Custom essays on Edgar Allan Poe
// October 10th, 2012 // No Comments » // Free essays
The source of writer’s inspiration and thoughts is usually his own life and Edgar Poe is not an exception. It does not mean that Poe came through everything he wrote in his horror stories. Edgar had a cloudless childhood but he suffered greatly in his maturity. First of all, when he was a grown-up he got to know that his real parents died. He had problems with his forest-parents and being a sensitive person suffered because of it greatly. Then, he had to think every moment of life how to provide himself and his young wife with everything they needed. He desperately loved his wife but lost her only in a few years after their marriage. It was the most crucial and tragic moment in his life. He was never able to recover from this lost. All these life difficulties and tragedies influenced his literary activity and found their reflection in his horror and murder stories. It can be proved by the stories themselves.
Edgar Allan Poe’s horror story “The Mask of the Death” was published in 1842. It is a story about Prince Prospero who wants to hide from the terrible epidemic, called the Red Death, in his abbey. During a masquerade ball a strange figure enters the abbey and Prince Prospero, when he meets this stranger, falls dead. The Read Death is made up by the author; it does not exist in reality. Its symptoms in the story are “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” (Poe). When Poe was writing this story his wife was suffering from tuberculosis. It inspired him to write this story. He, as well as the main character of the story, Prince Prospero, was trying to avoid the disease. It is also known that the writer’s real mother, Elizabeth, and his foster-mother, Frances, also died of tuberculosis. Poe during all his life was afraid of a fatal disease that could have taken his life and Prospero’s death is the bright illustration. There is another assumption of the source of this fictitious disease. In 1831 Edgar Poe became an eyewitness of the epidemic of cholera in Maryland and this episode had made a great impression on him. Epidemic is something that is haunting you and there is no way out. You can hide nowhere because it will reach you anyway (cited in Ropollo, 1967). (more…)




