University of Pardubice
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Fear in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Bc. Šárka Svitáková
Masterʼs Thesis
2013
Prohlašuji:
Tuto práci jsem vypracovala samostatně. Veškeré literární prameny a informace, které
jsem v práci využila, jsou uvedeny v seznamu použité literatury.
Byla jsem seznámena s tím, že se na moji práci vztahují práva a povinnosti vyplývající
ze zákona č. 121/2000 Sb., autorský zákon, zejména se skutečností, že Univerzita
Pardubice má právo na uzavření licenční smlouvy o užití této práce jako školního díla
podle § 60 odst. 1 autorského zákona, a s tím, že pokud dojde k užití této práce mnou
nebo bude poskytnuta licence o užití jinému subjektu, je Univerzita Pardubice
oprávněna ode mne požadovat přiměřený příspěvek na úhradu nákladů, které na
vytvoření díla vynaložila, a to podle okolností až do jejich skutečné výše.
Souhlasím s prezenčním zpřístupněním své práce v Univerzitní knihovně.
V Pardubicích dne 25. 3. 2013
Šárka Svitáková
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Šárka Bubíková, Ph.D., for her professional
approach as well as for the time spent during the consultations of my work. Without her
help, this Masterʼs thesis would not exist.
Annotation
This work focuses on the analysis of the conception of fear in the works of Edgar Allan
Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The main part of the text deals with the issues that
can be considered crucial when speaking about fear depicted in Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs
work. The issues are mutually interrelated and they are interconnected with the
depiction of fear. Together, they show the similarities and differences between Poeʼs
and Lovecraftʼs conception of fear. This thesis engages only in the horror stories written
by Poe and Lovecraft, which means that the analysis of their short stories belonging to
other genres (satire, fantasy, etc.) is not provided.
Key Words
Poe, Lovecraft, horror, sci-fi, gothic, fear, lunacy, setting, integration, fragmentation
Souhrn
Tato práce se zabývá analýzou pojetí strachu v pracích Edgara Allan Poea a Howarda
Phillipse Lovecrafta. Hlavní část textu zkoumá témata, která mohou být v případě pojetí
strachu zobrazovaném v Poeově a Lovecraftově práci považována za podstatná.
Všechna tato témata spolu navzájem souvisejí a jsou propojena právě s vyobrazením
strachu. Tato práce studuje pouze hororové příběhy napsané Poem a Lovecraftem, což
znamená, že jejich povídky patřící do jiných žánrů (satira, fantasy atd.) zde analyzovány
nejsou.
Klíčová slova
Poe, Lovecraft, horor, sci-fi, gotický, šílenství, prostředí, ucelenost, různorodost
Table of Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 8
1. Gothic and Sci-fi Horror ............................................................................................. 11
2. Sources of Fear............................................................................................................ 17
3. Lunacy ......................................................................................................................... 28
4. Role of Gothic and Sci-fi Setting ................................................................................ 54
5. Integrity and Fragmentation ........................................................................................ 60
6. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 61
Resumé ............................................................................................................................ 66
Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 70
Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft are two well-known figures of
American literature. The scope of their works is quite diverse (see below); their mutual
main contribution probably lies especially in the genre of supernatural horror fiction.
(Schweitzer 2001, 1)
Despite the fact that they both lived in New England, they never met in person.
Poe was born in 1809 in Boston and died in 1849 in Baltimore. (Poe and Thompson, xiii
and xix) Lovecraft was born more than forty years after Poeʼs death, in 1890 in
Providence, and died in 1937 (also in Providence). (Lovecraft and Derleth, ix and xii)
Nevertheless, their literary carriers encountered because as a young writer,
Lovecraft was enchanted by Poeʼs style which he used in his own stories. (Steiner, 60)
Lovecraft was influenced by Poe very much; his discovery of Poeʼs stories was a
significant event in his development as a writer and he would consider Poe the greatest
master of the horror story and admired him forever. (Tyson, 23) In Lovecraftʼs own
words, “to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.”
(Lovecraft in Tyson, 23)
Like Poe, Lovecraft wrote the tales of the macabre as well as science fiction, detective
fiction or pure fantasy. (Bilstad, 19) Some of the topics they engaged in are similar due
to the fact that they were both interested in psychological turmoil, the life and death,
rational and irrational, fantastic and weird (Poe and Thompson, xv and Bilstad, 19) and
these areas of their interest are reflected in their works.
They both lived at tumultuous times – and their literary universe is sometimes
equally disturbed. During Poeʼs life, several revolts emerged, such as Nat Turnerʼs
Rebellion in Virginia (Poe and Thopmson, xxiv) At the end of his life, the issues of the
extention of slavery westward were getting quite serious (Poe and Thompson, xxxvii)
and the years 1848 and 1849 brought conflicts between liberals and conservatives
concerning womenʼs rights and the rights of slaves versus freemen in the western
territories. (Poe and Thompson, xlii)
Lovecraft could not and did not ignore the Great War – he could not himself
serve in it, so he, at least, followed the course of the conflict, commenting on it in some
of his poems. (Joshi 2001, 110) And he had to deal with its consequences, particularly
8
with the wave of immigration, (Joshi 2001, 111) which even strengthened his already
deeply ingrained racism. (Tyson, 6)
Regarding their success, Poe reached his fame, being talked about not only for
his stories and poems, but also for his critical works. (Hayes, 36) His legacy influenced
many famous authors, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul
Valéry. (Poe and Thompson, xiii)
Lovecraft, on the other hand, was quite ignored by the literary mainstream
during his lifetime; he achieved certain popularity mainly in amateur journalism and
pulp fiction. Nowadays, however, his work is celebrated. (Joshi 1997, 1) In fact, “he has
been the subject of more scholarly study than any other writer of horror fiction except
(and perhaps even including) his great mentor Edgar Allan Poe.” (Joshi 1997, 1)
It is not easy to decide which one of them achieved more significant literary
importance; neither is this the theme of this thesis. The most common verdict probably
is that Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the most important writer of horror fiction since
Edgar Allan Poe. (Schweitzer 2001, 1)
This Masterʼs thesis can be divided into two parts: theoretical and analytical.
The theoretical part is represented by the first chapter (“Gothic and Sci-fi Horror”) and
its aim is to make the reader familiar with the genres discussed in this thesis. The crucial
terms (fiction, gothic literature, horror fiction, sci-fi literature, sci-fi horror and gothic
horror) are presented; also, their origin and the history of their development are briefly
outlined.
The following chapters belong to the analytical part. They engage in the
depiction of fear in Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs fiction. Some significant features of their
concept of fear are analyzed, such as what sources they used to raise fear in their
characters or how they used lunacy of their characters together with the setting to create
the atmosphere of horror. The issues are dealt with in terms of the similar and (or)
different aspects of the nature of fear in the works written by Poe and Lovecraft (this
means that the works of both authors will be analyzed with regard to the question how
Poe and Lovecraft approached the nature of and what are the main differences and
similarities in their conception of fear). The question of fragmentation and integrity of
Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs horror stories and if or how the fragmentation and integrity
9
influence the readersʼ perception of the mysterious atmosphere of the tales is also
discussed.
Finally, the answer to the question whether or how much certain parts of
Lovecraftʼs work were influenced by Poe in terms of themes (not stylistics) is
adumbrated, particularly Poeʼs influence on Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos.
10
1. Gothic and Sci-fi Horror
Supernatural literature, although often underestimated by the critics, is very popular and
there are many avid readers of this kind of literature. (Child, vii) This thesis focuses on
how two authors – Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Phillips Lovecraft - approached the
nature of fear in their gothic (Poe) and sci-fi (Lovecraft) horror stories. To make the
readers of this thesis familiar with the genres, the basic terms will be elucidated in this
chapter and it will be also briefly outlined how gothic and sci-fi literature emerged and
developed.
Before explaining the literary terms, some attention should be paid to the issue
of the marginalization of the discussed genres by the critics. One of the possible reasons
may be this one:
The reasons why supernatural literature has been such a critical pariah are
numerous and vague. Perhaps it is due in part to the genreʼs vulnerability to
exploitation – think of crude cinematic monsters, and pulp magazines. Or
perhaps it is because of some critical sense that anything “fun” to read, hence
popular, is beneath examination. Whatever the cause, the gap between the
influential role the ghost story has played and any real recognition of this role
has always been unfairly wide. (Child, vii)
When engaging in horror fiction, it is helpful to first elucidate the question what
fiction actually is. Basically, literature can be divided into two main categories that
stand in stark contrast to each other: fiction and nonfiction. Nonfiction is defined as a
piece of informational text dealing with an actual, real-life subject, whereas in
nonfiction, the content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on
fact. One of the typical features of horror fiction is that the events described in this kind
of fiction evoke a feeling of dread in the characters as well as in the reader.
