Greetings Everyone!
My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft:
White Fragility in the Weird Tales, has recently been released by Bloomsbury,
the foremost academic publisher in the United States and in the United Kingdom!
I hope that all of you will pick up a copy; you can
order it online from the publishers and, of course, from Amazon and other
online booksellers around the world. The
book is also available in bookstores here in the states and overseas.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/
Lovecraft’s theory of evolution reveals a fear on his
part that devolution is a stronger force than evolution. In my previous posting, I argued that
Lovecraft’s theory derives, in part, from
Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lovecraft was also influenced by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
The plot is fairly well-known: Dorian Gray, a
beautiful young man, wishes that he could stay young and beautiful while his
portrait ages. He gets his wish; he
looks exactly the same for twenty years; the painting, however, grows old and
ugly.
Dorian complicates the issue by living a terrible,
evil life—he commits murder and he drives men as well as women to suicide. The portrait reveals Dorian’s inner
corruption and it ends up looking even worse than simply an ugly, old man; it
looks like a misshapen, degenerate
monster—a half-human, half simian monster.
At the end of the book, Dorian can no longer stand
seeing himself like this and he stabs the portrait; then, the painting
becomes beautiful again, but Dorian dies, and he leaves behind the ugly, deformed body of his alter ego—much
as Dr. Jekyll in death left behind the
hideous body of Mr. Hyde.
The moral of Wilde’s story is the same as Stevenson’s:
devolution is stronger than evolution!
JLS
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