Greetings Everyone!
I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest
book! You can get it on Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.
In my previous postings, I argued that H. P.
Lovecraft’s theory of devolution derives, in part, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lovecraft was also influenced by Bram
Stoker’s classic vampire novel Dracula (1897).
The title character, Dracula, is a perfect embodiment
of devolution and degeneration. He is,
of course, undead, neither alive nor dead.
But the living part of him is animalistic, not human.
When we first see him in the castle, he reminds us of an old satyr:
ugly, decaying and repulsive; as hideous as Hyde or Gray.
There is a particularly graphic description of him
lying in a box in an old chapel, gorged with blood. The narrator, Jonathan Harker, describes him
as if he were a “filthy leech,” his eyes burning like coals; his flesh swollen
and puffy; and with blood trickling from
his mouth. Obviously, being undead is
akin to devolving into a lower life-form.
The moral of Stoker’s novel is the same as Stevenson’s
and Wilde’s novels: devolution is stronger than evolution!
The themes of degeneration and devolution are central, also, in J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire-lesbian novel Carmilla (1872), a novel that is almost as popular as Dracula. We shall look at this book in my next posting.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/
JLS
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