(www.genresofliterature.com) In his book A Dictionary of Literary Terms, Martin Gray
asserts that the word “fiction” originates in the Latin word meaning “fashioned” (119).
Gray further explains that fiction is:
The action of feigning, lying or inventing; that which is feigned or invented;
things imagined as opposed to fact. “Fiction” is nowadays used of novels and
stories collectively, to distinguish imaginative literature from “non-fiction”, for
example, biography or history. (119)
11
Gothic literature (despite the fact that different nations created different types of
gothic fiction) can be characterized generally as a kind of literature in which the setting
is usually represented by ruined castles, monasteries or similar places and in which
certain elements are used, such as some images of insanity, transgression and
supernatural. (Smith, 4) Sci-fi (or Science Fiction), on the other hand, is usually based
on an impact of potential science (actual or imagined) and it is often set in the future or
on other planets (www.genresofliterature.com); it deals with the unknown in
scientifically imaginable terms of reference. (Hart, 357)
Consequently, it is evident that gothic horror is a mixture of horror and gothic
literature and sci-fi horror contains the elements of sci-fi literature as well as the
elements of horror. The terms gothic horror and sci-fi horror are used in this thesis in
order to highlight the differences between Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs way of writing, to
specify where their stories occur on the horror scale; nevertheless, it is important to bear
in mind that in their cases, the genres often blend together or overlap.
Not only is it useful to provide brief definitions of the genres; a basic outline of
their development should also be provided to the reader of this thesis. In the eighteenth
century, there was the “Gothic revival” in architecture, harking back to the medieval
style, a tendency that flourished in the nineteenth century. Gothic novels originated at
the same time as the revival of the interest in the Middle Ages. (Gray, 129) Gothic
literature is connected with Romanticism which was a reaction to the strict and rational
ideas of the Enlightenment. Both Romantic and gothic literature opposed the
Enlightenment because apart from the representatives of the Enlightenment, the
representatives of Romanticism and gothic movement did not believe that the
complexity of human experience can be explained merely by rationalism. (Smith, 2) To
name some of the famous works of the gothic genre, Horace Walpoleʼs Castle of
Otranto (1764), Ann Radcliffeʼs The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), “Monk” Lewis´s
The Monk (1796) and Charles Maturinʼs Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) can be the listed
as the examples. (Gray, 129) Martin Gray adds:
Works with a similarly obsessive, gloomy, violent and spine-chilling
atmosphere, but not necessarily with a medieval setting, are also called Gothic:
Mary Shelleyʼs Frankenstein (1818), for example. Indeed any work
concentrating on the bizarre, the macabre or aberrant psychological states may
12
be called Gothic. In this sense Gothic elements are common in much
nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. (129)
In the introductory essay to the book Three Gothic Novels, the author Mario Praz
asserts that “the beauty of the Horrid” was one of the ideas influencing gothic literature;
he also claims that the discovery of this idea is not solely the matter of the eighteenth
century, but the eighteenth century was the time at which the idea came to full
consciousness. (10) Gothic literature adopted this macabre concept.
It is worth mentioning that the reader of gothic literature can come across other
terms as well. For instance, the editor of Dark Company (a collection of ghost stories),
Lincoln Child, gives some examples of the terms that can be used when speaking about
gothic literature. Regarding the origin of the genre, he states: “Modern supernatural
fiction had its birth two centuries ago, when Horace Walpole´s slim novel The Castel of
Otranto appeared in 1764.” (viii) To point out some facts concerning the development
of gothic literature, he claims: “The history of macabre literature since then has been a
long and complex one, embodying within its traditions many distinct stylistic schools.”
(viii) In these quotations, he uses the terms “supernatural fiction” and “macabre
literature”, thus giving some synonyms to the kind of literature which is also called
“gothic literature”. Later, he continues:
One final note before urging the reader onward: in earlier ghostly anthologies,
editors have sometimes found themselves in the grip of two preoccupations.
The first is with justifying the term “ghost story” itself; and the second is with
investigating the reasons why people deliberately seek out tales that will
frighten them. I wonʼt spend time on the shortcomings of the firs; terms like
horror, macabre, and grotesque are all partly right and partly wrong, and ghost
story is an acceptable compromise (since, as one critic put it, the stories in the
genre are all “apparitional in one way or another”). (ix, x)
Therefore, when searching for the examples of gothic literature, it is possible to find
more or less the same works under various terms denoting the same genre.
According to some authors, there are two major issues gothic literature deals
with. The first theme this literature engages in is a feeling of terror and the second key
aspect of the gothic genre is a representation of evil. (Smith, 2 – 3) Evidently, (like in
horror fiction) fear does not concern only horror fiction; it is also a very important
13
feature of gothic literature and it is one of the crucial elements of gothic and sci-fi
horror.
Concerning the popularity of gothic literature, it seems to be closely related to
fear as well. This popularity can be caused by the fact that the fear of death and the
unknown that first motivated this literature has been in existence for as long as there
have been people to relate and people to listen. (Child, viii) In other words: naturally,
this kind of fear has always stimulated the human mind. It can be assumed that as long
as people are interested in such fear, gothic literature will probably remain in demand.
Regarding the horror genre, it is, in fact, closely connected with the gothic genre.
Horror has its roots in gothic literature (Wisker, 7); moreover, it is sometimes also
termed “a branch of gothic writing.” (Wisker, 8) And some authors, such as Lincoln
Child, assign the term horror to what they call “ghost stories” and to what is generally
called gothic literature.
In the history of horror, some scholars speak about the classic period of horror,
which is roughly the period from the first Poeʼs stories (it means approximately from
1883) to Lovecraftʼs death in 1937. (Schweitzer 1992, v) Furthermore, it is added in the
same book that:
Earlier, Gothics flourished, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, Melmoth the
Wanderer and the whole chain-rattling crew. Afterwards, the modern horror
tale developed and is still developing. The distinction between classic and
modern is not yet clear. We can only say that post-Lovecraftian horror fiction
“feels” different. (Schweitzer 1992, v)
The gothic and the horror style of writing are quite similar; however, despite the fact
that horror uses many of the gothic formulae, horror is more likely to use violence,
terror and bodily harm than gothic fiction. (Wisker, 8) When collecting the stories for
his book Dark Company, Lincoln Child was choosing the stories as the representatives
of the genre because according to him, they contain at least frissons of anxiety. He
claims that many of these stories include moments of genuine terror - terror that is not
reached by providing repulsive images, but via restrained and artful orchestration. (viii)
His remark about reaching genuine terror is quite important. Generally, “horror
embodies what is paradoxically both desired and feared, dramatizing that which is
normally unthinkable, unnamable, indefinable, and repressed.” (Wisker, 8) In short,
14
horror fiction can contain certain repulsive scenes; however, it is not the defining
feature of the genre; horror literature (as well as the movies) is not merely about
flooding the audience with tasteless images.
Concerning the third mentioned genre, sci-fi, the direct ancestors of sci-fi
literature include Mary Shelleyʼs Frankenstein and works by Poe, Verne or H. G. Wells.
(Hart, 357) Also, Robert Louis Stevensonʼs Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was a pioneer book of the sci-fi genre. (Stříbrný, 548) Evidently, Frankenstein contains
the gothic elements as well as the sci-fi elements because it is used as an example of
both genres; Martin Gray uses Frankenstein as one of the representatives of gothic
literature and James D. Hart as one of the representatives of sci-fi literature (see above).
Gray also reminds Jules Verne and his novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth from
1864 “which might loosely be called science fiction.” (258)
After World War I, the idea dominating the genre was that a new war could
obliterate civilization together with an interest in the relationship between metaphysical
and moral questions. Cynicism and anti-utopian atmosphere is expressed for example in
Huxleyʼs Brave New World (1932). In the mid-1960s, a modishly experimental phase
emerged. One of the best of the experimental new writers was for example Roger
Zelazny. Nowadays, the boundaries of the genre are more difficult to outline than ever
before. (Ousby, 344 – 345)
The setting of sci-fi literature is often another planet, but this is not a firm rule,
of course; a sci-fi story can deal with “marvels or disasters created by scientific and
technological discoveries and inventions of the future” (Gray, 258) right here, on the
planet Earth.
To think about the idea of another planet in terms of horror, it is obvious why
such environment is used: an unknown world, full of strange creatures and phenomena
is an ideal place for fear, terror and life threats to appear. However, as proved by H. P.
Lovecraftʼs work, some authors do not need to imagine another planet; Lovecraft set his
stories on Earth and the sci-fi feature is represented by a race of mysterious beings,
superior to the human race in terms of technology and knowledge; these beings once
inhabited the planet and now, they are lurking in distant corners of space, waiting to be
resurrected and brought back to the Earth (Child, ix). In some stories, such as “The
Shadow out of Time,” these creatures are, thanks to their advanced technology, capable
15
of contacting certain human beings (via a process of mind exchange). According to
Lincoln Child, Lovecraft was a pioneer of the cosmic tradition of ghostly literature. (ix)
Lovecraft may be considered an author of horror fiction rather than the author of the
science fiction genre, because he in his stories (from or beyond the Cthulhu Mythos), he
managed to develop fear with the help of certain sci-fi features.
