Joaquin Romero

ENG 341
Dr. Renner
5 October 2015
A New Historicism Analysis of Poe
The Masque of the Red Death on the surface can be seen as a
simple horror tale concerning the implacable nature of disease but
looking at the events in mid-19th century America offers a different
interpretation. An ongoing event during 1842, when The Masque of
the Red Death was published, was the Industrial Revolution.
Particularly in the Northeast of America, factories sprung up like weeds
and many factory workers lived in poverty. The living conditions of
these workers tended to be small and cramped in the dirtier sections of
a given city.
These poor sections were highly unsanitary and diseases could
and would sweep through these areas in an instant. Illnesses like
cholera, typhus, and yellow fever were some of the more widespread
epidemics that would affect the country and diseases did not
distinguish between poor and rich. In his story, Poe describes Prince
Prospero and his court as being medieval in style with knights and
dames of his court (p 129). A native of New England, Poe would have
been familiar with the separation of the rich from the poor, and how
little it protected the rich from sickness. Poe condemns the wealthy by
comparing them to the nobles of Europe, members of a system
America broke away from, and punished these people by showing their
allegorical demise at the hands of an uncaring disease.
This growing sense of resentment towards the wealthier
members of American society would also lend support to the still
minority opinion of abolishing slavery. With the proliferation of
machinery in the North, slave labor was practically nonexistent and as
a result, the idea of abolishing slavery began to gain more and more
traction in the North. In 1849, Poe published Hop-Frog, the story of a
dwarf jester obtaining revenge against his monarch and seven
ministers. Hop-Frog, the eponymous dwarf, plans and executes his
murder of the king in recompense for assaulting an equally dwarfish
dancer Trippetta and after being forced to drink wine (p.314).
The story is presented as the first-hand account of an
unidentified third party, symbolic of Poes separation from the South
and slavery. The story can be seen as a warning to the Southern states
that their treatment of their slaves could very well end badly for them.

More specifically, in the story, Hop-Frog snaps only after getting drunk
and watching his female companion being assaulted, a not too
uncommon thing for a Northerner to image happening on a plantation.
Another important aspect of this story is that Poe doesnt
condemn Hop-Frog for his murder of the king and the ministers.
Instead, Hop-Frog is one of the few killers in Poes work to not be
punished for their actions. In fact, Poe writes Hop-Frog as a
sympathetic figure who only took revenge after being pushed too far.
This echoes the growing movement of treating slaves as actual people
instead of property. In fact, Uncle Toms Cabin, a novel and play
casting the life of slavery as a miserable one would be published in
1852, just three years after Hop-Frog. It seems Poe had a kernel of
progressiveness within his macabre tales after all.