HIDE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN: ISOLATION IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE MASQUE OF RED�DEATH’(1850), WILLIAM FAULKNER ‘A ROSE FOR EMILY’(1950)  AND AMERICAN GOTHIC (1930)  PAINTED BY GRANT WOOD��

By Angela Ramsoondur

Oct/Nov 2021

University of Mauritius

• Diseases caused by a virus or bacteria has been and is still a haunting topic.
• The corona virus of these past two years have set the stage for turning back the clock on history and also on fiction dealing with epidemics.

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

2

• What has marked the world since 2020 is the self-isolation imposed due to the spread of the virus.
• Two American short stories deal directly with self-isolation but in two different circumstances, one is due to the plague and the other is due to an obsession. �

​

3

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of Red Death”(1850) and William Faulkner “A Rose for Emily”(1950) are examined in relation to how isolation brings about madness of the protagonist and consequently death though they are not directly interrelated.

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

4

• This work-in-progress will not only investigate American Gothic in relation to disease and madness but also to the painting by Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930).

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

5

• The painting permeates a sense of isolation typical of rural America. Investigating what isolation could mean in these three works (written text and art) are the main focus for this paper.

​

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

6

AMERICAN GOTHIC

​

​

​

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

​

• William Faulkner (1897–1962)

​

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

7

• For Poe, it is about the owner of the palace who self-isolates with a select few in his palace and entertains them. 
• For Faulkner, self-isolation comes from Emily, a woman obsessed with a man, and hides his dead body in her bed.
• �����

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

8

• Let me begin first with Faulkner 's story.
• The mystery is around the character Emily Grierson, one of the relics of the Southern Belle.
• The narrative style pushes us readers to go in the past, reflecting on the validity of truth.
• But what we want to think and look at is how Emily is portrayed through mystery.

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

9

• She is always hiding something, it can be her motivation, of from herself when she denies about the death of her father or that she needs to pay taxes.
• As a typical Southern Belle, she expects men to take care of her.
• But she hides her fears, her own mental sickness and obsession with living alone. And in doing that Homer Baron is murdered by Emily who poisons him with arsenic. 

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

10

• Faulkner’s writing style is complex and the readers are invited to be involved in the mystery of Emily Grierson

​

• The story is also the conflict between the Old and New South.

​

​

​

11

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• It is only at the end of the story that we come to know that for more than 30 years, the corpse of Yankee Homer Baron lay in bed in the upstairs room in Emily's house. 
• She lived in self-isolation with the corpse and what renders the story even more macabre is that the narrator infers to us that Emily has been sleeping by the side of the corpse for years.
• Necrophilia and the Southern Belle thus become one entity and hence a new definition of the American Gothic. Madness gets to another level.  

12

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• The mystery is around the character Emily Grierson, one of the relics of the Southern Belle.
• The narrative style pushes us readers to go in the past, reflecting on the validity of truth. But what we want to think and look at is how Emily is portrayed through mystery.
• Her madness is not only her disease but her father and society imposed on her to fit certain expectations
• Like Temple Drake in Faulkner’s Sanctuary the image of a well-bred American South woman is disfigured into another reality

13

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Emily Grierson is always hiding something, it can be her motivation, of from herself when she denies about the death of her father or that she needs to pay taxes.
• As a typical Southern Belle, she expects men to take care of her. But she hides her fears, her own mental sickness and her fear about living alone.

​

​

14

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• And meeting Homer Baron she grows obsessed about him.
• His will to go away leads him to be murdered by Emily who poisons him with arsenic. 

​

• �It is only at the end of the story that we come to know that for more than 30 years, the corpse of Yankee Homer Baron lay in bed in the upstairs room in Emily's house. 

15

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Now concerning Poe’s story ‘The Masque of Red Death”, his protagonist, called Prospero ( a ironic reference to Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest) isolates himself with thousand of people in his palace, running away from a plague that is called the Red Death.
• The story teaches us that how much we can run away and isolate ourselves we need to face the truth. 