Because this thesis engages in horror fiction, only the stories containing horror
features are presented here. This means that in Poeʼs case, for example the tales that are
classified rather as comic stories, such as “Four Beasts in One; The Homo-Camelopard”
(Sova, 75) are omitted. Regarding Lovecraft, this thesis does not deal with his fantasy
stories (written mostly in the pattern of Lord Dunsany), such as “The Cats of Ulthar” or
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key” as well as his his fantasy novel The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. (Lovecraft and Derleth, xiii)
Lovecraftʼs work can be further divided into two subgroups in which this thesis
is interested in. There is a group of stories belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos - the term
created by August Derleth, an American author interested also in Lovecraft
(www.derleth.org), not by Lovecraft himself (Joshi 1997, 11) - and the rest of his tales
(written earlier or during the same years as the tales of the Cthulhu Mythos). It is the
other group – the tales out of the Cthulhu Mythos - that contains some stories, to which
Lovecraft referred as his Poesque tales. Especially in Lovecraftʼs early stories, namely
in “The Hound,” “Cool Air,” or “The Outsider,” Poeʼs influence is quite obvious; “Cool
Air” is even regarded as a rewriting of Poeʼs “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”
Lovecraftʼs tales of the Cthulhu Mythos were inspired mainly by Machen. When
discussing Poeʼs influence on Lovecraft, the critics speak more about the style and
technique rather than the plot elements, (Steiner, 60 - 61) but, as it is evident from this
thesis, Lovecraft also used some issues in which Poe was interested as well (such as
madness). He treated such issues in his own way, but their presence might indicate that
Lovecraft did not get rid of Poeʼs influence in his stories belonging to the Cthulhu
Mythos entirely.
16
2. Sources of Fear
Horor and fear are inseparably connected. As every human emotion, fear also arises
from certain causes. In Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs stories, sources of fear are various and
dealt with in diverse ways. This chapter focuses on the sources of fear particularly in
terms of their location – more precisely, whether the sources of fear in Lovecraftʼs and
Poeʼs stories are of external or internal nature. By the external sources of fear are meant
the sources not connected so directly with the character (such a source can be for
instance another person or creature), whereas the internal sources are called internal
because they come from within (such sources can be connected with madness, for
example – in such a case the source of fear arises directly from the characterʼs mind).
Lovecraftʼs “The Outsider” is quite interesting in terms of the question of
external/internal sources of fear. The main character lives completely isolated in an old
castle; there is no other human but rats, bats and spiders. The protagonist hates the old
dark castle full of shadows and therefore he decides to explore the nearby surroundings;
he finds another castle, enters it and in one of the rooms finds a group of people. As he
opens the door, the company seems shocked by something and runs away in horror. The
protagonist is also scared, his fear based on the assumption that there is something
lurking in the room, something unseen yet terrible. He wants to escape but as he moves,
he detects another movement behind one of the doorways. Eventually, he discovers that
the source of his (as well as the othersʼ) fear is a creature that is “a compound of all that
is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable.“ (Lovecraft and Derleth, 57)
He tries to run away, but cannot because he is paralyzed by the awful sight. Half
frightened, half mad, he tries to touch the monster. He is flooded with indescribable
horror, horror of the most internal nature that can be imagined; for the protagonistʼs
fingers in fact “touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.“ (Lovecraft and
Derleth, 59) In this tale, the unexpected denouement turns the external cause of fear into
the internal one.
This final shock caused by the fact that it is the protagonist who plays the main
role in the essence of fear is also used in Edgar Allan Poeʼs “Berenice”. The protagonist
(who is also the narrator of the story) is haunted by a mental disease called
“monomania,” (Poe, 643) which forces him to engage in the most ordinary objects
17
obsessively; later, his cousinʼs teeth become the object of his pathological mania. At the
end of the tale, he finds himself suddenly sitting in a study room, unable to recollect a
few past moments. Only the vague fragments of memories prompt that something
terrible has happened, but he is unable to remember what. Eventually, he finds out what
it was – in fact, what he has done.
With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I
could not force it open; and, in my tremor, it slipped from my hands, and fell
heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled
out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small,
white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the
floor. (Poe, 648)
In another Poeʼs story, “William Wilson”, the shocking end of the narration is
reached via the fact that the narrator suffers from the multiple personality. From the
beginning, he believes there is another person (William Wilson) looking and behaving
just like him. The other man ultimately spoils the narratorʼs life, chases and haunts him
wherever the narrator tries to hide and is the main source of worry for him. The final
fight reveals the truth while the narratorʼs enemy speaks and the narrator suddenly
claims “I could have fancied that I myself was speaking.” (Poe, 641) William Wilsonʼs
final words are “In me didst thou exist – and, in my death, see by this image, which is
thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” (Poe, 641) In other words, the real
cause of the narratorʼs fear is not of external (although it seems to be the case
throughout the whole story - for the narrator as well as for the reader,) but of internal
nature.
It is true that Lovecraftʼs “Cool Air” and Poeʼs “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar,” engage in the same topic. They both examine the possibilities of science
and depict how science can cross the border between life and death. In Poeʼs tale, the
narrator mesmerizes a dying man in order to find out what will happen because “no
person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis.” (Poe, 96) Therefore, he
hypnotizes a man who is on the edge of death, M. Valdemar. The narrator – according
to some scholars, Poe himself because his name also begins with “P” and in a letter, the
narrator is called “My dear P-“ (Poe and Thompson, 409) - is from the very beginning
acquainted with the fact that the object of his research is death (that means rather a
horrifying object). Nevertheless, when the hypnotized man utters: “I have been sleeping
18
and now – now – I am dead,” (Poe, 101) the narrator is overwhelmed by his feelings;
the horror is omniscient, one of the narratorʼs companions even swoons. When the
researchers recover from the shock, they, later in the afternoon, observe that the patient
finds himself in a stabilized condition because his “death had been arrested by the
mesmeric process.” (Poe, 102) After seven month, the narrator proceeds in the
experiment and inquires M. Valdemar about his feelings and wishes; the patient asks to
be put to sleep or be awakened quickly. The narrator tries to satisfy Valdemarʼs wish,
but at the moment he succeeds, something unexpected happens:
As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!”
absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his
whole frame at one – within the space of a single minute, or less, shrunk –
crumbled – absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before
that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable
putrescence. (Poe, 103)
At this gruesome moment, the story ends. The fear in this tale comes out of the
discovery that death can be trapped by hypnosis and the hypnotized person undergoes
terrible agony of the awareness of being possessed by death; first his soul and the body
soon after. Whereas the researchers are shocked by mere observation of the suffering
patient, Valdemar actually experiences all the horror. This horror is, however, described
from the narratorʼs point of view and therefore, the readers are probably more likely to
identify themselves with him; for the narrator, the source of fear is external, apart from
M. Valdemar – in his case, the source of fear (death) is internalized because he truly is
grasped by death.
In Lovecraftʼs “Cool Air,” the narrator is afraid of cool air as a result of the
horror he has experienced in a place full of such air. He lives in a rented flat in a house
owned by Mrs. Herrero and one of his neighbors is also Dr. Muñoz. The narrator meets
him for the first time while having a heart attack; he crawls to the doctorʼs apartment to
ask him for help. It is revealed that the doctor is a specialist in rather a peculiar method
that allows a person to exist consciously without the heart; this requires a constantly
cold environment. To make it short, it becomes more and more obvious that the doctor
himself still lives only thanks to this method; at the very end of the story, he confesses:
“I died that time eighteen years ago.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 211)
19
It is interesting that while having the heart attack, the narrator is actually not
afraid of death at all or, at least, he does not seem so; he acts in a very rational way,
heading to the doctorʼs door as quickly as possible because he knows there is no time to
hesitate. It is, of course, possible that he simply does not admit the fear that would
probably paralyze him and cause that the narrator would not be able to get any help;
however, this is not mentioned in the narration. The first sign of fear, or rather, certain
aversion, appears when the doctor opens the door and the narrator feels the cool
draught; “[…] as I saw Dr. Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which
nothing in his aspect could justify.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 206) The narrator also
perceives the touch of the doctorʼs hand as very unpleasant since the hand is unnaturally
cold. The doctor is the source of the protagonistʼs concern from the first contact and this
feeling gradually increases as he observes doctorʼs behavior that becomes weirder and
weirder.
