The Midlife Crisis

Orange is usually one of the colors that represents the season autumn.  This color can seem bold and exciting, but there is a whole other side to this one color.  It can represent the progression of adolescence to adulthood, or the famous “midlife crisis” in “The Masque of the Red Death” by the author Edgar Allen Poe.  Orange is one of the seven colors used for different rooms in Prince Prospero’s castle.  Each room represented the seven stages of man.  When the sun rose throughout the day, the orange room was full of light and showed the readers of the story that this room was a representation of the middle of human life.  In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allen Poe writes to the readers that the color orange represents the midlife crisis. 

            The color orange is a symbol of re-evaluation of a person’s life.  The middle of the human life, or ages 21- 50, is usually referred to as the midlife crisis.  A midlife crisis is when adults will look back and evaluate what they have done with their life.  Some people will want to change their career, grieve about their children leaving home, or re-evaluate their marriage.  During these years of your life, many people have gone to college, started a family, or may have done something totally outrageous because some people think that they have wasted parts of their life not doing things they wish they did when they were younger.  The ebony clock in “The Masque of the Red Death” represents death.  When people are middle aged, they are not near death yet, but they do sometimes psych themselves into a temporary psychological depression or mental turmoil.  Even the fear of aging can persuade people to make themselves look younger with the miracles of medicine and health to help them.  This condition is always treatable, but it has to take a lot of sense to know that a person happy the way he or she is.

The color orange, or midlife crisis, has not really effected me yet.  I hope that during that time of my life, I will be happy where I am and I will not reget the choices I made that I know would effect me the rest of my life.  The color orange is like the “middle of the road” stage of life and you should feel confident and happy about the decisions you had made when you were younger.  This color is impotant to the story because it was one of the middle rooms.  The rooms were set up right to left, or east to west.  When the sun rose everyday the rooms and the light would shift just like life would.  So the sunlight would be in the orange room near the middle of the day, just to represt the middle of our lives.  The color orange can be tricky when it comes to what is best for us.