What Is The Shadow Self In The Masque Of The Red Death

In both stories, the shadow self of the characters are demonstrated as the human desire to conquer death. In “The Masque of the Red Death”, the rejection and denial of demise was a part of Prospero’s shadow self due to which his will to live rejected the consequences of death. Prospero says, “Who dares? He demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him- “ who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him- that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!” (Poe, “Masque” 10). This states his anger towards himself that even after all these security were in the castle, some stranger dared to enter in his premises. In the process of accepting his shadow self of denying death, he left the external world to take care of themselves

When he lost the woman he loved due to tuberculosis, he wanted to fight death and bring her back. Nevertheless, Red Death is described as a disease that kills an individual in half an hour and right after facing the Red death, fell prostrate in death Prince Prospero. Furthermore, Poe’s loved ones also died after facing tuberculosis which plays a role as a Red death and shows Poe to be the shadow self of Prince Prospero. Similarly, in “Ligeia”, the shadow self is also shown through the love of Ligeia’s husbands toward Ligeia. Ligeia’s husband says, “Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia --and then came back upon my heart…with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one and only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena” (Poe, “Ligeia” 8). This describes that Ligeia’s husband sits next to his dead wife Rowena that he can not help but only think of his beloved Ligeia. His shadow self gives him an idea that even after death, Ligeia can conquer her deathbed. Rowena’s dead body is the narrator’s own desires of perceiving Ligeia by means of his shadow