The real horror is about to appear. It starts when the refrigerating machine
breaks down and it can no longer supply Muñez with cool air. Consequently, his
physical state deteriorates and the worst moment comes when the narrator, smelling a
terrible odor, breaks with some other men into the doctorʼs flat. The fear and
repugnance escalate more gradually than in Poeʼs story; in “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar,” the decomposition of the body is so sudden that it leads to a dreadful shock;
in Lovecraftʼs tale, it is an overwhelming shock preceded by increasing thrill (caused by
the narratorʼs expectation of something horrific). The end of the poor Muñez, who
wanted to defeat death, is as terrible as in the case of M. Valdemar. The only remnant of
the doctorʼs existence is some slimy substance. “A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the
open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool
had accumulated.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 210) The narratorʼs fear of cool air is a
natural result of this terrible experience. It is so because in this story, an ordinary
phenomenon – the cool air – is connected with Muñezʼs dreadful experiment;
consequently, the cool air associates the horror in the narratorʼs mind, thus becoming a
phobia. Ironically, what sustains life of every human being (air) transforms into a source
of fear because it is also the source of life for Muñez, but his life is of such perverted
nature, that it can evoke nothing but disgust.
20
“The Rats in the Walls,” according to S. T. Joshi, is Lovecraftʼs homage to Poe;
he states that it could be regarded as a modern sequel to “The Fall of the House of
Usher.” (1997, 10) Beyond other things, Joshi sees an evident parallel of the
protagonistʼs name de la Poer that he considers to be evidently derived from Edgar
Allan Poe. (1997, 26) Another parallel can be made between “The Rats in the Walls”
and a story by Poe (“The Black Cat”); it is rather a minor fact but an interesting one.
The protagonist of “The Rats in the Walls” has some cats; the most important one is his
eldest cat – black cat – called Nigger-Man. It is this cat that shares all the horrors with
him and it is this cat that is, as the first one, alarmed by something in the walls. The
protagonist and his black cat must endure the terror; as well as in Poeʼs “The Black
Cat,” they are connected via a terrible secret they share. However, apart from Poe,
Lovecraft does not allow the protagonist to harm the cat; on the contrary, it is the cat
that, starving, attacks its master who is susbsequently found “with my own cat leaping
and tearing at my throat.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 52) In “The Rats in the Walls”, the
cat is not vicious (as the narrator of Poeʼs “The Black Cat” believes), only acts as a
normal feline. It is, nevertheless, interesting that from all kinds of animals, Lovecraft
chose a cat of a black color to be the protagonistʼs companion.
It is the cat that detects the first signs of hidden evil. The way in which Lovecraft
works with this very first disturbance of the existing tranquility makes it a mere
precursor to the following dread; he calls it “the first incident which, though lightly
dismissed at the time, takes on a preternatural significance in relation to later events.”
(Lovecraft and Derleth, 40) From this point on, the reader expects a gradual increase of
the fear experienced by the protagonist; this sentence becomes an omen of the
forthcoming horror. It is similar in the story “Cool Air” (see above) in which the
sentence “Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying
suddenness” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 209) also foreshadows the most nightmarish part
of the narration.
The title of the story indicates that the source of fear is rats. At first, the
protagonist does not even know what is happening; he is simply concerned by the
strange behavior of his cat that is restlessly sniffing by the walls. Actually, he regards
the anxiety of his cat to be caused by “some singular odor or emanation from the old
stonework, imperceptible to human sense, but affecting the delicate organs of cats even
21
through the new woodwork.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 40) The narrator firmly believes
this and when a servant suggests that rats or mice may be responsible for the problem,
the protagonist opposes his idea and calls his companion, Capt. Norrys, who assures
him that it is highly unlikely that mice or rats would be dwelling in the walls.
Nevertheless, the following night the protagonist, half woken up, notices his cat staring
at a certain point on the wall; and now, he asserts: “whether the arras actually moved I
cannot say. I think it did, very slightly. But what I can swear to is that behind it I heard a
low, distinct scurrying as of rats or mice.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 41)
The statement “as of rats or mice” is crucial here. In fact, he still does not know
the real cause (he finds nothing behind the arras), but suddenly inclines to the servantʼs
opinion. One of the explanations may be that he is – either unconsciously or consciously
– affected by the servantʼs belief and/or (again, deliberately or unwittingly) ascribes the
strange phenomena to rats rather that to anything else. Rats may be repulsive and their
presence annoying or even disgusting; still, it is a better eventuality than to admit there
may be much worse things hidden in the walls; rats, no matter how filthy, are better
than spectral, perplexing, terrible something. The real source of fear is veiled in this
tale; more than of the presence of rats, the hero is afraid of ignorance (that can conceal
much worse things than ordinary rats). The cause of fear is beyond any doubt external;
it is internalized only in that sense that the protagonist ascribes a subjective meaning to
it, but this meaning does not strengthen the fear – it makes it normal, reasonable and
thus somehow justifiable. Later, he does not doubt the presence of rats at all. “The oakpanelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling,” (Lovecraft and Derleth,
43) he describes confidently – although he actually has not seen even a single rat yet.
The only visible evidence of their presence is found to the end of the narration, and this
evidence consists merely of a pile of rat bones – these rats evidently had nothing to do
with the nauseous sounds. Living rats – moreover, living rats so rich in number – are, as
Capt. Norrys suggested, highly unlikely “to infest the priory in such a sudden and
unprecedented fashion.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 40 – 41) and they are not observed in
the whole story at all.
Similar – yet reverse – principle can be found in Poeʼs “The Tell-Tale Hart.” In
this tale, the protagonist (again, the narrator of the tale) is a lunatic. A little impulse –
merely an eye of an old man (the owner of the apartment the protagonist lives in) is
22
enough to detonate the lunaticʼs fear. In this short story, the increasing nervous tension
is not a result of dreadful fear; the psychology of the character, the state of his mind, is
the source of all the horrific feelings. The source of fear is perceived as external by the
protagonist (according to him, the old manʼs eye is to be blamed for the terror) but it is
evident that his fear is, above all, internal: the primary cause is the sick mind ascribing
imaginary wicked value to an ordinary thing (the old manʼs eye and later also the
protagonistʼs own heartbeat that he believes is produced by the murdered manʼs
treacherous heart).
In “The Black Cat,” Poe again used an insane narrator, but in this case, although
it is quite obvious that the fear is caused by his lunacy, the narrator does not ascribe the
causes of his dread to an ordinary thing (such as the eye in “The Tell-Tale Heart”) but
possibly to some supernatural power (see the chapter “Lunacy”).
It is interesting to compare Lovecraftʼs “The Rats in the Walls”, with his other
two stories: “The Beast in the Cave” and “In the Vault” because they all have something
in common. It is the fact that the source of fear is unknown to the protagonist who
always tries to explain somehow (rationally) the situation.
In “The Beast in the Cave”, the hero is in a dark cave, unable to see anything.
Suddenly, he hears steps coming closer. His sense of hearing is the only sense he can
rely on and this sense suggests that the steps are caused rather by an animal than by a
human being. In a short while, he is convinced that he shares the cave with a puma. In
order not to become its pray, he decides to act and arms himself with stones. Although
there is something strange about the movement of the animal – a certain “lack of unison
betwixt hind and fore feet,1“ (BC) he does not change his opinion about the source of
the sound, deducing that the animal is probably somehow hurt and therefore moving in
such an extraordinary manner. Ultimately, he hits the beast with the stones; however,
how great is his astonishment when he, at the very end of the story, unexpectedly finds
out that “The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was, or had
at one time been, a MAN!!!“ (BC) In this case, the explanation of the cause of his fear is
the protagonistʼs own deduction, not somebody elseʼs idea that would be merely
adopted by the protagonist; it is quite natural that he ascribes the steps to the most
1
All quotes of the story “The Beast in the Cave” – thereafter referred to as BC - are taken from an
electronic version without pagination. (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/bc.asp)
23
probable source – a wild animal. He is, of course, anxious about the fact that he could
be eaten by the assumed puma. Still, it is more comforting and natural in such a
situation to come to this conclusion that to think about much worse (and even
phantasmagorical) interpretation, such as being in the same cave with a creature that is
partially a man and partially an animal. The final shock of revealing the real source of
the protagonistʼs worry is much bigger than the tension resulting from a danger caused
by quite an ordinary creature (such as the supposed puma).
In the story “In the Vault”, the main character, again, does not see the real cause
of his fear, but this does not prevent him from creating his own opinion about it. George
Birch is a gravedigger whose moral feeling is rather corrupted. He happens, one day, to
be locked in a vault; subsequently, he spends a couple of hours trying to get out and
finally, his effort is successful. However, while escaping from the vault, he experiences
something very unusual. To get out, he uses the coffins to climb to a small window
through which he wants to squeeze. When he carries out his plan and pulls himself up,
he abruptly feels that something is holding his ankles and dragging him down; then, a
horrible pain strikes his legs, but he liberates himself from the grasp, squeezes through
the window and, unable to walk, crawls away.
