The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in "The Masque of the Red Death": Solved at Last?

Author(s): Brett Zimmerman

Source: The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Winter 2009), pp. 60-73
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41506370
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fin The Masque of the Red Death

The Puzzle of the Color Symbolism in "The Masque of the

Death": Solved at Last?
Brett Zimmerman

G. R. Thompson reminds us that "one of the favorite pastimes of critics is

trying to identify the symbolic meaning of the colors of the seven rooms"1
of Prince Prospero's imperial suite, but they have had difficulty agreeing on
the significance of the colors or if they have any significance at all. Nicholas
Ruddick insists that the chromatic imagery has no symbolic meaning whatsoever
and Poe employs it simply to demonstrate Prospero's insanity.2 Eric H. du Plessis
also believes that no particular meaning is discernible in the arrangement of the
colors yet this is a deliberate strategy:

Poe's use of jarringly disparate nuances in "The Masque

of the Red Death" suggests a concerted effort to breach
the standards of aesthetics prevalent among the painters of
his day .... The tonal anomalies and resulting visual shock
orchestrated by Poe make a fitting counterpoint to the other
discordant elements introduced in the text: they complement
Prince Prospero's unusual demeanor and his aberrant taste in
clothing, entertainment, and decor ... the disharmonious color
scheme participates effectively with other jarring elements in
challenging the reader's artistic assumptions.3

It is difficult to believe that a symbolist such as Poe would refuse to assign

significance to the hues in a tale otherwise loaded with symbolic and allegorical
suggestiveness.

Indeed, other commentators maintain that the color scheme is not meant to
indicate discord but something more clear and sensible. Madeleine Kisner,
in a dissertation devoted to color imagery in the works of American authors,
has surprisingly little to say about the chromatic strategies of "Masque": after
providing no original insights about the black room, she states, "The choice
of colors for the other apartments seem[s] randomly indicative of the multi-
colored dreams that life encompasses."4 Edward William Pitcher says that Poe
sometimes wrote about life in terms of a tripartite division:

life's three stages are the first twenty years (the blue and purple
rooms signifying a closeness to divine truths - purple is the

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 color of paradise in
the subsequent thirt
and white for the thr
autumn, winter peri
twenty years (with
return to "facility in
and violet, and the a

H. H. Bell reads these

the seven rooms are "t
span."6 Quite right, th
seem rather far-fetch
beginnings and origins
it is the residence of t
speak of something co
worn by those who ha
by extension of meanin
of that period in Pros
in life - perhaps movin
three colors. Green is a
is full of life and vigor
Orange suggests "the a
to be beyond his prim
suggest the silver or h
goes on to say that vio
then represents the gr
more or less enforced c
black and its associatio
imagination or Procrus

Patrick Cheney relates

backs off a little, thoug
be pressed too hard;"7
a reversal of the Chris
destruction of the abb
religious ritual to comm
triumphing over the l
liturgywould therefor
Nevertheless, Cheney is
something by the hues

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62 The Masque of the Red Death

Although we may disagree with Ruddick and du Plessis, who argue

means nothing by his use of chromatic imagery in "The Masque of
Death," we may not be entirely satisfied with the explanations offere
scholars. Perhaps an obvious strategy would be to consult modern di
of symbols. J. E. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols is less helpful than
expect. Much more useful is Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheebrant's
Dictionary of Symbols,8 yet that provides a surfeit of suggestions; one h
through, with some colors, pages of material picking and choosing signif
that work in the context of "Masque" while rejecting many others.

Consequently, an important question arises: Would Poe have known a

various meanings assigned to the colors by these twentieth-century
Which texts, if any, were available to him that might have influenced his
choices? Chevalier and Cirlot are helpful in this regard: both provide
bibliographies. One naturally looks for publication dates that prece
approximately coeval with the first publication of "Masque," which
initially in Graham's Magazine in May 1842 and later, in revised for
Broadway Journal of July 1845. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols
the first clue with a book printed in Paris in 1837: Des Couleurs Sy
Dans L'Antiquite, le Moyen-Age et Les Temps Moderns, by Frederic
The English translation I have seen, published in 1845, is by W. S. In
certainly would not have required a translation; his facility with Fre
known to Poe specialists and Portal's French seems relatively acc
footnote in Inman provided a further lead: George Field's Chromatog
A Treatise on Colours and Pigments, and of Their Powers in Paintin

