The Fears of Lovecraft, Pt. 3
In this third blog post concerning Lovecraft’s fears, I’d like to address the third portion of the essay “The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H. P. Lovecraft’s Fiction.” Here Bruce Lord leaves, temporarily, the topic of what scares Lovecraft the most and takes a look at what Lovecraft values.
The phrase “Lovecraftian utopia” seems a contradiction in terms, as in “What sense does it make to talk about Lovecraft’s idea of utopia?” But it makes quite a bit of sense. First, we can discern Lovecraft’s concept of how things ought to be from his clear-cut depictions of how, in his opinion, things ought not to be. Heterogeneous populations scared the bejeezus out of him; thus we presume his utopia is populated by a single culture, or, at the very least, segregated cultures. Sex in all its rampant animalistic glory gave him the heebie-jeebies; thus we presume his idea of utopia would do without.
But again, we needn’t rely on presumption. Lord cites some of Lovecraft’s fiction (”At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Out of Time”) in which the structure of advanced alien civilizations superior to humanity is described in great political, social, and biological detail. He says,
When the description of the Great Race’s “utopia” and the infamous pean to the fiber of the Old Ones’ characters[*] are considered, it becomes apparent that Lovecraft, despite whatever conscious intentions he might have had of creating entities that were alien at every level, is in fact bringing his own personal, sexless utopia to life.
* “Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!” (MM, 96) It’s worth noting that in attributing the term “men” to a sexless alien race and describing them as “scientists to the last,” (MM, 96) Lovecraft aligns the Old Ones with his own precise definition of what constitutes humanity in his stories: the host of male, yet essentially neutered academics who discover the Old Ones, and who moreover populate the majority of his stories.
If Lovecraft seeks for these aliens to inspire horror in his readers, it by confronting us in our anti-Lovecraftian biases with the otherness of these paragons of Lovecraftian virtue. Which is to say, a society hyper-obsessed with sex can expect to be horrified by the idea of doing without.
Which leads Lord to discuss in detail “The Thing On The Doorstep,” a story whose source of horror is the body-swapping predation of the immortal wizard Ephraim Waite. First Ephraim takes over the body of his daughter Asenath, leaving her mind doomed inside Ephraim’s dying body. Thence he jumps to the body of Edward Derby, Asenath’s husband, and Derby has time only to leave his best friend Daniel Upton a note explaining all before Asenath’s body imprisoning him rots away. We end with Upton destroying Derby’s body and, presumably, Ephraim’s mind inside–yet still terrified that Ephraim has survived and will make Upton his next victim.
Did you follow all that? Maybe we should all just go read the story ourselves. It’s one of Lovecraft’s better efforts, I hear.
Lord is quick to point out that Ephraim epitomizes Lovecraft’s asexual, race-pure utopia:
In Ephraim’s birthing process, there is neither the mechanically laborious and (for Lovecraft) emotionally traumatic sexual act, no painful birth accompanied by blood and embryonic fluid, and most importantly, no danger of any degeneration or tainting of the bloodline along racial lines. Ephraim need never worry about the mongrel hordes which caused Lovecraft so much anxiety during his years in New York, nor the possibility that some transgression of his ancestry might spell atavistic doom for him (as in “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Rats In The Walls”), because he is his own ancestry.
But Lord does not follow this concept to its logical conclusion, or anyway to that conclusion that I think follows logically. He heads off in different and equally fascinating directions instead, which I’ll let you read for yourself. But no, the question that I’m interested in asking is this:
If Ephraim represents the pure ideal of the asexual, non-degenerative reproduction that Lovecraft idolizes, why does Lovecraft present “The Thing on the Doorstep” as a horror story? Why is Ephraim the story’s villain and not its hero?
I don’t have one precise answer, of course. But in thinking about it, here’s one of the places my brain goes:
The horror Lovecraft wants us to experience has its source in the story’s title: The “thing on the doorstep” is Miss Waite’s decaying body with victimized Edward Derby inside, trying with his last fingernail-hold on life to warn the point-of-view character (and incidentally us) of Ephraim Waite’s doings. The nightmare presented to us readers is, “This could be you!” We are to identify not with the asexual, pure Ephraim, but with those he treats as his lessers and assimilates at will. By contrast,
Lovecraft envisioned that certain racially inferior people were capable of being culturally assimilated, and ergo there was no hypocrisy in marrying a Jew as long as she adopted a properly Anglo-Saxon identity.
Lovecraft stated the position that cultural assimilation was a virtue if it was “inferior races” being assimilated, to the point of cultural extinction, by nice white American culture For all Lovecraft’s racist bluster. And yet it appears to me he was not incapable of empathizing with the victims of this virtuous cultural assimilation. At the very least, I think he recognized an undesirable outcome was possible when pushing his stated ideals to their inevitable extremes.
In other words, in Lovecraft there coexisted the vicious bluster of racism (vicious even by the standards of his own era!) with the more empathetic capability of seeing, in the spread of white colonialism, the Deep Ones’ shadow over an unfortunate Innsmouth.
OK. Tomorrow, the promised fun stuff. (Will it be as fun as promised? Or will it be a total let down? Come back next post and FIND OUT!)