Consequently, he is found and cured and later, he is told what caused his
suffering. The real source of his agony was in fact a corpse of a man who wanted to
revenge himself on Birch for having been treated badly by the gravedigger (Birch cut
his legs off so that the man would fit in the coffin). According to the doctor who is
confused by the nature of Birchʼs wounds, Birchʼs legs were held and then bitten by this
dead man. But this elucidation differs diametrically from the one Birch made up in the
vault: “in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable materialism that
suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden box.”
(Lovecraft and Derleth, 15 – 16) Again, a very similar defense mechanism as in “The
Rats in the Walls” with a difference lying in the fact that, as in “The Beast in the Cave”,
it is the protagonist, not another character, who deduces the explanation.
Poeʼs “The Masque of the Red Death” might remind the reader of “In the Vault”
and “The Beast in the Cave.” Although the characters of “The Masque of the Red
Death” can see the source of fear, there is, at least according to the scholars, a certain
element connecting this story to the “In the Vault” and “The Beast in the Cave”: human
24
imagination. The crucial question in this story by Poe is who is hidden behind the mask
(and, consequently, who actually causes the horror). The easiest explanation is that it is
a man; however, the end of the story denies this theory. When Prosperoʼs guests attack
the figure and unmask it, they gasp “in unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements
and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any
tangible form.” (Poe, 273) This theory about a human in disguise does not satisfy some
scholars either. For them, it is human imagination that brings the figure alive, gives the
masque its sinister power and makes it the source of fear.
'The Masque of the Red Death' is, then, not the plague, not death itself, but
manʼs creation, his self-aroused and self-developed fear of his own mistaken
concept of death… 'The Masque of the Red Death'…can be (and has been) read
as a parable of the inevitability and the universality of death. (Roppolo in
Carlson, 409)
On this premise, the procedure in “The Masque of the Read Death” is as follows: first,
there is the fear of death; this fear creates the illusion of the Red Death and this vision
whips up the horror even more. Consequently, the narration can be seen as a study in
hallucinatory terror (Winters in Budd and Cady, 73) and the source of fear would be
internal. In fact, the guests start dying when they unmask the figure:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like
a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed
halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the
life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames
of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held
illimitable dominion over all. (Poe, 273)
It is quite obvious that the masked figure is not a figure of a man; the question remains
whether it is, as the mentioned scholars suggest, a personification of the Princeʼs and his
guestsʼ fear, or Death itself. Arthur Hobson Quinn, the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A
Critical Biography, notes that the Red Death does not touch anyone; (331) but if it was
Death, perhaps it would not have to do so – its mere presence may be enough to kill the
present people. Some critics state explicitly that the phantom figure is the embodiment
of the disease ravaging the country (Sova, 113); in that case, the source of fear in “The
Masque of the Red Death” would be rather external.
25
In Lovecraftʼs tale not belonging to the Cthulhu mythos, “Hypnos,” the decision
whether the source of fear is external or internal also depends to a certain degree on the
point of view. In this story, the source of fear is, at least at first sight, exclusively
internal, something not so common in Lovecraftʼs work. The main character and his
friend try to immerse in sleep and reveal its deepest secrets. While doing so, the
narratorʼs companion suffers a shock – as well as the narrator himself shortly after. The
two friends live in horror, avoiding falling asleep, but despite this precaution, the
narratorʼs companion falls asleep eventually – and his nemesis, whatever it is, kills him.
It is up to the reader to decide from the slight hints what exactly has the young
man seen and what actually kills him at the end of the narration. It is not said explicitly,
but no matter what it is, it is of internal nature in that sense that it can be only seen in
oneʼs dreams (in other words, in oneʼs mind). On the other hand, however, if the point
of view is changed, the cause of fear in this story can also be perceived as external; for
if the two friends want to reveal the ultimate secret of night visions, there is a premise
of a universal essence of dreams which is common to all human beings. Therefore, the
fear would be caused by something beyond oneʼs mind, by something coming from a
spectral illusionary world, an astral world humans can enter only when sleeping. The
soul, separated from the body – an independent fleshless traveler - would then be
threatened by this unknown force; consequently, concerning the soul, the cause of fear
would be external.
At the end of the narration, the main character is told that there was in fact no
companion at all; that all that has happened has happened exclusively to him.
Nevertheless, even if the companion was imaginary, the horror is not; on contrary, it is
too real for the hero. Therefore, if the source of dread is the narratorʼs madness, the
cause of fear is purely internal, connected only with the narratorʼs mind, not with
consciousness of all mankind.
To return to Poe and the internal sources of fear in his tales, “The Premature
Burial” concerns with the inner source of fear as well. The narrator is afraid of being
buried alive; this fear is so strong that it almost drives him mad. He suffers from a
peculiar disease, or rather, cataleptic states, which could, according to him, confuse
doctors so much that they would pronounce him dead and let him be buried. The
narratorʼs worries are caused by his illness and strengthen by the fact that people at his
26
times are sometimes buried alive. He does not seem to be frightened of death but rather
of dying when being buried alive. Nevertheless, death and dying are inevitable; they are
interconnected with life and its physical and mental sides so much that every person is
sometimes occupied by the question of death. In such a situation, it does not really
matter that it will happen to everybody, that it is something universal; what matters is
the fact that it will happen to the person who is thinking about it. In this sense, death is
deeply personal. Therefore, the narrator of “The Premature Burial,” although collecting
various horrific stories of people who have been accidentally buried alive, is (naturally
and selfishly) worried solely about himself; and these worries, his inner source of fear
(strengthened by the collected stories), hunt his tormented soul so much that his life is
not real life anymore, but rather a preparation for death.
As for Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos, the source of fear is represented by
creatures from distant secluded spaces in the universe that lived on Earth in distant past,
such as the Great Old Ones. The Great Old Ones are not mere space animals; the name
as such implies that they are much more. There is a whole cult connected with them;
usually, the characters perceive them more as ancient beings similar to gods rather than
as animals (although in At the Mountain of Madness, they are shown in a slightly
different light).
They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there
were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. […] Mankind
was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came
out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones.
No man had ever seen the Old Ones. (Lovecraft and Derleth, 143 - 144)
Obviously, in many Lovecraftʼs stories, groups of cultist emerge. The fear of the Old
Ones is different from a fear of mere strange animals from a foreign planet or; the
horror the Great Old Ones arouse in Lovecraftʼs characters is almost holy. It is the same
in the case of Cthulhu dwelling under the sea: “the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark
house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
again beneath his sway.“ (Lovecraft and Derleth, 144) It is a kind of fear that might
have felt people in the distant past (for example when facing a natural disaster that they
ascribed to some gods).
George Hay, the author of The Necronomicon, tries to answer the question why
the Cthulhu Mythos “has such a powerful appeal.” (34) He points out that other literary
27
works of similar nature has been more or less forgotten, whereas in the case of
Lovecraftʼs stories of the Cthulhu Mythos it has not happened. (Hay, 34) According to
him, Lovecraftʼs creatures – Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones – “somehow strike a
deeper chord; they seem to rise up from 'that age-long memoried self' that Yeats
believed could be contacted through symbols.” (Hay, 34) Hay also mentions Carl
Gustav Jung in the connection with the Cthulhu Mythos; the Old Ones and Cthulhu
seem also to correspond with the various levels of unconsciousness recognized by Jung
(35) as well as the collective unconsciousness; many of Jungʼs patients (although
having no knowledge of mythology) dreamed in mythological symbols. (Hay, 29)
Reportedly, Lovecraft drew his inspiration from his dreams and frequent nightmares.
(Hay, 24) However, according to some, they were not dreams, but rather visions consequently, these people - among them for example Kenneth Grant (the author of The
Magical Revival) - believe that Lovecraft actually managed to contact non-spatial
entities. (Hay, 35)
Whether he managed or not, the fact remains that in the Cthulhu Mythos, these
entities represent external sources of fear for the characters.
3. Lunacy
In Poeʼs as well as in Lovecraftʼs tales, lunacy is present in diverse forms and is
interconnected with fear; it can be said that if there is no other connection between
Poeʼs tales and Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos (contrary to the fact that Poeʼs influence is
obvious especially in Lovecraftʼs early work – see above), there might be at least seen a
connection represented by the presence of insanity. In other words, madness plays an
important part in Poeʼs tales as well as in the stories from the Cthulhu Mythos, although
both authors treated the issue of lunacy differently.
