

With photos of both secured, we arranged for Sajudin to sit for a polygraph. This was standard practice for stories that could draw legal action from a subject. We had two private investigators who would routinely conduct lie-detector tests on sources before we ran their stories. It was an extra layer of insurance, especially because The Enquirer was a constant target of lawsuits; a polygraph could demonstrate that we had gone above and beyond to confirm that a source was telling the truth. We would sometimes spike stories when sources failed polygraphs, but over time I came to feel that the tests were a cynical way of manufacturing a good-faith effort before publication.

Sajudin passed his polygraph, but it turned out that the information was secondhand: He had heard his colleagues talking about it and had no proof. He had serious credibility issues besides. If you ran his name through Google, you would find an anonymous website that accused Sajudin of making similar allegations about a Trump World Tower resident.

I could hear from Howard’s office that Michael Cohen was calling, and I assumed he was looking for updates. I had my doubts about the story, especially as the “love adult,” as I was now calling her (she was in her late 20s), looked just like the man named on her birth certificate, who was not Donald Trump. Then, out of nowhere, the order came to stand down.

Pecker made the call to pay Sajudin $30,000, and the story was killed without Howard explaining why. It was an enormous amount of money to pay someone, especially for a story we were not running. In December, a reporter met Sajudin at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania to present him with the check. In return, he signed a new contract that stipulated that if he told the story to any third parties, he would be on the hook for a million dollars in damages to A.M.I. It was a highly unusual clause. The signed contract was put into a safe. A colleague who was working with me described what happened as a “catch and kill.” It was the first time I had heard the phrase, but it would not be the last.

As we hurtled toward the presidential primaries, there was a laser focus on stories about Trump’s rivals. Ben Carson, we alleged, had left a sponge in a woman’s brain. Bernie Sanders we accused without any evidence of being caught in a “child sex probe.” Marco Rubio, or at least someone with a similar haircut, had been photographed at a “man fest foam party.” While I had serious misgivings about publishing stories like these — which took cues from sites like Infowars and The Gateway Pundit — it also felt totally meaningless: Would anyone take this stuff seriously? I also quieted my conscience by continuing to drink heavily, every night.

Ted Cruz was a major target. We ran thinly sourced stories that suggested that he was a raging alcoholic who had five secret mistresses and was named in a madam’s “black book.” And we ran a cover story linking his father, Rafael, to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That article hinged on a grainy photo contained in the Warren Commission report purporting to show Lee Harvey Oswald handing out pro-Castro fliers with Rafael Cruz. The money quote came from a guy who ran a photo-digitization website who told the reporter with a “high degree of confidence” that it was the same person.

Then, much to everyone’s surprise — and my horror — the Cruz story was picked up by the mainstream media. Trump went on Fox News to repeat the claims, and the Cruz campaign was forced to respond. I watched in Howard’s office dumbfounded as Cruz denied the story on CNN.

I was eventually moved into a better office, one that had windows and an old safe about the size of a minifridge. The Sajudin contract was inside it, and I used it as a footrest. My old office, meanwhile, was littered with dozens of boxes that had been brought up from A.M.I.’s offices in Boca Raton, Fla. This was all the material the newsroom had collected on the Clintons over the decades. I was directed to hire a freelance researcher to go through them and generate memos so we could gin up hit pieces. The Enquirer had a similar archive of files on Trump — perhaps the most amazing trove of Trump material of any national media organization — but it was not receiving the same careful review.

Instead, I was going through the memos from the freelancer that provided the basis for spurious stories accusing Hillary Clinton of forming a “hit squad” to kill Vince Foster. Then we moved on to hyperbolic material on Bill Clinton and women. “HILLARY’S HIDING BILL’S SEX CRIMES! 36 WOMEN BREAK THEIR SILENCE” was the cover that landed in May 2016.