While it is difficult to prove beyond doubt that Poe had his hands on
treatises, or others, he does appear to have tapped into the contemporary
in chromatic aesthetics. Portal, after all, mentions "polychromy, the the
practice of which, in the schools of France and Germany, have recently a
much attention."9 Although he is an artist figure, I do not mean to i
Prospero's sense of decor takes anything from nineteenth-century "polyc
rather, it is plausible that Poe borrowed the color symbolism from
contemporaries for his existential allegory. For specialists, it is now
that, rather than being estranged from the spirit of his time and place -
politically, culturally - Poe was very much in tune with his Zeitgeist .10
or not he was interested in "the standards of aesthetics prevalent a
painters of his day," as a literary artist Poe was concerned with the
associations provided by texts on chromatics - at least for "The Masq

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 Red Death."11 To solve
whatever suggestions a
go beyond them with

* * *

The idea of associating time with colors - from small te

from hours to seasons to human life spans - was hardly
may have taken the notion from Field, who writes of
coloured every thing according to nature, fancy, or an
things immaterial - the hours, the days, and the seasons
on this idea early in Chromatography :

The analogy of the natural series of colours, with th

the day and the seasons, coincides with the ages of
seasons of life, and adapts it to express them in th
shades of draperies and effects; from the white or l
morn or dawn of innocuous infancy, through all th
ages, and stages of human life, to the black or dark
guilt, age, despair, and death.13

Poe does not necessarily follow other artists: his use

certainly does not symbolize "light of the morn or dawn
and even Field himself furnishes a significance antitheti
purity that white often represents. In this regard, Poe ap
later lead - but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The first color of Prospero's suite, blue, is often taken to

(since it is the easternmost room) and the morning of lif
important traditionally and in terms of Poe's metaphy
devoted to it in the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. To q
is not of this world: it evokes the idea of eternity, calm
inhuman, even;" it "draws the individual towards the in
yearning for purity and a hunger for what surpasses n
"substantial metaphysical significance," "a solemn supr
(103). When we consider Poe's belief in a transcenden
material universe, the association of blue with the infin
may easily be seen to relate to the first room. An idea f
stories - particularly in the "transcendental tales" of "B

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64 The Masaue of the Red Death

"Ligeia," and "Morella" - is the concept of prebirth existence: "i

idleness to say that I had not lived before - that the soul has no
existence. You deny it? - let us not argue the matter. Convinced myse
not to convince," says the Neo-Platonist, Egaeus, in "Berenice" (CW 2
initially come into this world not from nonexistence but from the metap
repertoire of souls where "God" dwells. To quote Wordsworth, "traili
of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home."15 In Christian a
tradition, blue has metaphysical significances: "Blue and white ... ex
detachment from the things of this world and the flight of the liber
towards God;" "In Jewish tradition, Luz ... the home of the immorta
called the 'Blue City'" (104). Poe's awareness of the association of blu
immortality and paradise is also suggested by his reference in "The F
House of Usher" to Ludwig Tieck's The Journey into the Blue Distan
about a paradisiacal land where the souls of artists go.

Blue, then, has clear metaphysical associations for Poe, as suggested b

of his tales and by the symbolism uncovered by modern scholars. Bot
contemporary with Poe substantiate these meanings. Field writes, "In
is the colour of Heaven and of the eye, and thence emblematical of in
and divinity" (192). Portal concurs, stating that blue - azure, Inman s
calls it in translation - represents truth divine, eternity, and human imm
(Second Section, 23); he repeats these points two pages later. The co
of blue with the divine and immortality is, in fact, trans-cultural: "
the Supreme God, the creator of the universe, Cneph, was painted
In Greece, azure is the colour of Jupiter. In China, heaven is the
god; and in Christian symbolism, the azured vault is the mantle wh
the divinity. Azure is likewise the symbol of God the Saviour, rede
mankind" (Second Section, 18). Poe's first color, then, is neither arbi
in opposition to certain established chromatic conventions; we must
clues provided by the theorists and combine them with Poe's metap
conclude that blue signifies the immortal soul descending from the trans
divine realm beyond the mask of space and time (to borrow a conce
Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Melville's Moby-Dick) and inhabiting p
form. This phenomenon is universal and therefore buttresses the vie
seven rooms and colors in "The Masque of the Red Death" as symbo
cycle of human existence. I would enlarge this interpretation, howe
insisting that blue does not represent the first, the morning, stage of hu
solely but also the supernatural stage immediately preceding birth.