It is not surprising that they engaged in madness in their work - considering the
fact that the issue of madness played quite an important role in both Poeʼ and
Lovecraftʼs life, too. Consequently, they reflected it in their stories. Poe balanced all his
life on the verge of madness (Chambers, 422) and therefore, he “immersed himself in
the overlay of dream states with reality and in the clouded reasoning and uncontrolled
perversions of insane protagonists.” (Snodgrass, 189) Lovecraft worried about his own
28
sanity because of his parents; his father had lost his mind and his mother displayed
emotional and mental instability later as well. (Tyson, 53) Consequently, one of the
biggest Lovecraftʼs fears was the fear of going mad; he anxiously observed his peculiar
interest in strange places such as graveyards or old buildings, his aversion of meeting
other people, his headaches as well as nervous collapses – he regarded all these
symptoms as signs of developing madness. (Tyson, 80)
One of the most obvious examples of a mad narrator in Poeʼs work is the
protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Hart” (this story was discussed in the chapter concerning
the sources of fear, too). From the very beginning, the mental state of the character
plays a crucial role. (Sova, 174) The story is narrated from the first person perspective
and the first words of the mad protagonist concern the state of his mind. This is the
initial paragraph of his narration:
True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why
will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not
destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard
all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then,
am I mad? Hearken! And observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you
the whole story. (Poe, 303)
Despite the fact that the main character asserts he is not crazy, it is not easy to believe
this. The fact as such (that he assures he audience he is sane) is so suspicious that it
leads to the exactly opposite result. James M. Hutchisson, the author of the book simply
named Poe, even uses the term “egomaniacal declarations of the narrator” (143) – the
narrator, is, according to him, evidently mad but wants his audience to believe he is
sane. (144) Sova claims that the narrator “appears obsessed with conveying to his
audience that he is sane. This effort, however, only increases the readerʼs conviction
about his lack of sanity.” (174) Even if the reader believed this dubious proclamation of
mental health (that means that the narratorʼs calmness is real), it would not show the
narrator in a better light; on contrary, Poe explained that the extreme calmness of the
murderer suggested his insanity. (Poe and Thompson, 317) That he is a lunatic is even
more evident at the end of the story when the narrator loses his control and it is his
madness that is truly dominant at that point.
29
Oh God! What could I do? I foamed – I raved – I swore! I swung the chair
upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise
arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder – louder – louder! And
still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not?
Almighty God! –no, no! They heard! –they suspected! –they knew! –they were
making a mockery of my horror! –this I thought, and this I think. But anything
was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I
could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!
–and now – again! –hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!- (Poe, 306)
Poe used the hyphens to tear the sentences to pieces together with many exclamations
marks denoting the ejaculations of the protagonistʼs tortured mind; consequently, the
text reminds of an utterance of a person who is not mentally healthy, but whose mind is
somehow fragmented, damaged and distorted. Twisted or inverted syntax also
contributes to the image of the narratorʼs mental disorder. (Hutchisson, 144) The
narrator addresses the reader frequently, which, again, indicates an uncontrollable
hysteria. (Carlson, 249)
The narrator ascribes vicious powers to the old manʼs eye, which drives him to
“take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.” (Poe, 303)
Regarding the idea of the all-seeing eye, Hoffman presents one of the possible
interpretations of how and why such an idea crossed the sick mind of the main
character. According to him, it is crucial to answer the question of the relationship of
the narrator and the old man at first. Hoffman supposes that they are a father and a son.
He claims that there is especially one activity sons keep a secret. It is an activity the
sons do not want to be revealed by their all-knowing and all-seeing fathers: a “forbidden
act” of masturbation. (Hoffman, 223 – 224) However, the narrator does not mention a
particular situation that would cause him to believe the manʼs eye is evil. First, he says
that he cannot say when the idea of killing the man had come to his mind; then, he
explains that he had actually loved the man and the man had never done anything wrong
to him; eventually, he recalls that whenever the manʼs eye “fell upon me, my blood ran
cold; and so by degrees – very gradually” (Poe, 303) he decided to get rid of the man –
and his eye. It seems that the idea of being observed by the Evil Eye is more likely to be
caused by the fact that the main character is possessed by his lunacy rather than by one
particular event; also, it is possible that the question of the relationship of the two men
30
is not answered in the story because it is not really important; instead, the state of the
protagonistʼs mind and its consequences are of major significance.
Hoffman further adds that in the protagonistʼs mind, the old manʼs eye does not
become only the all-seeing eye of the father, but also the Eye of “The Father” – the Eye
of God. The main character believes it watches him all the time and that is why this
omniscient Eye becomes an observer to be feared. (Hoffman, 223)
The word the narrator often uses to describe the eye is “vulture.” (Poe, 303) The
word is quite important; Hoffman explains:
Everywhere else in Poeʼs work, in Poeʼs mind, vulture is associated with
TIME, and time is associated with our mortality, our confinement in body. The
vulture-like eye of an aged man is thus an insupportable reminder of the
narratorʼs insufferable mortality. Could he but rid himself of its all-seeing
scrutiny, he would then be free of his subjection to time. (224)
Moreover, vulture - a scavenger - is also connected with death; it can profit from death
because it feeds on the animals that are already dead. When the narrator, overwhelmed
by guilty, confesses to his crime, he does so because he supposes he hears the dead
manʼs heart beating. In this sense, the old man also profits from death. The protagonist
ascribes the sound to the old manʼs heart, but it is, of course, his own heart beating
(Hoffman, 227); nevertheless, it leads to his destruction. The murderer is convicted and
thus sentenced to a punishment. The issue of guilt and innocence is one of the crucial
issues in the story. (Sova, 174)
To return to time and its importance in the story, it surely plays quite an
important role in “The Tell-Tale Heart” - at least for the narrator who remembers quite
precisely how long he waited to murder the man. He also relates the sound of the
heartbeat to the sound of a watch; at the end of his narration, the sound of his own
heartbeat is like ticking of a watch measuring the time to his confession. (Sova, 174) It
is interesting to look deeper at the period of time for which he observes the sleeping
man. He does so for seven nights; during the eighth night, he commits the murder. In
“The Masque of the Red Death,” there are seven rooms which can symbolize many
things (see the chapter “Role of the Gothic and Sci-fi Setting”) – one of the possible
interpretations is that they symbolize the seven ages of man. (Poe and Thompson, 301)
The seventh room in Prosperoʼs castle is, then, the one of Death. The protagonist of
31
“The Tell-Tale Heart does not take the action during the seventh night – the night of
Death – he does so the night after. As if he missed his opportunity, he murders the man,
but (at least in the sick mind of the narrator) the manʼs heartbeat surpasses death and
lives on to reveal the hideous truth to the police.
The narrator plans the murder systematically, “methodically,” (Hoffman, 226)
which is connected with the proclaimed calmness. The content - the act of murder - is
driven by his mad mind and it is mad as a whole. However, there is certain coldness and
calmness about the form – about the procedure, the way the murder is committed. The
lunatic narrators in “The Tell-Tale Heart” as well as in “The Black Cat” are so
frightening because they are very controlled. (Hutchisson, 144) Beyond this control,
nevertheless, lie some emotions as well, especially obsessive fear or sadistic pleasure; in
“The Tell-Tale Heart,” the protagonist enjoys knowing that since the first slight noise
(made by the protagonist when observing his victim), the old man has been frightened.
(Sova, 175) In fact, he seems excited by the fact that he controls the man in a way,
because the old man is possessed by fear caused by the narrator. The night he
approaches to kill him, the narrator states that the man feels “the extent of my own
powers.” (Poe, 304) This is in a sharp contrast with the beginning of the tale and makes
an interesting twist. At the beginning of the story, it was the narrator who felt constantly
observed by the manʼs vulture eye and was frightened. Now, on the contrary, it is the
protagonist who is observing the old man and the old man is frightened. In other words,
their roles have switched. Finally, by killing the old man, the protagonist beats him.
Carlson points out that the narrator “denies his own 'mortal terror' by simulating control
over time and space and by impersonating 'Death itself' […] to be rid of a threat that is
simultaneously without and within.” (249) However, in the end, he is betrayed by his
mad mind and confesses himself – in his own twisted illusionary world, he is defeated
by the old man at last, by his obdurate heartbeat. In a way, “he is never free from the
gaze of the old manʼs clear blue eye.” (Hoffman, 227) The protagonist manages to take
power over the all-seeing Evil Eye; nonetheless, it leads to his bad end, as if the owner
of the Evil Eye was capable of taking revenge on the murderer.
Another example of Poeʼs lunatic character is the protagonist of “The Black
Cat”. To some extent, his behavior is similar to the behavior of the main character of
32
“The Tell-Tale Heart”. In fact, these two stories are closely related - (Quinn, 394) even
if there are also some differences.
The nature of the protagonistsʼ lunacy originates in different ways. Whereas in
“The Tell-Tale Heart” the narratorʼs initial utterance can be interpreted as the evidence
of his mental disease tormenting him ever since he can remember, the protagonist of
“The Black Cat” is not ill and he knows the cause of his mental state quite well. At the
beginning, he describes himself as a sensitive child: non-aggressive, docile and deeply
loving animals (according to him, the love for animals endures to his adulthood).
Eventually though, his character is transformed immensely due to his alcohol problems.
