A Study of Thing-Narrative in The Masque of the Red Death

Abstract

The Masque of the Red Death is one of Edgar Allan Poe‘s most important works, which has been studied by numerous  scholars from the perspectives of style, narrative aesthetics, and semiotics. However, the relevant interpretation to date  has almost completely ignored the description of things in the novel. At present, there is an obvious “material turn” or  “non-human turn” in the field of humanities research, that is, the research perspective turns to the “object” components  that have been largely ignored in the past, including animals, plants, minerals, ecosystems, landscapes, places, etc.  Therefore, from the perspective of the thing-narrative, combined with the social and historical background of the works,  this paper analyzes Poe‘s use of thing-narrative techniques through close reading of the text. Through the in-depth  analysis of the interaction between things and characters in the story, the author explains how castles, rooms, and ebony  clocks, as cultural symbols, agents with subjectivity, exist as noumenon, influence or predict the fate of characters, and  promote the development of the plot. And to further clarify Poe‘s theme in this novel - the inevitability of death.