Between those were a drumbeat of fictitious health crises for the former first lady and presidential candidate. With the help of so-called medical experts — typically publicity-hungry pundits who understood what we wanted to hear — and the assistance of a talented art department, we tried to kill her off in print almost weekly. She would appear with her eyes made baggy and the colors in the images desaturated. In others, she swelled to fit the cover line that she had gained 103 pounds and was “Eating herself to death!” In another we purported to have her “FULL MEDICAL FILE!” which, as the cover screamed, said she had “3 strokes,” “Alzheimer’s,” “liver damage from booze” and “violent rages.”

We had another secret weapon: Michael Sylvestre. By day, Sylvestre worked at the Walt Disney Company, but at night he operated Truth and Deception Technologies in Florida. We would send Sylvestre audio clips of politicians or celebrities speaking, and after using software that he called DecepTech Voice Stress Analysis, he sent back charts at $500 per test. “HILLARY FAILED SECRET FBI LIE DETECTOR!” was one such cover. (We had no reason to believe DecepTech had been used by the F.B.I.) We went to him so often that I could signal that we required his services again by using a cranking hand motion.

In August, Howard told me he had met with a former Playboy Playmate named Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump. The woman was being represented by a lawyer, Keith Davidson, and Howard said he found her story credible. Howard told me that Pecker bought her story for $150,000 but that it would never see the light of day. It was the second catch-and-kill on Trump’s behalf that I heard about.

I started to avoid Howard as best as I could. Our interactions became icy, and colleagues in the newsroom started to notice. I felt as if I were being suffocated. And I feared that being near all of this would mean the end of my career.

Late in the afternoon on the Friday before the 2016 election, I received a call from Lukas Alpert, a Wall Street Journal reporter. He and I used to work together at The New York Post, and we kept in touch. He was on the media desk now but explained that he had been asked by a colleague on the investigative team for help on a story. Did I know anything about a woman named Karen McDougal?

I froze. I was in the newsroom and only feet from Howard. I told Alpert I would call him back. I walked to the elevator and rode it down to the entrance of the building. I explained the huge risk I was taking by helping him and the consequences if Pecker or Howard found out. I thought if I used an old-school tabloid term it would give me some cover; only the guys who had been there forever used that term.

“This was a catch-and-kill,” I told Alpert.

“What’s a catch-and-kill?” he asked.

I went on to explain the tabloid practice of buying stories to bury them. Alpert already had the outline of the story, I learned, and I filled him in on more: how Howard had flown out to Los Angeles that summer to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000, with the direction from Pecker to kill it to protect Trump. I stressed to him the importance of the term “catch and kill” and told him that if The Journal included it, it would give me some breathing room.

I went back to my office and closed the door. My heart was racing, and I was sweating. A short time later, Howard burst in.

“The Wall Street Journal has a story coming,” I recall him saying, before naming two former employees, blaming them for the leak. He slammed the door shut. The story went live after 9 that night. “National Enquirer Shielded Donald Trump From Playboy Model’s Affair Allegation.” And there it was in the third paragraph. “Quashing stories that way is known in the tabloid world as ‘catch and kill.’” I didn’t hear from Howard that weekend. No one thought Trump was going to win at that point, and the story was swallowed up in the pre-election frenzy.

That same week, I had finally hit my breaking point with the job. A few days earlier, Howard called me into his office. He explained that we would be crashing a late exclusive. He had obtained a seven-page dossier that contained what he said were emails between Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, one of her longtime aides. The only snag was that the emails were in Italian, and we had just hours to get them translated if we wanted any chance of meeting our print deadlines.

Howard told me that Pecker had spent thousands of dollars to buy the file from a private investigator. Pecker was always paranoid about leaks and had paid this investigator’s firm to do sweeps of A.M.I.’s office looking for listening devices. And now, the investigator had become a source. (In response to questions from The Times, the investigator said he could not remember many details of this episode.)

