What Does The Ebola Symbolize In The Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allen Poe uses symbols such as the Red Death, masquerade ball, and even the castellated abbeys in the allegory “The Masque of the Red Death” to teach all readers, no matter their age, ethnicity, or gender, to acknowledge other people’s problems. This story applies to real-life situations, such as the HIV outbreak in the 1980s; it was believed that the disease could only be contracted by homosexual men and drug users, so it seemed unimportant to the sober, straight community, who mainly just tried to ignore it. It was only when HIV was detected in straight women and children who did not use drugs that Americans started worrying about the disease and began funding and developing research on it. In this case, HIV was like the Red Death in

The Ebola virus has always been around, but it has mostly been contained within Africa; but when a doctor visited Africa to treat the disease, he ended up contracting it and bringing it to America, where at least two other people contracted Ebola from him. America tried to ignore the Ebola virus in Africa until it entered the country, just like how Prospero tried to ignore the Red Death while it raged outside of the castellated abbeys, and only tried to address the problem when it appeared at his door. This is proven within the story, when “It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence” (83). While Prince Prospero could have been making efforts to calm his people or look into ending the plague, he chose to host a masquerade ball instead, leaving over half of his kingdom to fall ill and die a gruesome, painful

Eventually, the Red Death, which Prospero had tried so desperately to evade, approached and killed him, so “now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each is the despairing posture of his fall” (88). Because the castellated abbeys can be considered a part of Prospero’s mind, then this clearly shows that denying the existence of a problem will not magically resolve it, and could instead cause bigger and even more pressing issues. Poe is proving that even if a problem does not directly affect someone, it should still be acknowledged, confronted, and dealt with in one way or another. It is clear that all of the symbols included in the story contribute to the allegory “The Masque of the Red Death”, which contains a lesson that applies to all people and teaches the reader to recognize other people’s problems, even if they do not affect the reader