Greetings Everyone!
I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest
book: Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird
Tales, available on Amazon, Bloomsbury, and other online booksellers!
You can read all about Lovecraft’s theory of
evolution, which reveals a fear on his part that degeneration is a stronger
force than development; that human beings can more easily devolve than they can
evolve. Lovecraft’s theory derives, in part, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s
famous novel: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a book that Lovecraft was
very familiar with.
Mr. Hyde is described by numerous characters in the
novel as “deformed” or “degenerate.”
When Jekyll transforms into Hyde,
this can be interpreted as a devolution from a higher form of life into a lower
one. Over the course of Jekyll’s
transformations, Hyde begins to dominate Jekyll, such that Jekyll finds it
increasingly difficult to make the transition back to his integrated self.
Finally, in the climax, Jekyll cannot
return to being Jekyll; frustrated, he commits suicide and dies. Interestingly, however, Jekyll still cannot
break free; the dead body that remains is Hyde’s body. The transformation is permanent, even in
death.
Here, Stevenson is making the same argument
that Lovecraft makes in his hybrid, degenerative monster tales: devolution is
stronger than evolution!
In my next two postings, I will examine two additional
Victorian horror masterpieces that inspired Lovecraft’s evolutionary theories:
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107690/
JLS