The protagonist compares his alcoholism to a disease: “But my disease grew upon me –
for what disease is like Alcohol!” (Poe, 224) Nevertheless, this comparison does not
cover the fact that such a “disease” is quite different from the disease of the main
character of “The Tell-Tale Heart”. In “The Black Cat,” the change of the narratorʼs
temperament soon leads to his unpleasant, unfriendly and then even violent, sadistic
behavior - once, in a state of intoxication, he cuts out the eye of his black cat, Pluto. He
claims he loves the animal, but he tortures it anyway – this event is only the first
suggestion that something even worse is going to happen to the cat from the hand of its
master. The reason why the main character acts so violently is that he imagines that
Pluto avoids his presence; therefore, he grabs the cat which, in its fright, bites him
slightly; the narrator gets furious and cuts Plutoʼs eye out.
The protagonist might commit the sadistic act solely because he is drunk.
However, alcohol cannot be the only reason; it is too cold-blooded a deed to be done out
of drunkenness and besides, requires certain skill and precision as it reminds of a
surgery. The main character describes his furious state of mind: “My original soul
seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence,
gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.” (Poe, 224) But even if he is in such
derangement, he immediately states that he “grasped the poor beast by the throat, and
deliberately cut on of its eyes from the socket!” (Poe, 224) If he did not think at all, he
would probably simply strangle the poor animal; but instead, he is driven by his
madness to extreme cruelty and he “deliberately” cuts Plutoʼs eye out. A possible
explanation might be that when he was a kid, his tenderness was so immense that, as he
claims, his friends laughed at him; he was seen as too sensitive, effeminate, subordinate
33
from the male point of view. But now, he is the one who is in charge; when he holds his
cat, he feels the animal is at his mercy and he is the one who can decide what to do with
and to Pluto. Later, he feels sorry for what he has done, but soon, he drowns the pang of
conscious in wine. Both of the protagonists narrating “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The
Black Cat” feel that they have power over somebody; the murderer in “The Tell-Tale
Heart” plans his crime for a long time, he lurks in darkness and waits for the right
moment and he is so eager to get rid of the Evil Eye that he has no mercy with the old
man and kills him quickly. The protagonist of “The Black Cat” also feels strong
compulsion to hurt somebody, “unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself – to offer
violence to its own nature – to do wrong for the wrongʼs sake only.” (Poe, 225) In the
case of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the act seems to be committed by a sick mind and a sick
mind only – a mind capable of calculating coldly and killing mercifully. In “The Black
Cat” it is an act committed by a formally normal mind, now altered by alcohol, a mind
possessed by a momentary state of raving angriness, but still capable of thinking how to
revenge in a painful and effective way. At least at this point, he is still a master – a very
cruel master, but not a killer. Shortly, the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart” can be
described as predominantly cool blooded and the protagonist of “The Black Cat” as
predominantly impulsive and sadistic (which does not mean he would lack the ability to
thing coldly – see below, where the murder of his wife is discussed).
Later, when he actually kills the cat, he seems to do so with a terrible conscious:
One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the
limb of a tree; - hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the
bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me,
and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; - hung it because I
knew that in so doing I was committing a sin – a deadly sin that would so
jeopardize my immortal soul as to place It – if such a thing were possible –
even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most
Terrible God. (Poe, 225)
From this, it seems that the protagonist of “The Black Cat” is a more complicated
personality than the murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart”; when killing Pluto, he does not
feel power and relief as the protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, he feels (or imagines
he feels) sadness as well. His last words about “the Most Merciful and Most Terrible
God” are remarkable here; it is quite possible that they reflect his own feelings – by
34
being able to kill the animal he loves, as if he actually became “the Most Merciful and
Most Terrible God.” Some scholars speak about “the fatuous denial of a moral order” in
the connection with the story (Gargano in Carlson, 246); the protagonist might refuse
this moral order because he feels God-like; the main character of “The Tell-Tale Heart”
compares himself to Death – his victim comforts himself that what he has heard was an
ordinary sound; “All in vain; because Death, in approaching him, had stalked with his
black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim.” (Poe, 304) (The protagonist of
“The Tell-Tale Heart” even uses the pronoun “he” – “his black shadow” – when talking
about Death, which, in this case, means about himself.)
It should be also noted that the character in “The Black Cat” feels quite opposing
emotions - power and sorrow – and he also might (maybe even subconsciously)
perceive himself as God-like, but at the same moment, he feels to be possessed by a
primitive human impulse, by “the spirit of PERVERSENESS” (Poe, 225) leading to
both crime and retribution. (Carlson, 249) As Budd and Cady assert in their book On
Poe: The Best from American Literature: “The Black Cat” is “a hideous story
constructed upon the idea sub-liminal Perverseness.” (14) (The idea of “Perverseness”
in Poeʼs and Lovecraftʼs work will be also mentioned later.)
The same day the protagonist of “The Black Cat” kills Pluto, a fire breaks out in
the his house and destroys it completely – apart from a wall, on which a figure of a cat
with a rope around its neck appears mysteriously. From this moment on, the main
character is haunted by a phantom of his dead pet; later, he adopts a cat similar to Pluto
(but this one, in contrast to Pluto, has a big white splotch on its chest). This cat seems to
torment and frighten him by reminding him of the killed cat – he confesses he feels
“absolute dread of the beast” (Poe, 227); first, it loses its eye for unknown reasons and
then, it seems to the narrator that its white spot has gradually got the shape of the
gallows. Later, he almost kills the animal with an axe, but his wife stops him; he, blind
with fury, kills his wife and buries her in the cellar – unfortunately for him, as it is
revealed in the end, together with the cat whose meowing alerts police officers and the
murderer is convicted. Therefore the revenge of the cat is completed.
Carlson believes that the protagonist ascribes his actions to supernatural causes,
but in fact, it is his deep problems in relationships to others that are the cause of his
lunacy. (250) However, the question remains whether there are some other, hidden
35
levels of his madness. At the beginning of the story, he mentions that his wife remarked
several times that black cats were witches in disguise. He also notes that he points it out
“for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.” (Poe, 224)
However, some scholars, such as Daniel Hoffman, have a different opinion about this;
they, despite the protagonistʼs light tone, suggest that this remark about disguised
witches is quite important and affects the main character intensely. According to
Hoffman, the narratorʼs wife only suggests, but her husband may actually believe that
the cat is in fact a witch. (231)
The remark about witches connects the story even tighter with “The Tell-Tale
Heart” – the belief in the Evil Eye is used there to make the power of the old manʼs eye
more frightening; in “The Black Cat,” another element of folklore superstition (the
belief that a black cat is a witch) plays a similar role. (Hoffman, 231)
Hoffman comes to the conclusion that witch equals wife, therefore the black cat
equals the narratorʼs wife; (Hoffman, 231) he also highlights the fact that women in
Poeʼs stories have names, but not this one – as if “she has no name, or he cannot
remember it, or he dare not to speak it.” (Hoffman, 231) But this might also be caused
by the fact that whereas the women he uses as examples (Eulalie, Ulalume, Helen,
Annabel Lee, Ligeia, Morella, Madeline – from “The Fall of the House of Usher” and
Berenice) play more important part or they are connected with deep noble feelings such
as love (and, consequently, sorrow caused by the loss of such a woman), the protagonist
of “The Black Cat” has, since his childhood, substituted the affection for people with
the affection for animals (Carlson, 250); his wifeʼs name might be omitted deliberately
in order to emphasize how shallow his feelings for other human beings are. Throughout
the whole narration, he gives the impression of a mere observer conveying the facts and
the consequences with no emotion (Sova, 34); when he is struck by emotions (when he
hangs Pluto), he gets rid of them quickly (with the help of alcohol). Despite the fact that
he blames alcohol for the change of his character, he does not provide the explanation
for the cause of his drinking, nor does he analyze his drinking. (Sova, 34) Dawn B.
Sova analyzes the protagonistʼs ability to feel in his Critical Companion to Edgar Allan
Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work and comes to the conclusion that the
protagonistʼs calm and peaceful words and depiction of himself hide suppressed anger
and arrogance that are revealed at the moment he performs violent actions toward Pluto
36
and his own wife. The narratorʼs brutality becomes evident when he openly reveals that
he feels loathing for his wife; in the words of Hoffman, it is possible that the protagonist
has been plotting the murder all along. (35) Sova adds his final comment on the
narratorʼs calm brutality:
He walls up his wifeʼs body in the basement and calmly relates the details,
commenting that “For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adopted.” The
narrator calmly discusses his excellent masonry skills while completing the
wall and shows his utter lack of remorse. (35)
Whether his sorrow when killing the cat is only imaginary or not, his ability to feel is
seriously damaged and twisted; subsequently, the result is the same as in “The Tell-Tale
Heart”: death of an innocent victim.