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The second hue, purp
Portal is of no help
redness, is a regal,
mythological represen
and in general also a
related to divine king
it has associations wi
Poe. In his poem "Th
we find these lines:
In state his glory we
Porphyrogene is a r
how these colors cle
a prince. Thus, he ca
the world and into t

Green has several pa

However, few if any
Ages, green "became
Prospero, whose biza
some who would hav
was necessary to hea
673). The ironist Poe
it is the color "of th
Field, could have inf
associate it with the
of youth, the spring
nature is surprisingl
variety" (225-26). Pit
the springtime of hu

The first three hues i

move toward the last
the human lifespan a
suite. It is also the t
green and the mor
with orange, then, t
orange represents "t
"it is an extremely d
the libido, and henc

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66 The Masque of the Red Death

infidelity" (723). We might say that orange, then, represents the mo

and therefore least innocent period of human life - adulthood (Prosp
ours, more generally). Portal reinforces these negative associations: like sa
a yellow-orange, "orange designated adultery; the marigold, by its
this day the attribute of betrayed husbands. In heraldic language, i
likewise the emblem of dissimulation and hypocrisy, and the love of
(Third Section, 18). We have no textual evidence to support the idea of
being a cuckold or an unfaithful husband, but the nature of his ma
provides clues to his licentious disposition; we are told, after all, th
his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders
there was "much of the wanton" ( CW 673) - a word denoting ungove
lechery, lasciviousness, sexual promiscuity. The hedonistic Prospero
man who lives by a carpe diem philosophy - is easily imagined to be
all the degraded passions in the autumn of his life.

The next color in his suite, white, has, as we know, many symbolic signif
but perhaps the most telling quotation from the Penguin Dictionary o
is this: "[white] is the colour of going to one's death, and this w
the significance of the Aztecs' making white the colour of the wes
Certainly after the orange room, Prospero begins to enter the western pa
suite and is indeed, literally and symbolically, going to his death. Th
true, of course, of his guests who follow him as he pursues the Phantom
the black room. I doubt that Poe was aware of Aztec color symbolis
might have known Field: "Physically, white is expressive of infirmity
or pale complexion is feminine, and indicates ill health and want of
(1 19).16 As I demonstrate elsewhere,17 Prospero has already caught t
in fact, has had it for half an hour before the climactic confrontation
avatar of the Red Death. He is therefore ill as he passes through th
room - "The white colour of flowers is attributed by the botanist t
(Field 119) - and the final manifestation of their particular disease, red sp
on the skin and especially the face, will become apparent as the prin
guests finally fall. Poe's readers who were aware of the polychromati
of his day would have seen what was coming as the enraged tyrant m
way into the white decor: as Portal puts it, "White was consecrated to
by all antiquity, and became a colour of mourning" (First Section, 1
to borrow a phrase from Inman's translation, a "mortuary colour," th
the four remaining.18

The hue of the next-to-last room, violet, is also relevant in this sen
Chevalier we read, "in the circle of life, violet lies directly opposite

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Thus it stands, not f
autumnal passage fr
isnot precisely oppo
the diagram in Edg
while green is at the
between white, which
black, which represe
of symbols. Let us s
offers nothing of va
was "a mortuary col
a coffin, with a viol
mourning by person
mourning. On media
also it is mourning" (T
color, perfectly sit
should decorate the
by a prince is also ap
by personages of exa
of his choice of mor
certainly does.

Scholars have had lit

black, or about the o
Field has much to sa

Black is emblema
In its moral effect
both in nature and
augmented by dar
and the ensign of
people; and hence
employed it ideally
criminal, the mourn
melancholy, of wh
darkness. (306-07

In contributing to the
Death," black's associ
seven rooms and the
Prospero, on the oth

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68 The Masque of the Red Death

crime," "the criminal." Prospero, after all, is a tyrant whose mental degradat
has made possible a decadent masquerade for his aristocratic friends as wel
as a criminal negligence and sociopathic hard-heartedness in allowing the va
majority of his subjects to die. If "mental degradation" also means insanity,
have already considered the textual evidence for Prospero's madness.