The dossier, Howard explained, had come to our source via the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna — Italian intelligence, where the source apparently had connections. This is why the emails, though originally written in English, were in Italian. The agency had received the emails from Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the source said, which had itself hacked Clinton’s servers and obtained the emails from a laptop Abedin shared with her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. Despite the many red flags and ethical questions that chain of custody raised, Howard believed in the dossier. And besides, Pecker had already decreed that this would be the cover story. The research team had found two New York University students to translate the documents. When they arrived, I was instructed to confiscate their cellphones.

The translators finished, and we managed to close the issue by midnight. “Hillary & Huma GOING TO JAIL!” was the cover line, with bullet points claiming, among other things, a “Secret hospitalization & truth about GAY AFFAIR!” (The translations in the article were totally garbled, and the inferences we made from them were absurd.) While it made its way to the printers, I went with Howard and some colleagues to White Horse Tavern — not the famous one, the one in the Financial District. He was buzzing with glee; I could barely look him in the eyes. I needed to get out, but I needed my visa to stay in the country and find another job. I held on to the thought that this would all soon be over. The election was just six days away. Clinton looked sure to win. Trump would fade away. I would be able to find my way out and back to actual journalism.

Instead, my duties somehow became even more depraved. When The Wall Street Journal contacted A.M.I. for comment about the $150,000 payment to Karen McDougal, the company claimed that the money was not to kill her story but rather to purchase her life rights to “any relationship she has had with a then-married man,” as well as two years of fitness columns and magazine covers. This had in fact been stipulated in the contract A.M.I. drew up with her lawyer, but now we had to actually come up with the columns. I assigned a reporter to ghostwrite them, and he got on a call with McDougal to take notes while cribbing fitness tips from the internet.

Alpert and his colleagues at The Journal were chasing fresh leads. I mentioned the doorman and the events of the previous year. Alpert asked for the names, so I opened the safe and got out the contract, which contained notes with the names of the woman and the “love adult.” I texted them to Alpert, put the documents back and went to close the safe. But the door wouldn’t shut. I tried desperately, but this rickety old safe refused to close. I was starting to panic. At any time, Howard could come in. I turned up the sound on my office TV as I sat hammering at this old metal door. Finally, the bloody thing shut.

After Trump won, I could not hide my utter contempt for Howard. My position as his deputy became untenable. By this point, the two of us were barely on speaking terms. I wasted my afternoons drinking alone in nearby bars and restaurants while I devised an exit strategy. I retained an employment attorney, knowing that both Howard and Pecker would love nothing more than to screw me on the way out. Howard was enraged by my behavior and made it known to others in the newsroom.

In July 2017, after weeks of negotiations, I was presented with a nine-page separation agreement. I would be kept on as an employee for the next nine months, collecting half my salary as a form of severance. That meant I would be able to continue living in the United States until my visa expired. But the price would be my silence: a nondisclosure agreement covering A.M.I. in general and Pecker in particular. The contract’s language was so broad that it prohibited me, in perpetuity, from even writing a work of fiction about my time at the company.

On Aug. 4, I entered the morning news meeting for the final time. Howard announced to the staff I would be “working from home” for the foreseeable future. I looked him in the eye and shook his hand. It would be the last time I saw him.

About six weeks after I left and around the time The New York Times and The New Yorker broke the Weinstein story, I was walking back to my apartment when I got a call from my attorney. A.M.I.’s lawyers had sent him a letter accusing me of breaching my nondisclosure agreement on three occasions. The letter threatened termination and damages, but it was the next sentence that got me. “In the event A.M.I. terminates Mr. Cartwright’s employment he will not be entitled to lawfully remain in the USA.” I vomited. They might not have known what I’d actually done, but it seemed they were trying to scare me into silence.

I resolved that if I was approached by a journalist whom I trusted and who I knew would protect me, I would do my best to help. Someone out there could do the work I should have been doing all along. A few weeks later, I received a direct message on Twitter from a New York Times reporter. I responded to him with my cell number and agreed to meet. I told the reporter what happened in 2015 with Gutierrez. I detailed Howard’s requests for damaging information on women connected to Weinstein, which usually followed their regular TriBeCa lunches. (Howard says he never asked Enquirer staffers to share damaging information on women connected to Weinstein.) But I stressed that the real story was The Enquirer’s work on behalf of Trump.

