ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Throughout his life, Edgar Allan Poe lost the women he loved, including his mother, adoptive mother and wife, many to tuberculosis. Their absence played a huge role in his writing.

Detailed explanation-2: -The disease called the Red Death is fictitious. Poe describes it as causing “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores” leading to death within half an hour.

Detailed explanation-3: -The Poes performed at theaters throughout the Eastern seaboard, from Boston to Virginia. In 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, leaving orphaned Edgar, his infant sister Rosalie, and his older brother Henry.

Detailed explanation-4: -In this story, the ‘red death’ is an extended metaphor of Tuberculosis, and the concept of the story was that no matter how hard the characters tried, the ‘red death’ would eventually come to take their lives, which was Poe’s though process of TB, it had killed almost everyone close to him.