As for red, on one hand it traditionally symbolizes life (as in life-blood), but
"Masque," as we know, it represents disease. Geoffrey Gait Harpham elaborat
"From Biblical times red has been associated with the plague, especially the
contagious viral cholera as opposed to the flea-carried bubonic plague know
as the Black Death. In England through the time of Pepys, corpse-beare
were required to carry red wands, and infected houses had red crosses paint
on the door."19 We may not be surprised, then, to find Portal listing red as y
another "mortuary colour" (Second Section, 15). Poe, however, unites red wi
black in the westernmost room, and Portal has a rather interesting suggest
about the symbolic meaning of that coupling: "red will designate divine love
united with black, it will be the symbol of infernal love, of egotism, of hatred,
and of all the passions of degraded man" (First Section, 12). We return to th
passions of a morally degraded man, Prospero. As Pitcher puts it, "His egotis
arrogance, pride, coldness, manic superiority, and tyranny are intimated
several points" (72). A colleague, Denise Hubert, whose services I had request
to help translate Portal - before my discovery of Inman - suggested that th
reference to "infernal love" means that Prospero will be damned for his s
against humanity.

COLOR I SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE I RELEVANT TO

blue immortality, heaven, paradise, humanity (including
the divine; ties in with the Neo- Prospero)
Platonic notion of prebirth
existence found in several Poe

purple royalty Prospero

green madness; Prospero

the awakening of life, youth, the h

orange middle age, lust and infidelity, humanity (including

dissimulation, hypocrisy, love of Prospero)

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 white a mortuar
health, going t
mourning
violet a mortuary color: autumnal passage humanity (including
from life into death, mourning; Prospero)
mourning by personages of exalted

black a mortuary color: gloom, woe, humanity (including

death, the Devil, the mournful; Prospero)

mental degradation, criminality Prospero

red a mortuary color: disease - humanity (including

red wi
black the passions of degraded man,

Figure 1 : Col

Figure 1 sum
hues of Pros
(blue), to you
and violet), t
(red), and per
(around back
Prince Prosp
commentator
important add
represent the
to particulari
may also be
to pertain to
the coupling
man of depr
than for the
But the meta
on the part
allegory in w
the Holy Tri
triumvirate

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70 The Masaue of the Red Death

that the philosophic materialism suggested by the apocalyptic concl

counterbalanced by the symbolic promises of the blue. Our physica
suffer the stages of energetic youth, corrupt middle age, and disea
death, but our supra-carnal essences rejoin the repertoire of souls a
metempsychosis - a theme Poe explores in such tales as "Metzeng
"Ligeia," and "Eleonora." Perhaps "The Masque of the Red Death,"
not quite the bleak existential vision we have long thought it to be. I
that Poe never abandoned his Neo-Platonism.

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 Notes

1 . Edgar A. Poe. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. G. R. Thompson.
(New York: Norton, 2004), 301 n3.

2. Nicholas Ruddick. "The Hoax of the Red Death: Poe as Allegorist." Sphyinx 4
(1985), 272.

3. Eric H. du Plessis. "Deliberate Chaos: Poe's Use of Colors in The Masque of the
Red Death.'" Poe Studies 34.1-2 (2001), 42.

4. Madeleine Kisner. Color in the Worlds and Works of Poe, Hawthorne , Crane ,
Anderson , and Welty. (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1975), 32.

5. Edward W. Pitcher. "Horological and Chronological Time in 'Masque of the Red

Death.'" American Transcendental Quarterly 29 (Winter 1976), 73.

6. H. H. Bell. "The Masque of the Red Death' - An Interpretation." South Atlantic

Bulletin 38.4 (November 1973), 101.

7. Patrick Cheney. "Poe's Use of The Tempest and the Bible in The Masque of the Red
Death.'" English Language Notes 20.3-4 (March- June 1983), 37 nlO.

8. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheebrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. Trans.
John Buchanan Brown. (New York: Penguin, 1996), hereafter referred to in the text
under Chevalier's name.

9. Frederick Portal. Symbolic Colours in Antiquity - The Middle Ages - and Modern
Times. Trans. W. S. Inman. (London: Johan Weale, 1845), 36.

