Imagine your English teacher's delight when in 2008 the stock market took a terrible tumble. Though much of her personal fortune evaporated overnight, she was more than compensated for her financial woes by a cartoon appearing on the cover of one of the last issues of the New Yorker she was able to afford. Literary references are hard to come by, and here was a reference to a story she taught year after year after year after year...
Explicate the reference. Why is there only one color in this otherwise black-and-white graphic, and why is that color apt in more than one way? Why is this story a perfect reference for the 2008 stock market crash? Small, pitiful prize (never did recover that fortune) for the most shrewd and knowing comment. Comments should be entered by Tuesday morning at 7:30 am, Oct. 25th.
The color red is appearing in the black and white picture because it is a significant color. It is significant in more than one way because it has to do with the story but also when you bank account is in the red it is not good. When the stock market crashed it was in the red and not good. It crashed and "killed" everyone like the red death during that time.
ReplyDeleteThe black of the backround reprisents people not being in debt. The red represents the 'death' of the stock market. We see that the picture is balck and white, but the red seems to be taking over. This picture represents the crashing of the stock market. Now look at the people and the red in their eyes. This represents how well they were doing, and then how much they lost. The red could also represent their anger;they were seeing red.
ReplyDelete(Imagine your English teacher's delight...Don't you mean dismay?)
like the red death, the picture is showing how the red (stocks) had taken over their lives. if the stocks/economy got bad then they basically felt as if they died similar to the red death that took over Prince Prospero's life in the end.
ReplyDeleteThe New Yorker cover illustration references, of course, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Masque of the Red Death.” The reference is clever and chilling in two ways. First, in financial terminology, the color red references debt, as in “to be in the red.” Second, in the story, a prince and his court lock themselves in a castle in hopes that they can evade the Plague. They do not succeed. Likewise, on Wall Street, experts created financial products based on bad debts and shaky mortgages, hoping to profit personally at the expense of average citizens. Wall Street brokers tried to isolate and enrich themselves, but the failing economy hurt them as well. They were “isolated in their castle until one day, the Red Death arrived”. Instead of actually killing people, this “Plague” spreads debt and financial issues in its wake. For average citizens who were already suffering with debt, things got worse. For major investors, huge chunks of their wealth and investments went down the drain. Unlike the victims of the Plague in the story, people today have the chance to bounce back from this economic downturn because they are not physically dead.
ReplyDeleteThere is only one color to emphasize the blood. During the Red Death blood would come out of people eyes and they would be dead within thirty minutes. It's also there to show how bad the finacial situation is and is going to be. With the Red Death, it was a quick, painful death. This relates to the economy because the economic issues led to the quick loss of everyones money and made everyones lives harder. Also, no matter how hard you tried to prevent yourself from catching the fatal disease, it would still find you, as it did in "The Masque of the Red Death". The rich and the poor died from it, and it affected everyone in the country. The economy also affected the rich and poor alike. It affected everyone in our country and no matter how hard you might try to prevent yourself from being affected by it, it didn't work. Everyone lost and is losing money due to the economy.
ReplyDeleteThe cover of the “New Yorker” shown above uses one distinct color- red, and represents the “Masque of the Red Death,” a short literary work by Edgar Allan Poe, and compares it to the stock market crash of 2008. In the story, catching the fatal red death disease was inevitable for any average citizen, just as suffering and grief were inevitable for most Americans immediately following the economic catastrophe in 2008. In “Masque of the Red Death,” tragedy struck that affected the masses, just as the dramatic decline of the stock market caused anguish for any commoner. Though these two comparable misfortunes were extremely widespread, affecting the majority of the population, there was a lucky few who were able to save themselves at the expense of others. During the red death plague, the arrogant Prince Prospero cared only for his own well-being and left the masses to die in agony. To give a less extreme example, during the 2008 stock market crash there were extremely wealthy folks who sat by and watched as middle-class citizens watch their fortunes disappear instantly. As most people suffered tremendous losses, much of the wealthy American classes acted as onlookers, deciding to save their own finances rather than assisting the masses in their dire time of need, thus making the stock market collapse comparable to the fictional plague of the red death. In both of these cases, the majority of the population fell victim to extremely unfortunate circumstances. Suffering was unavoidable and anyone who could help the masses chose to only save themselves.
ReplyDeleteLeib
ReplyDeleteThe picture on the New Yorker depicts the Red Death standing over a bunch of stockbrokers, who have just lost their fortune and lively hood. This corresponds to the story, “The Masque of the Red Death” because in the story all of the people in Prospero’s castle tried to evade death and disease, but they could not. Similarly, in the stock market crash of 2008, the stockbrokers tried to escape financial decline, but the Red Death, or huge loss of money finally caught up to them. It is important to note that on the cover instead of shedding tears from their eyes the people are shedding blood, this is correspondent to the story because people who had the Red Death. The black and white graphic and the one other color, scarlet, are also interesting. I feel that the red on this black and white serves three purposes. One, the scarlet flares out so that the first thing you see is the Red Death. The second reason is merely to show the significance of red. Red is the theme of this cover page. Red is death, decline, and sorrow, and these people want you to know that. The last reason corresponds to the seventh room in the Prince’s castle. There was a black room with a scarlet window. This theme also shows in the cover, a black room that is only illuminated by a deep scarlet red.
