Poe on Brick Lane

Abstract

What parallels might there be between Poe’s story of a proud prince and his noble acolytes who shut themselves away to take refuge from the red death and the twenty-first-century non-fiction story of Covid-19? The author of this piece take a personal, auto-fictional approach to this question, narrating his own experience of locking down with his family in London’s vibrant East End. If Prospero and his nobles devote themselves to revelry and aesthetic pleasure, leaving the poor beyond the abbey’s walls to die, so the author’s privilege manifested itself in an ability to turn to literature—and indeed, to Poe—and to the communities of online seminars, while the homeless and marginalized of the city around him were left to fend for themselves. This piece uses these parallels to ask questions about the sorts of fantasy that Poe’s tale articulates: a fantasy “from below” of come-uppance for the rich and powerful, and a fantasy “from above” of the aesthetic as anaesthetic and a means of combatting death. And it concludes by asking what has changed when the story comes to an end and when Covid-19/the red death has passed: what sort of response might there be to the inequalities that the fictional story of the red death and the reality of Covid-19 reveal and emphasize?