Eventually, I got a burner phone, as I was in almost daily contact with the reporter at The Times, my contact at The Journal and others. It was hard to keep them all straight. I emailed the New Yorker writer Ronan Farrow with the subject line “Signal.” “Are you on it?” I asked. He was in touch an hour later, and I began telling him what happened with Dino the Doorman.

It became clear to me that reporters from The Journal were in possession of information that could have come from only a small circle of people, and I feared that the source was Howard. If the reporters I had been talking to were incautious, they could have easily revealed to him that I had been a source, too. It would be the ammunition Howard needed to terminate my agreement and have me booted from the country. But on the other hand, if he was a source, how could he tell Pecker that he had learned I was, too? These paranoid thoughts kept me up at night.

I had heard A.M.I. sometimes tailed current and former employees. I became convinced that the same was happening to me. That might explain an incident that took place one evening when I went to Babeland, an adult store in SoHo, and walked out with a dildo, lubricant and condoms. As I exited the store, a car pulled up, and out jumped a man with a camera, who proceeded in the most indiscreet way to take a series of photos of me with a bright flash. Before I knew it, he had jumped back in the car, and it sped off. Were those photos going to be used to embarrass me? Was it a way to scare me?

With just weeks left on my visa, I had spent six months working free as a source, a self-imposed sentence for my many crimes against journalism. By this time I was in the late stages of interviews for a new job with The Daily Beast and an opportunity to resuscitate my byline.

Since I left A.M.I., I have lived under constant threat of litigation from my former employer. A.M.I. has threatened me with a $5 million lawsuit for breach of contract. (In 2020, A.M.I. was merged with another company and renamed A360 Media; A360 Media did not respond to requests for comment.) Howard has threatened me with another $5 million suit over articles I wrote for The Daily Beast, accusing me of defamation and breach of contract. But now the facts of what happened are a matter of public record, the basis for the first-ever criminal trial of a former president. Indeed, Pecker and Howard have already testified before Bragg’s grand jury. If they’re called again to testify at the trial, they will in all likelihood be revealing some of the same information they tried to intimidate me into withholding.

As I’ve tried to come to terms with just how corrupt an organization I worked for in those years, I’ve taken some comfort in the fact that acting as a source for other journalists helped rebalance the scales — not only for me but for the public too. After the last legal threat Howard sent me, in October 2020, a lawyer representing me wrote a strongly worded letter in response, arguing that the information I shared was “in the public interest” and “in some cases, it was of profound national importance.” The letters stopped; no suits have been filed. Three years after leaving the building for the last time, I finally felt free of the place.

Then the Bragg indictment outlined, in plain and unafraid black and white, the schemes that felt so opaque and contentious and complex when I had to navigate my way through them in real time. But it was the 13-page statement of facts that brought me to tears. On Page 3, prosecutors outlined “The Catch and Kill Scheme to Suppress Negative Information,” and it revealed to me that I had been managing a newsroom with improvised explosive devices planted everywhere. The secret deal that was made at Trump Tower, where Pecker told Cohen he would act as the campaign’s “eyes and ears.” The hush-money payoffs. The plot to publish negative stories about Trump’s rivals. A scheme to influence the 2016 election.

Everything finally fit into place. There were no more secrets, and I wasn’t alone anymore. Everyone now knew.

Lachlan Cartwright is a special correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter. He has been a journalist for 20 years, reporting from Australia, London and New York.

Photo credits for top image: Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic/Getty Images (Daniels); Andrew Burton/Getty Images (Trump); Santiago Felipe/WireImage/Getty Images (Weinstein); Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images (Clinton).

