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In Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, the role and responsibilities of leaders could be evident from the ending of the story. The most visible picture derived from the work is that leaders should be defenders of their people in times of crisis. In the described country, a plague pillages the streets with severity unknown before. The aristocratic revelers gathered in the castle, separated from the general population, trying to escape from the Red Death. However, the disease reached them as punishment for their conceit: “one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each…” (Poe 666). Thus, the ruling elite was chastised for abandoning its people, for protection and administration of which it had been responsible.
The figure of a leader is incorporated in Prince Prospero. He is the one who “summoned to his presence… friends from among the knights and dames of his court” and organized the revel (Poe 662). Nevertheless, literature is a kind of art open for interpretation; then, I propose my own candidate with leadership implications. Namely, the Red Death, “Darkness and Decay,” inevitable doom, or fate fits for a symbolical representation of the head ruler of all world (Poe 666). Therefore, the most apparent leader character of the work is Prince, although other variants are possible.
Next, the question arises about the fulfillment of the leader’s responsibilities. Prospero is an arrogant person and a leader that could not defend his people, as it may seem; but the other perspective could be proposed. Choices of leaders are somewhat afield the general ethics since they guide people while having more power and responsibility. The Prince might have seen the bigger picture; for example, there was no cure for the pestilence, and its spread was far-reaching and inevitable. In a specific moment, “all is silent [in the castle] save the voice of the clock,” which can be a symbolic display of waiting and fear before the inevitable (Poe 664). In this sense, Prospero could be said to performing the last revel, life feast, to keep his closest subjects from despair. Hence, the realization of the leader’s duties in Masque of the Red Death is ambiguous and depends on the interpretation of the work.
Work Cited
Poe, Edgar. “Masque of the Red Death.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert Levine et al., 9th ed., RedShelf ed., vol. 1B, W. W. Norton & Company, 2017, pp. 662–666.
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