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 posting, I argued that H. P.
Lovecraft’s theory of devolution 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, written around the same time.
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; the painting becomes beautiful again, but Dorian dies, and
he leaves behind the ugly, deformed body of his alter ego—much as Jekyll in
death left behind the hideous body of Hyde.
The moral of Wilde’s story is the same as Stevenson’s: devolution
is stronger than evolution!
The themes of degeneration and devolution are also central
to Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula.
And this goes for J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s equally famous novel Carmilla. We shall look at these books in future postings.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/
JLS