10. This point is made by several of the Poe specialists represented in Jeffrey Andrew
Weinstock and Tony Magistrale, eds. Approaches to Teaching Poe 's Prose and Poetry.
(New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008).

1 1 . Burton Pollin's Word Index to Poe 's Fiction. (New York: Gordian, 1982) provides
references to the Poe tales that mention blue, purple, green, orange, and violet and
includes numbers indicating frequency of appearances for "red" (76 times), "white"
(115), and "black" (147). Having tracked down the references to blue, purple, green,
orange, and violet, I am not convinced that the symbolic significances of these colors in
"Masque" are found elsewhere in Poe's prose. Wilson O. Clough's "The Use of Color
Words by Edgar Allen [sic] Poe." PMLA 45.2 (June 1930), 598-613 concludes: "Blues
are everywhere negligible, and violet, purple, and orange are also neglected, though more
naturally so" (606) throughout Poe's writing. Regarding the poetry, Clough believes

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72 The Masque of the Red Death

that "Poe's verse is not marked to any striking degree by color words, an
number of color words is too small to allow for any conclusions" (608). A
"Its use seems conventional" - as in blue eyes, veins, or skies (611); "'Purp
19 times in the prose tales, applied three times to the face, otherwise to var
(611); "'Green' ... appears most often in the landscape studies, and is gener
most often either for vegetation or as apparently a humorous color" (610); "Th
seven uses of 'orange' were humorously applied to dress" (611); "The word '
a wide range of use, particularly in the tales of horror" (608); "'Violet' is use
as to appear almost negligible" (611); "One feels that 'black' becomes co
and unthinking with Poe. The word 'black' is applied to a great variety of
(609); red "is used to describe a great variety of objects, apparently most oft
idea of intensifying the horror of the situation" (609). All in all, Clough con
"Outside of the few landscape studies, Poe's use of color is generally cons
probably more conventional than deliberate, except for some white and blac
and colors used to intensify a situation of horror. Poe's range of color w
sufficiently great to warrant one in supposing that he gave much attention to
of his work" (612). Most Poe scholars, however, would agree that "The Masq
Red Death" is one tale that falls outside of Clough's summarizing observa

12. Certainly it is more convincing to cite texts contemporary with Poe

sources for the aesthetics of "Masque" rather than The Penguin Dictionary o
but we must remember that Chevalier and Gheerbrant consulted hundreds of sources
and many of those works on such topics as aesthetics and mythology could have
functioned to influence Poe indirectly through a more direct impact on the texts he was
more likely to have seen.

du Plessis mentions a third French source that Poe may have had at his disposal: M.
E. Chevreul's De la loi du contraste simultane des couleurs (Paris, 1839). du Plessis
tells us that "Chevreul's study, though primarily written as a reference book for the
printing industry, had a considerable impact in the field of aesthetics; it became a frame
of reference that ended a great deal of polemics among nineteenth-century European
artists" ("Deliberate Chaos," 41).

13. George Field. Chromatography; or, A Treatise on Colours and Pigments , and of
Their Powers in Painting. (London: Tilt and Bogue, 1841), 23.

14. All quotations from Poe's tales are taken from the Collected Works of Edgar Allan
Poe , 3 Volumes. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. (Cambridge: Belknap, 1969-1978),
hereafter cited as CW in the text.

15. William Wordsworth. "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of

Early Childhood" in William Wordsworth 's: The Prelude. Ed. Carlos Baker. (Toronto:
Holt, 1954), 154.

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16. Recall the pale comp
Rappaccini, Chillingwor

17. Brett Zimmerman. E

McGill-Queen's Universi

18. In Moby-Dick (New

his own "chromatogra
multiplicity of meaning
objects and abstractions
has been subject to no si
the color theorists of th
hue by various cultures:
innocence, or divinity to
associations, with whate
elusive something in the
soul than that redness w
in his treatise on the sub
Burke considers dark hu
examples of white object
White Squall," the "Whit
of "the king of terrors,"
Hampshire," "the White
realm of physics, too, not
itself would be as palsied
taken to symbolize the "
in his exploration of wh
into the symbolic associa
to it for the purposes of

19. Geoffrey Gait Harph

Literature. (Princeton, N

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