Poe Response

1. The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. …The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and sympathy of his fellow-men . . . When his dominions were half depopulated, he [Prince Prospero] summoned to his presence a thousand hale and lighthearted friends . . . and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. . . A strong and loft wall girded it in . . . had gates of iron. The courtiers . . . welded the bolts . . . With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion . . . All of these and security were within. Without was the “Read Death.” . . . while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad . . . Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of most unusual magnificence (Poe 269). - blood, fear, contagion : connected to Dayan - isolation/ separation from contagion - idea of the mask: mask of slaves, mask to hide faces/blood, prevents detection - dark, fear, gothic, death - “Poe’s preoccupation with what is pernicious dark, and deadly” PPP 405 - blood - “There is a logic to his excessive attention to blood, things dirtied, and bodies mutilated” 252 - “degradation and rot” 252 ; “a particular kind of degradation and defilement” PPP 405 – contamination of white blood with black – black and red room! - “Poe’s relentlessly circumscribed settings” 253 recalling, according to Dayan, slave ships - slippage, blending, fading into black – degradation – slips in unseen ,corrupts - permeability: “Into the same society that sanctioned the accumulation of money, goods, and land seeped the rot to surfeit . . .” PPP 413 - “The epistemology of whiteness, absolutely dependent for its effect on the detection of blackness, resulted in fantasies about secret histories and hidden taints that would then be backed up by explicit codes of the law” 261 “not always possible to detect black blood in lightened skin” 261 - detection: stain of the blood on the body, especially the most visible part, the face – would bear the most radicalized features - “The indelible mark of infamy” PPP 413 - blood and crime: “the crime of color” PPP 417 “tainted” “the unseen blood stain” that one could be charged with - other blood – inheritance, heredity, aristocracy? - “Poe’s troubled sense of himself as a Southern aristocrat” 241 -“ his obsession with investment, inheritance, descent, and lineage” PPP 413 – connects with the “corruption of blood” – civil death, no inheritance PPP 415 no transmitting property – “Civil death sustained itself through two ruling metaphors: ‘corruption of blood’ or ‘forfeiture of property’” PPP 416 -- property, “magnificence” the abbey, the extravagance of the masquerade – idea of aristocracy – RD, corruption gets in, and all of it is dead

2. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. . . I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or intensity of the gratification this derivable (223). . . . I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them . . . I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand . . . The fury of the demon instantly possessed me. . . I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity (224). - Dayan - lady and the slave, with the cat as stand-in, both facing violence, subordinated 241 - the idea of the slave who loves the master ,dependence and “reciprocal affection” 242 - still using - “you own what you love” 242 – able to treat it however you like - de-humanize by making people animals or angels – here both, wife loves animals, is in the house, etc - slippage, man to beast (in two cases) 244 - “Poe articulates a specific relation of domination, where the speaker who has defined himself as possessor is in turn defined by his possession” 247