Greetings Everyone!
I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest
book! You can get it at Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.
In my previous series of postings, we have studied H.
P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution—Lovecraft believed that pure-blooded white,
Anglo-Saxons who have intimate contact, especially sexual contact, with blacks
or non-whites risk devolving, i.e. moving from a higher evolutionary stage to a
lower stage. That is, their blood
becomes tainted by contact with those who don’t have pure blood and they become
more like animals than humans. Over
time, these hybrids literally transform into monsters.
Lovecraft read about fictional characters such as Mr.
Hyde and Dorian Gray who reinforced his devolutionary fears. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was
particularly inspiring. Dracula is
undead, neither alive nor dead. This state of being, according to Stoker,
represents an impurity in the blood that causes a living, human being to
devolve into a monster. Dracula, thus,
is similar to the kinds of hybrids that result from sex between whites and blacks.
Lovecraft was also influenced by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s
vampire-lesbian novel Carmilla (1872).
The title character, Carmilla, is a vampire, like Dracula. She seduces a young woman, Laura, and drinks
her blood, hoping to turn her into a creature like herself, just as Dracula
does with Mina Harker.
Carmilla is beautiful on the surface, but beneath, she
is a monster. In one graphic scene,
Laura sees her as a monstrous, black cat: “four or five feet long...[moving]
with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage... I felt it spring
lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes
approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles
darted...deep into my breast.”
The moral of Le Fanu’s novel is the same as Bram
Stoker’s: devolution results from tainted blood and is a stronger force than
evolution!
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/
JLS
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