Comparing The Black Cat And The Masque Of The Red Death

When life becomes rough, how do people cope with it? Some people channel their struggles through a creative outlet. Others deal with it in more negative and harmful ways. Edgar Allen Poe dealt with his hardships in both ways. Many people in his life, including his parents, had died when he was young, thus starting the chain that was his depressing life. Somewhere in that chain he tries to forget his problems with alcohol, but that just turned into another problem. Luckily, he had another solution: writing. Poe’s inability to cope with both alcoholism and the large amount of loved ones that died in his life had led him to majorly focus on those two topics within his writing.

By creating characters who had negative experiences with alcohol,

In “The Black Cat”, the narrator killed his most beloved pet cat(2). This relates to Poe’s life because the cat could represent the beloved women and family members that died in his life, even though he didn’t kill them. Also in “The Black Cat”, the narrator kills his wife(4). Even though this story was written before his wife died, this could have been him venting his worries that one day his wife will follow the same path as the other women in his life. In “The Masque of the Red Death” the text states, “And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.” (10) The blood-bedewed halls are a symbol of tuberculosis, as also is the Red Death himself. The revellers are the people in his life that had died of tuberculosis.

Poe wrote heavily about the topics of alcoholism and death because those were 2 big factors in his life. He took aspects from his sad reality of loneliness and addiction, and turned it into a morbid alternate universe of burying people alive and killing rich people with a personified version of