“The Masque of the Red Death” is a story written by Edgar Alan Poe. He is a writer who has focused his writing career on fiction and macabre stories (digital). “The Mask of the Red Death” is one such story. Poe's romantic ideology uses the seven rooms as a symbol of death and evil to apply the still life genre "Vanitas" and use it as a focal point not only for the setting of the story, but also to teach the reader how an individual with power This position can forget morality by attaching themselves to frivolous pleasures and material possessions, resulting in wickedness. Poe also reminds the reader of the fragility of human life, using the plague brought for the Red Death. Death and evil ravage people's lives and no one can escape their force. Poe uses his knowledge of the ideas of the Romantic movement to depict death and evil. The author uses Still Life, Vanitas art as inspiration to create the style of the story. The reader should first know about Vanitas: “An art with a fascinating genre that features objects rich in morbid symbolism such as skulls…elaborate pictorial messages with moral undertones that inspire the viewer to renounce earthly pleasures and to pursue a meaningful spiritual life” (Vanitas). ). Poe uses Vanitas Art to describe how people forget their spiritual side in favor of money and possessions which not only bring evil but also decay over time. Some of the objects found in a Vanitas art are the clock which is a representation of time passing; the rotten fruits or flowers which symbolize the decadence of our body, and the gold which represents the material things in which we spend almost our entire existence working and forgetting that everything has an end, even our life. Plus, a skull...... middle of paper ...... to pay with inevitable death. Poe was able to portray the parallelism of death and evil in his story by providing the reader with a feeling of horror and the death and concealment of the plague in a physical appearance, making Prince Prospero and his friends tremble in despair for their remember that the evil brought by selfishness, greed and inhumanity brings no positive effects, and even their power will not save them. dying. The romantic influence of the Vanitas genre demonstrates how the mundane pleasures of our existence weaken our soul by allowing evil to enter our lives as a villain without us being aware of it. The same problem will happen with death because no matter how much an individual tries to prevent it and how much a person escapes from danger, death will occur and our clock will stop as it happened at the end of the year. Poe's story.