When a stock market crashes, fortunes slowly die along with the spirits of those affected. In this satirical image on the cover of The New Yorker a sort of dark lord is seen displaying the rapidly plummeting stock system in the form of a graph as onlookers, the average Joe, stand by and cry the blood of lost fortune and economic insecurity. In a dull, black and white illustration the color that stands out the most is red. Red is generally the symbol for blood. This is not to say that lost money brings death or physical harm, rather the blood represents a dark, painful feeling, much like that of physical hurt. The dark lord of the crashing stock market is wearing all red and seemingly spreads the darkness and pain to all the citizens like an epidemic. The 2008 stock market crash was brutal. Its effects are still lingering today. It seems as though a lord of evil took the market and smashed the crap out of it until the result became a bloody mess. The dark lord is still among us, god willing it will depart sooner rather than later.
ReplyDeleteThe people with the bleeding eyes are the stock brokers and the caped skeleton is the figurative death of the stock market in a bloody and macabre way.The red is an isolated color because the black-and-white remnants enhance the importance of the red which stands out. Blood red is appropriate because it is connected with doom and macabre and painful falls and wounds. The Masque of the Red Death is a perfect reference due to the similarity of the fact that the Prince felt he was safe and hidden from the disease and the stockbrokers and loaners then felt like everything was going great and smooth. Then in a day, the Prince and his friends got the plague and in a maybe even shorter amount of time or longer time (about a week for the worst), the world stock market experienced drops of up to 77%, with many people losing money and jobs and big corporations having to shut down. The Prince's arrogance had been crushed by the plague and the stock market was crushed by badly organized loans.
ReplyDeleteThis cover represents the ending of "The Masque of the Red Death" when everybody uncovers the costume of the Red Death corpse and drop dead. On the cover, however, the Red Death is holding a graph showing our economy's worth (as you can see, it's pretty low). The red in the black-and-white coloring is perfect because it draws attention to both the chart being held by the Red Death and the blood coming out of every stock broker's face. Bleeding out of your face is very bad, along with a low economy and a chart to represent it. It is a perfect reference to the story because the stock market crash did indeed cause bloody face disease. I specifically remember the President locking himself in the White House so that nobody would come begging him for a solution...in case you couldn't tell, I was being sarcastic. The cover is very funny, but the contexts of the story and the cover are completely different. One is about a 14th century disease somewhere in Europe that caused facial bleeding and and scary clock chimes. The other is about the stock market crash in 2008. They both are are scary and lethal, but they aren't necessarily the same thing. In fact, let me rephrase that: they aren't the same thing at all. They're completely different.
ReplyDeleteThis cartoon is a reference to the stock market crash in 2008. Red is the color of violence, depression, and death. The person in red holding the graph is the market because it caused so much depression. The bankers and stock brokers with red in their eyes are very depressed and angry because of the crisis. The graph that he is holding displays that the market suffered a great decline. The only color besides black and white in this cartoon is red in order to make a point because red is the color of violence, depression, and death, and the market caused a great crisis. "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe is a very gothic short story that depicts that the red death is a figure that causes everyone to die, which is why it is called the red death. This story is a perfect reference to this cartoon because just like the red death causes so much depression, death, and overall crisis, so did the stock market in 2008.
ReplyDeleteIn the picture above,you can see that the only color besides black and white is red. The picture, relating to the stock market crash, is showing an evil person, holding a piece of paper with a graph, showing the results plummeting down. You see that coming from the people's eyes who had stock have red coming from their eyes, obviously meaning bad. Relating to "The Masque of the Red Death", the town and Prince Prosperous were frightened by the Red Death and wanted to escape it. Like this picture, the red death "stood up" in front of all of the guests in the palace and killed them all, which in the stock market crash, all of the people were "killed". The Red Death entered the party and first killed the prince, then moving on to the entire number of guests at the party. The stock market crash and the red death both relate to this picture, as something awful has come about many people and ruined their lives.
ReplyDeleteIn this cartoon of the stock market crash of 2008 we see a red, scary looking man holding up a chart that depicts the stock market's sudden crash and a bunch of people with red tears. Interestingly, the only color shown is red and the reason why is because it makes the important things such as the tears, the man, and the graph stand out more. This cartoon is apropos to "The Masque of the Red Death" because in the story the Red Death is like a theif who comes and takes all of the happiness from the people in the party. So too, in this comic the Red Death is like a thief who killed the stock market and all of the people have lost their happiness because they don't have any money.
