Notes on "The Masque of The Red Death"

The trope that is presented is the “monster” who is Prince Prospero. A monster is a creature or a man that is destructive to other people or to mankind. Although there are some that may argue that there are different kinds of monsters, let us examine the monster through the different archetypes that are apparent in “The Masque of The Red Death” regarding Prince Prospero. “The first of these figures is what [we] will call the human monster. The frame of reference of the human monster is, of course, law. The notion of the monster is essentially a legal notion, in a broad sense, of course, since what defines the monster is the fact that its existence and form is not only a violation of the laws of society but also a violation of the laws of nature […] The monster combines the impossible and the forbidden.”

In this case, Prince Prospero was in control of the commoners outside the gate who suffered from the Red Death, whereas he was the law of the people who combined the impossible and the forbidden. What we are looking at or analyzing are his actions which combined the forbidden being the fact that he only invited the people that were to him as royalty. Meanwhile, the fact that it was impossible to help those people (the commoners) were a combination of monstrosity and political entertainment.

“[We are now analyzing] the history of this moral monster whose conditions of possibility [that we are trying] to indicate. To start with, [let us] present the first outline, the first face of this moral monster called forth by the economy of punitive power. Strangely, and in a way that seems to [us] quite typical, the first moral monster to appear is the political monster. That is to say, crime is pathologized, [as we] believe, on the basis of a new economy of power, and there is a kind of supplementary proof of this in the fact that the political criminal is the first or at least the most important and striking moral monster to appear at the end of the eighteenth century. Actually, in the new theory of criminal law […], the criminal is someone who breaks the pact to which he has subscribed and prefers his own interest to the laws governing the society to which he belongs,” which is Prince Prospero’s very own aristocracy that he is trying to save other than the people.

“The Masque of The Red Death” echoes what Donald Trump had done to migrants of the country of the U.S. For example, he builds a wall and excludes Mexicans from ever entering America in the first place. Trump then tries to exclude African Americans from their own rights as citizens. “The Masque of the Red death echoes the American tragedy that was Trump under the corrupt four years that eh was president thus making a monster seem political.

For example, “four years into the Trump presidency, immigration remains a major platform for the Republican Party. One of Donald Trump’s central promises during his presidential campaign in 2016 was the construction of a wall along the southern border of the United States, for which Mexico was going to pay. As of Election Day, only 371 miles (595.45 km) of the wall have been built or rebuilt, and Mexico has paid nothing for it. However, Trump’s administration has made a legal wall difficult for immigrants to overcome. More than 400 executive actions intending to reduce immigration and make it more selective have branded the four years of Trump’s presidency. Scandals, court challenges and controversy accompanied many of those actions,” which is why Donald Trump is equivalent to Prince Prospero who is the monster. In this case, for people who do not have access to the safe haven which is called America whereas in “The Masque of The Red Death,” these monsters keep the people of their land or safe-haven inaccessible to safety and do not even help them in any way whatsoever.

                                                            Works Cited

            Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975. Verso New

Left Books, 1974–1975.

            zenger.news. “The Invisible Wall That Donald Trump Built to Stop Immigration – The

Wilmington Journal.” Http://Wilmingtonjournal.Com/the-Invisible-Wall-That-Donald-Trump-

Built-to-Stop-Immigration/, 2021, wilmingtonjournal.com/the-invisible-wall-that-donald-trump-

built-to-stop-immigration.