Abstract
Wort-case scenarios depicted in literary works may function to mourn and warn people about the real situation, such as the spread of COVID-19 that has altered worldwide life drastically. This study offers a reflection on the current pandemic time through a close reading of selected American classic literary works. The imagination of fear, isolation, and mask-wearing in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories is resonant with the new expressions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three short stories by Poe, i.e., ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, and ‘The Sphinx’ are chosen for examination using the thematic analysis method. Repeated reading of the short stories shows that parallels can be drawn between these stories and today’s phenomenon about anxiety, social restriction, and health protocols. What can be implied from the analysis are as follows: (1) Fear of the disease results in the characters’ added distress, (2) The characters’ aberrant behaviour as to overprotect themselves is exacerbated by the dreadful situation, and (3) Poe’s obsession with dread and death to shock the readers can be historically traced through his own inner predicaments, ill-health, and the 1832 Cholera contagion. In conclusion, the findings resonate with the COVID-19 epidemic’s upshots.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted havoc throughout the world with many victims and mortality rates steadily increasing since January 2020
Having said that, reading fiction can be one way to reflect on the worse-case circumstances portrayed in the literature that are resonant with the present-day situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath
This study has shown that Poe’s living experience and the society of his time shape the background of ‘The Mask of the Red Death’, ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, and ‘The Sphinx’
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted havoc throughout the world with many victims and mortality rates steadily increasing since January 2020. Identified for the first time in the city of Wuhan, China by December 2019, the case of the disease has afflicted all nations across the globe with alarming death tolls every day. Deemed more severe than the 1918 Spanish Flu that lasted in one year, the COVID-19 pandemic may last even longer given that no specific and effective eradication of the disease is yet to be found (Chen et al, 2020; Roback & Guarner, 2020), to say nothing of its economic and sociopolitical impacts. Having said that, reading fiction can be one way to reflect on the worse-case circumstances portrayed in the literature that are resonant with the present-day situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Just as joy and triumph are subjects of literary works, so to have diseases and discomforts have become the core of such great works as Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’, Daniel Defoe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’, and ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to name a few
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