ReplyDeleteIt’s almost as if this magazine cover was copying the exact story line of Poe’s “Masque of Red Death”. It is a perfect analogy.
ReplyDeleteOn the cover of The New Yorker, there is not only a masked man infliction pain and bloody death onto his opponents, but there is conection to be made between the characters of the story and the playmakers during the stock market crash of 2008. In the crash of ’08, the playmakers were the wealthy upperclassmen who hoarded and withdrew all their money from the economy thus drowning the middle class. This is just like the story. It is analogues to when the wealthy impulsive prince decides to save himself and completely ditch his responsibility, his people.
The second obvious connection is the color scheme. Red and black is known as a combo representing death or depression. The ominous colors are highlighted in the story, where death occurs, just as in ’08 when depression rolled in.
The last connection is less physical and rather, a mental and moral outcome that is a result of the lack of the “true” power. The elite members of the American upper class had everything they could ever want in 2007. They had all their riches at their disposal. They just sat up in their fancy house executing their seemingly flawless pyramid schemes, while watching the money pour in. Never the less, they didn’t have the “true” power. The real control was not in their hands. The stock market takes a large dive into to the deep end and they lose everything. Soon, the upper class is on their knees and “bleeding from their pores” simply because they lack the true control of what happens to the economy in the end. This same exact event occurs in the story. Prince Prospero decides that he has all power and he can fight the inevitable by running away from the epidemic, Red Death. But no! Reality comes back to bite him in the butt (excuse my language) by walking into his castle and killing him. He never had the “true” power. He only thought he did until his dominance and health was pride from his grasps by the true supremacy, in this case, death. In both cases, the seemingly powerful figure is taken down by the truly powerful entity because the figure believes it is too supreme to be tampered with.
There is only one color in this graphic, and that color is red. Red represents several aspects of this drawing. One aspect represented is shown through the fact that red is commonly known as the color of failure, and red is also a color that warns of danger. The stock market had dropped to extreme lows and the color red is used to show that the market was failing and to warn investors of this unfortunate event. The color red in this graphic also represents blood. It is not that investors were actually bleeding as a result of the market plummeting, but rather since blood represents pain and suffering, blood is used in this graphic to show that investors had much pain and suffering at this time.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens in this story is very similar to what happened during the 2008 stock market crash. In the story, the Red Death has become a major threat to human health. Therefore citizens quarantine themselves inside Prince Prospero’s palace and try to wait until the Red Death passes over before returning to their homes. The Red Death in the story can be compared to the stock market crashing in 2008. In the story, people get out of their homes in order to protect their health, and in 2008, people and companies took their money out of the stock market in order to protect their financial situations. And in the story the citizens try to wait until the plague passes over before returning to their homes. Similarly in 2008, many investors tried to wait until the stock market went back up before reinvesting their money.
The cover artist for The New Yorker illustrated the stock market crash for the October 20, 2008 issue with symbols from Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Everyone in the country is affected by the red death, and when nearly half of his dominions lost their lives to the plague, Prince Prospero takes with him a thousand healthy members of the nobility into his extravagant palace to hide away. There soon after they have a masquerade filled with frivolity; through six of the seven rooms there is much dancing until midnight. At midnight, however, the happiness of the night ceases abruptly at the sight of a strange masked figure that almost exactly resembles a living corpse. It is then that the whole party goes to chaos and the Prince chases the Death into the seventh room- which is adorned in ebony with a red window (, it should be noted that all other rooms were a singular color and the eeriness of the fashion of this room causes all partygoers to avoid it,) - and attempts to kill the death. The blade releases from his dead grasp and falls downward; the Prince is dead, and soon the whole party dies of the plague.
ReplyDeleteThough they thought they had escaped death and the plague, they had, in fact, locked themselves with it. It not only embodies the sick ironies of life but also “the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley,” because they so surely believed that they were safe and cleverly dodged the plague when t hey had actually cornered themselves into it.
The illustration in The New Yorker reiterates Poe’s classic story with a modern twist. There are thousands of Americans- “the 99 percenters” as the protesters would say- who are living average, if not almost poor lives. Then there are the stockbrokers, the people who put the well-being of their money in the hands of the New York Stock Exchange. They think that they are clever and earning money; they have such rich taste and are able to have comfortable, if not grandiose lifestyles. What the stockbrokers hadn’t realized was that they had locked themselves into the “party” or Wall Street and “death” was locked in with them. Despite their beliefs, they did not have financial security in the Stock market and just as they were enjoying the highlife, suddenly and without warning, the stock market crashed and they were no longer secure. Here is again the case of people not recognizing the holes in their plans.