Read by David Linski

Narration produced by Anna Diamond

Engineered by Steven Szczesniak

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"The Masque of the Red Death": [Essay Example], 439 words
Words: 439 | Page: 1 | 3 min read. Published: Feb 12, 2019. The story begins with a description of a plague, the "Red Death," which has been devastating the country for a long time. The narrator explains the process of the disease, emphasizing the redness of the blood and the scarlet stains. The disease is so deadly that one is dead within ...
Masque Of The Red Death English Literature Essay
Edgar Allan Poe uses his mastery of writing to convey the idea that Death is inexorable in "The Masque of the Red Death.". This central overall theme that death is inescapable can be seen in the narrator, Death itself, in the ironic nature of the plot, and most blatantly in the vast amount of symbolism scattered throughout the story.
The Masque of the Red Death Critical Essays
In Poe, Baudelaire thought he had found a twin soul, one who had given voice in prose to the dark sentiments Baudelaire routinely expressed in his poetry. "The Masque of the Red Death" was one ...
A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Masque of the Red Death'
Interestingly, Poe originally titled the story 'The Mask of the Red Death', which places the emphasis on the masked figure who shows up at the end; in replacing 'Mask' with 'Masque', Poe shifts the focus onto the masquerade which Prospero stages for his courtiers. (A masque doesn't have to involve wearing masks: it was a private ...
Poe's Stories: The Masque of the Red Death Summary & Analysis
Analysis. The Red Death, a bloody disease that kills a man rapidly with a seizure and bleeding from the pores, is terrorizing the country. But Prince Prospero is unaffected. Though his people are dying by the hour, he gathers his friends and his knights and shuts himself away in an ornate abbey, which he designed himself.
The Masque of the Red Death Critical Overview
Critical Overview. By the time of his early death, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had written about 50 poems, 70 short stories, a short novel and over 50 essays. While his literary and personal ...
The Masque of the Red Death Essays and Criticism
To Foerster "The Masque of the Red Death'' is a richly vivid contrast between life and death. Setting dominates, and ''magnificence and voluptuousness heighten the sense of worldly pleasure ...
Poe's Short Stories "The Masque of the Red Death" (1845) Summary
A summary of "The Masque of the Red Death" (1845) in Edgar Allan Poe's Poe's Short Stories. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Poe's Short Stories and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
"The Masque of the Red Death"
Summary. In "The Masque of the Red Death," Poe presents an age-old theme, a theme as old as the medieval morality play Everyman. In this ancient play, the main character is named Everyman and early in the play while walking down the road, he meets another character called Death. Everyman cries out to him: "O Death, thy comest when I had thee ...
Mood in Poe's "The Masque of Red Death" Short Story Essay
The author's detailed portrayal of death attracts and simultaneously intimidates the reader, setting a frightful and ominous mood of the overall story: "And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night" (Poe 4). The Red Death image haunts the reader through the short story, constantly leaving a ...
The Masque of the Red Death Summary & Complete Analysis
Contents. "The Masque of the Red Death" was published in 1842 by an American writer Edger Allan Poe. The story is an account of Prince Prospero, who tries to avoid the dangerous plague, the Red Death, to hit his abbey. Along with many other nobles, he hosts a masquerade ball in seven differently decorated rooms.
Essays on The Masque of The Red Death
2 pages / 715 words. In the Masque of the red Death, Edgar Allen Poe tells his readers about the seven different rooms. Each room is said to have a different color with items to match. Also each colored room symbolizes a feeling. The feelings that portray each room is... The Masque of The Red Death Edgar Allan Poe. 10.
Death Themes in The Masque of The Red Death
Published: Mar 25, 2024. The Masque of the Red Death, written by Edgar Allan Poe, is a short story that explores the theme of death in a vivid and haunting manner. This essay will delve into the various ways in which death is portrayed in the story, as well as the debates surrounding its interpretation. Through a review of the history and ...
The Masque of the Red Death
Publication date. May 1842. " The Masque of the Red Death " (originally published as " The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy ") is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1842. The story follows Prince Prospero's attempts to avoid a dangerous plague, known as the Red Death, by hiding in his abbey.
The Masque of the Red Death: Themes
