Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON REPRESENTATIONS OF PANDEMIC IN LITERATURE, Türkiye, 26 Mart 2021
It is an irrefutable fact that the cycle of life continues with the role reversal – and
sometimes cooperation – of the binary oppositions. Life-death, health-illness, light-darkness,
good-evil, and other binary oppositions accompany us from birth to death with their absolute
power capable of directing human life, at times conflicting it and at other times pulling it
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Internat�onal Sympos�um: Representat�ons of Pandem�c �n L�terature
together. Having turned our lives upside down for nearly one year, the COVID-19 pandemic
has a distinguishing feature from the other pandemics which ravaged the world population in
the history of humanity. It has created a new binary opposition which consists of living
cautiously due to the belief in the severity of the pandemic and living without any precaution
in defiance of the disease. This new one, unfortunately, has been creating severely traumatic
effects on both human psychology and social life from day one. Being one of the essential
motives in literature, binary oppositions appear abundantly also in The Masque of the Red
Death, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Prince Prospero, the protagonist, being the
representative of wealth, success, and welfare as his name signifies, challenges the Red Death
devastating the country for a long time. Yet, as required by Jung’s Enantiodromia law
originating from the philosophy of Heraclitus, the Red Death with the masque finds him
together with his people and kills them in their castle surrounded by many security
precautions at the end of a night full of worldly pleasures. It strongly associates with Jung’s
Enantiodromia theory according to which the energy of life moves constantly between two
opposite poles and turns back immediately when it reaches one pole. In our study, the aim is
to analyze the important roles and meanings of binary oppositions in the aforementioned
story and to offer an insight into the recent pandemic concerns under the light of Jungian
theories.