In the story, the clock was constantly hinting that people needed to stop and become aware of their surroundings. At the stroke of midnight, there was nowhere else to go- the Red Death was right in front of them. This scene represents the stroke of midnight. The stock market had crashed and there was nowhere else to go, there was nothing else they could do with their money, because it wasn’t there. Their money had “died”; their lives, in a way, had passed on.
The color scheme, while very powerful in the story, stands out boldly in the drawing. The whole room is black, which represents the creepy black room in which the Prince died. The whole scene is dripping with eerie death, personified with the Red Death figure clad in Red. Red is also prominent in graphs that show the sudden plunge in the stock market, a fast death (about 30 minutes?). Lastly, there is red coming from the pores and mouths of the stockbrokers, like they have the plague.
The image on the cover creatively represents the message that both the artist and Poe were trying to convey: there is no escaping “the Red Death.”
This picture is referring to the story "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe. This picture is only colored in red because of a few reasons. First, the red symbolizes death showing how the stock market has in essence "died", and so have people's finances. People are also suffering because of this. The color is red also because red is the color of the Red Death, and shows that it is the underlying cause of all these problems(since the Red death can be taken to mean death, woe, and suffering, among other things). this story fits perfectly with the story because the people "on top" like the wealthy in the story, and in this case the stockbrokers and people in charge were hit among the hardest.This hit everyone, no matter who they were. It also shows that this misfortune was unavoidable, and their status has no effect on their situation. It also shows that no matter how much you prepare and try to avoid it, the "Red Death" will find a way to get to you, and will triumph.
ReplyDeleteThe reference in this picture is to the story" The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe. The main aspect of the picture and story is the "red death", only while in the book it's a disease, here it's cleverly portrayed as 'the '08 stock market decline. The dying people all around in the picture represent those at Prospero's party as they were desperately trying to uncover the masked man (who turned out to be the red death). The poster provides a very cynical, pessimistic view of what the decline would cause. Basically, it is showing us that like the red line on the chart, and the people in the story, we too will slowly fall into despair (only of our wallets).
ReplyDeleteRes is the only color, other than black and white in the picture because it is representing the Red Death. Red is a good color for them to choose because a) One of the symptoms of the Red Death is oozing sores all over the body and b)when a company is in debt, it's called being in the red. When the stock market crashed, many companies went into the read and ultimately closed down (or died) because of it. Another reason this story is perfect is that people tried to hole themselves up (not literally like in the story, but figuratively) to try to escape from what was going on and to try to stay unaffected. It didn't work. Also, like Prince Prospero chased the Red Death from room to room and kept getting closer to death, we just kept getting closer and closer to the stock market crash until it became inevitable and happened.
ReplyDeleteThe color red is a very vivid color in and of itself, but when put with no colors other than black and white, it gives off an even stronger sense of what the color red is trying to convey. Most people associate red with blood, and therefore associate it with death; but it gives off a strong, emphasized feeling of whatever the picture is trying to convey. In this picture, red is blood and death; and by using black, white, and gray for everything else, it shows us how the life was literally being sucked out of the people at the sight of the market crashing (or the red).
ReplyDeleteThis story is a perfect reference for the 2008 stock market crash because everyone was affected by the crash. Even those who were very wealth, and were sure they were safe and protected from the crash, were affected, and sometimes even worse than those who weren't so wealthy. Essentially in "The Masque of the Red Death" the Prince has sealed away himself and his 1,000 closest friends to protect themselves from the Black Death. At first, they only affected in a very small way and had a merry time, except for the two things that represented the worst of times for them: the room with the scarlet windows and the clock chime. But as the time went by there were more and more chimes; when finally, at the highest point of chimes, the masked man arrived. As the mask man killed the Prince, the place that they had feared most proved to be just as dangerous and frightening as they thought it would be, and their world in this chamber that they had become so accustomed to came crashing down, collapsing at the feet at what they had most feared: the Black Death.
The cover depicts a figure representing the Red Death holding up a plummeting stock chart, while all of the stock brokers scream and die of the Red Death. This is fitting because, similar to the story of "The Masque of the Red Death", by Edgar Allan Poe, though the economy loomed perilously over the world outside, the royalty on Wall Street lived safe and secure until even there arrogant stronghold of extravagant safety and mundane pleasures came crashing down around their ears. The market collapsed, they fell from power, and the inevitable finally caught up to them and destroyed their petty mortal lives. Their overindulgence in luxury was their undoing, leaving them unprepared for the doom that they thought they were so powerful as to be immune to. "Futility of futilities, all is futile!" says Kohelet in Megillat Kohelet (1:2), read on Sukkot every year; this seems apt as this unit on "The Masque of the Red Death" comes to a close.
ReplyDeleteThe time is 6:56 am 10/26
ReplyDelete