When "The Masque of the Red Death" opens, Prospero and his companions have sequestered themselves in one of Prospero's walled estates so they can save their lives by avoiding the deadly plague known as the Red Death. As a result, one can read "The Masque of the Red Death" as an allegory about life and death and the powerlessness of ...
The Masque of the Red Death Essay Examples
The Masque of the Red Death Essay Examples. Stuck on your essay? Browse essays about The Masque of the Red Death and find inspiration. Learn by example and become a better writer with Kibin's suite of essay help services.
The Masque of the Red Death Introduction
More. " The Masque of the Red Death " is a deliciously creepy and wonderfully bizarre story written by that early American master of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe first published it as "The Mask of the Red Death. A Fantasy" in the May 1842 issue of Graham's Magazine, a Philadelphia literary magazine for which he served as editor.
The Masque of the Red Death Analysis
Dive deep into Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death with extended analysis, commentary, and discussion ... New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death. by Edgar Allan Poe. 1842. 11th Grade Lexile: 1100. Font Size. VSPC Assignment: Light by hgiugno is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. [1] 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.
The Masque of the Red Death Essay Topics
Get unlimited access to SuperSummaryfor only $0.70/week. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The Masque of the Red Death Essay Questions
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt ...
The Masque Of The Red Death: Critical Analysis
The Masque Of The Red Death: Critical Analysis. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. `The Masque of the Red Death is [an obvious] instance of architectural allegory. You will recall how Prince Prospero, when his dominions are being ...
How Does Poe Create Tension In The Masque Of The Red Death
In "The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Allan Poe, Prince Prospero's evolution from fear to bravery in his encounter with the Red Death, Poe captures Prospero's transition from initial fear to bravery or impulse, through irony, visual imagery, and foreshadowing. Initially, Prospero believes himself and his followers to be above the reach of ...
Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death
In the short story, "The Masquerade of the Red Death," Poe uses the significance of the Masquerade ball to portray the theme. The author describes the masquerade as a magnificent and joyful time so the reader can see its symbolic representation that reoccurs throughout the story. It shows the hidden use of a ball to bring pleasure during ...
The Masque Of The Red Death Research Paper
The Masque Of The Red Death Research Paper. 742 Words3 Pages. Evelyn Hall Ms Crain English 9 March 22 2024 Death is inevitable to escape Death is not something even the wealthiest people can escape. The story, "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edger Allen Poe, is about a disease that killed half of the population. It's called the Red Death ...
The Masque of the Red Death
The key to writing a good hook statement at the beginning of your essay is establishing a connection between the theme of the story or text you are writing about, the essay question and the ...
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Research Paper On The Masque Of The Red Death. 843 Words4 Pages. Frankie Huether Ms. Crain English 9 7 March 2024 Hiding From Death Death is one thing no one can avoid. In the short story "The Masque of the Red Death," by Edgar Allan Poe, this idea is written into a story based on the Plague. The wealthy friends of Prince Prospero throw a ...
The Masque of the Red Death Summary
The Masque of the Red Death Summary " The Masque of the Red Death" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which a plague known as the Red Death spreads through 14th Century Europe. Prince Prospero ...
Lachlan Cartwright: What I Saw at the National Enquirer During Trump's
Lachlan Cartwright has been a journalist for 20 years. He is currently a special correspondent at The Hollywood Reporter covering media, entertainment and politics. Published April 3, 2024 Updated ...

A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

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Poe's Stories

Edgar Allan Poe

Summary and Analysis "The Masque of the Red Death"

Mood in Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death” Short Story Essay

Works Cited

Background of the Story

The Masque of the Red Death Summary

Characters Analysis

Mysterious guest

Death as Natural and Inevitable

The Red Death as a Moral Decay

Safety is an Illusion

Versions of Reality

Foolishness and Folly

Literary Analysis

The “Red Death”

Title of the Story

Writing Style

Narrator Point of View

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

The “Castellated Abbey”

The Red Death

The Masquerade/Dream Imagery

Art Imagery

The Shakespearean Connection

Apocalyptic Symbolism

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