​

16

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• �The story has a surreal element in the sense that Red Death is impersonated by one of the people in the masquerade and his masque is himself that is the disease. 

​

17

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• And finally all the people who were in self-isolation are in fact isolating with Red Death itself.
• The massacre is horrifying and because Red Death is treated as an enemy and not invited to the masquerade…
• … it plays the role of a wicked male Cinderella... Imagine Wes Craven's 1996 movie Scream as well.

​

18

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Whether hiding a corpse or hiding herself, Emily is also hiding her madness from society as well as her refusal to let go of the past.

​

• For Prospero, hiding away from the Red Death, brings him with a more horrifying experience for himself and all his guests with the plague

​

19

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• In hiding away from society, we see the characters suffering mostly due to this confinement
• They unknowingly have been living with the plague in their company
• Like Emily who has been living with a dead body for decades

20

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• “American Gothic” is the title of a 1930 painting by Grant Wood.
• The name given to the painting is due to the style of the house in the background called Carpenter Gothic.
• Both individuals in the painting can have different meanings for different audiences.
• They are in a rural background
• And again there is this clash between the old and the new, the rural and the urban�

​

​

21

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• For this presentation I was scrutinizing the painting and noticed something about the lady in the painting.
• She has a strand of hair as if she was in a hurry to tie it down.
• Like the Mona Lisa, whose smile has been an enigmatic question for ages, my own enigma is that strand of hair. What does it represent?

22

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• The strand of hair reminds us as well of Emily Grierson’s strand of hair and the only clue that she is the killer of Homer Baron and has been sleeping by his corpse for more than 30 years till her own death.

​

• So the point of reflection converges again to the word ‘isolation’.

​

​

23

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Do notice also there is a window in the painting. 
• It is an important part of the composition of the painting, and again reminds us of instances of Emily staring from a window or even the different colors of window panes in Poe’s story.
• What is hiding behind the window in that painting? Is the female figure in the painting another Emily?

​

​

​

24

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• Windows are the bridge from isolation and contact with the world

​

• During the pandemic and lockdown these two years, we all stood by our window at some point thinking when will this end.

​

​

25

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

• As much as the characters in ‘The Masque of Red Death’ and ‘A Rose for Emily’ can hide, they are made to face the truth within their isolated spaces
• And in Grant Wood’s painting, the two figures have to go out to clean the yard or even have their portrait taken
• The abject and the horror cannot be hidden for long
• Like the strand of hair that escapes, truth always escapes…

26

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Allan Lloyd Smith 2004, American Gothic fiction : an introduction, Continuum, New York.
• ArtDependence n.d., ArtDependence | Symbolism of the Pitchfork in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, artdependence.com.
• Bjerre, TÆ 2017, ‘Southern Gothic Literature’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.
• Ellis, J 2013, Southern gothic literature, Salem Press, A Division Of Ebsco Publishing ; Amenia, Ny, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

27

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Faulkner, W 2009, A rose for Emily, Perfection Learning, Logan, Iowa.
• Fisher, BF 2010, ‘Introduction: Poe and the Gothic’, Gothic Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 1–3.
• Joyce Carol Oates 1996, American Gothic tales, William Abrahams Book, New York.
• Riggio, TP 1978, ‘American Gothic: Poe and an American Tragedy’, American Literature, vol. 49, no. 4, p. 515.

28

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Wagner, LW 1981, ‘Faulkner: Aesthetic, Gothic, Psychologic’, in JB Wittenberg, E Kerr & DM Kartiganer (eds), NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 90–94, viewed 23 September 2021, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345340>.
• Wood, G 1934, ‘American Gothic’, Design, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. i–i.
• Wood, S & Macdonald, R 2017, American Gothic : the life of Grant Wood, Abrams Books For Young Readers, New York.

​

​

​

29

Angela Ramsoondur - Oct/Nov 2021 - UoM