It is quite difficult to find such a sadistic or/and cold-blooded narrator in
Lovecraftʼs stories. One character worth mentioning in this context is an old man from
the story called “The Picture in the House,” which is a tale not belonging to his Cthulhu
Mythos. Unlike in Poeʼs case, in which some similarities between “The Tell-Tale
Heart” and “The Black Cat” can be found, “The Picture in the House” cannot be
connected with other parts of Lovecraftʼs work. But even this old man differs from the
protagonist of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” in a significant detail: the
sadistic murderer is not the narrator of the story; he is a man the narrator meets and
who, as the narrator finds out, is even more brutal than the narrator of “The Black Cat.”
The story “The Picture in the House” takes place in 1896. The narrator, when
bicycling, is driven to seek refuge from heavy rain in an old house (or, rather, a cottage).
At first, he regards the building as uninhabited, but then he notices a very old and
valuable book on the table. Overwhelmed by his own curiosity, he leafs through it and
his attention is caught by a picture depicting “a butcherʼs shop of the cannibal
Anziques.2” (PH) After a while, the protagonist hears steps and the owner of the cottage
enters the room – an old man with white beard and shabby clothes. The narrator is
agitated by the manʼs appearance at first, but calms down quickly when finding that his
behavior is very hospitable. They leaf through the book together and it turns out that the
old man is particularly attracted by the same picture that shocked the narrator. In fact,
2
All quotes of the story “The Picture in the House” – thereafter referred to as PH - are taken from an
electronic version without pagination. (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/ph.asp)
37
he seems to be improperly excited when talking about the terrible scene portrayed in the
picture. The protagonist is soon flooded with horror and disgust; at the end of the story,
it is revealed that the old man is actually a cannibal who believes (and, according to his
too ancient memories, it is true) that by eating human flesh, he can prolong his own life.
Then “came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of
unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.” (PH)
Again, there is the combination of a sick mind and supernatural feature
(immortality or, at least, unnaturally long life). In contrast to “The Tell-Tale Heart” and
“The Black Cat” which are, thanks to the first person narration, dramatic monologues of
the protagonists (Carlson, 489), the narrator of “The Picture in the House” is not the
murderer himself, but the observer who is likely to become (this can only be assumed
because of the sudden end) another victim. The readers are told nothing about the
procedure of killing (which is described in detail in the two stories by Poe), they are
merely confronted with the result. The shocked protagonist narrates:
The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward.
As the old man whispered the words “more the same” a tiny spattering impact
was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned
volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the
butcher’s shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened
picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man
saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it
necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left
an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose
plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which
seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut
my eyes. (PH)
The brutality of the old man can be reconstructed by his vivid interest in the picture,
when he is enthusiastic about the idea of how human limbs are cut off the body; his
evident pleasure is a clear indicator of a person with a sick mind who feels twisted
pleasure when even thinking about killing another person. Such feelings become
obvious for example from this utterance:
Thet feller bein’ chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at ’im—I hev
ta keep lookin’ at ’im—see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar’s his head
on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an’ t’other arm’s on the graound side o’
the meat block. (PH)
38
Whereas in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” the perverseness and
killing are interconnected with retribution (Carslon, 249), in “The Picture in the House,”
the perverse need to kill is driven by the longing for unnaturally prolonged life. And
whereas in the two Poeʼs stories the charactersʼ horrible acts lead to their conviction and
thus to their dead - in “The Black Cat,” the narrator states “to-morrow I die” (Poe, 223)
and in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the protagonist confesses to the police officers which
seals his fate - in Lovecraftʼs story they, on contrary, lead to the old cannibalʼs further
life.
The aspect of time in “The Picture in the House” is also interesting. The story is
narrated chronologically, but when the shocking truth is revealed, the readers must go
back to the past and reconstruct the preceding actions of the old man: they imagine a
man who is supposed to be dead for a long time and who hides dead bodies in the upper
room to fasten on them; the readersʼ imagination at this point is stimulated to figure out
all the bloody crimes the old man has committed and how many people he has killed;
suddenly, his remarks about those who lost their way in the area and were never seen
again make a different, much more terrible sense than at the moment they were uttered.
In other words, the lunatic desire of his perverted mind – to life via murdering other
humans – is now understood in its terrible complexity, confirming that his mind is sick
beyond any doubt. At this point, Lovecraft does not have to describe what has
happened; instead, he lets the readers to realize it (and be shocked).
This is not the only tale by Lovecraft that deals with a dreadful way to extend
oneʼs life; another character, lunatic in this sense, appears in “The Case of Charles
Dexter Ward,” which is a story linked to the Cthulhu Mythos via frightening magic
rituals (in these rituals appears for example the name of “Yog-Sothoth,” which is the
name of the character from the Cthulhu Mythos) that serve the very same goal as eating
human flesh in “The Picture in the House.” In this case, however, the sorcerer (Joseph
Curwen, who is Charles Dexter Wardʼs ancestor) uses ashes made of human remains in
his rituals.
The madness in this story is interconnected with the way the tale is narrated; in
this story, the first person narrative is no longer used – instead, Lovecraft uses the third
person narrative. As if the tale was presented by an independent observer capable of
39
joining the characters when undertaking expedition into Charles Dexter Wardʼs house,
an eye of the camera recording the relevant events as observing person would see them;
but, what is important here, not divulging too much. The narrator gives the readers for
instance the opportunity to read some secret protagonistʼs letters, but he does not allow
them to enter Charlesʼ mind – his character is known by his actions and the readers can
make their own opinion about Ward in the same way as the characters who meet him.
Thanks to this technique, the figure of Charles Dexter Ward is more mysterious than if
it was narrated from his point of view or if it was narrated from another characterʼs
point of view, which would restrict the readersʼ insight into the story. This technique
reminding of a movie allows the reader to put the pieces of the mosaic together, even
though it is not difficult to figure out what has happened to Ward. Lovecraft does not
reveal his thoughts explicitly, but he presents the thoughts of some other characters, for
example Dr. Willett, thus unobtrusively leading the reader to the roots of Wardʼs
lunacy; at the same time, the reader already assumes that certain supernatural elements
play their role in the tale and thanks to this, it is easier for such a reader to realize the
real nature of Wardʼs lunacy before the other characters (who consider some rational
explanations at first) do. In fact, the readers know almost from the very beginning that
Wardʼs soul has been replaced by Curwenʼs soul, but the narrator keeps it a secret until
the very end. (Szumskyj and Joshi, 275) Regarding the issue of supernatural elements in
this story, S. T. Joshi claims that “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” represents the
pure supernaturalism. (Joshi 2001, 300)
The story starts in a mental asylum where Ward has been placed and from which
he manages to escape. At this moment, a brief description of the state of his mind is
provided:
His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most
exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have
made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and
grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward’s family physician, affirms that
the patient’s gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters
outside the sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure.
Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most
brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed
during his last examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to
obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the
youth’s mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of
40
many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his
intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. (Lovecraft, 212)
Then, the story comes back to the past, providing the important pieces of information
about Wardʼs life, so that the readers can imagine what has happen to him. It seems that
his mind has undergone a transformation starting with certain obsessive interest in
Wardʼs precursor and his (quite disturbing) life (therefore, the author goes even deeper
to the past and provides also a detailed description of Joseph Curwenʼs life) to alarming
behavior signaled for example by “very haggard and haunted“ (Lovecraft, 282)
expression of his face and to, as observed by his servant, evidently seriously “disordered
nerves.” (Lovecraft, 288) The whole town is alerted because Charles cumulates an
immense amount of cattle and food for his small household (Curwenʼs old house bought
by Ward - a very gloomy place with, as it is revealed at the end of the story, huge cellars
and a torturing room), and he is connected with many peculiarities in the town, such as
the cases of strange unexplained vampirism. Obviously, this man must be somehow
mentally ill – this is what the other characters believe in more and more firmly, whereas
the readerʼs suspicion about the supernatural causes strengthens. Joseph Curwenʼs soul
has possessed Charles Dexter Wardʼs soul because Curwen and other sorcerers “had
found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different
bodies“ (Lovecraft, 304); subsequently, they could continue in their unholy effort to rob
the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest
men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the
consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
(Lovecraft, 303)
Curwenʼs desire to live and his attempt to go over dead bodies (literally) as well
as Wardʼs obsessive compulsion to evocate his ancestorʼs ghost from the grave can be
regarded as deranged obstinacy; and when Curwenʼs evil plan is fulfilled, other
characters perceive Wardʼs strange behavior as an evidence of his lunacy, which leads
to his hospitalization.
Especially in the tales from Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos, madness plays an
important and interesting part. There is a certain pattern appearing in the stories – at
first, the narrator tells the readers that he made a discovery so terrible, that he almost
lost his mind; he had been a reasonable person and had not believed in the supernatural.
41
However, then he saw with his own eyes… (Hay, 20) something that changed his life,
something due to which he almost lost his mind, something that forced him to change
his opinion about the supernatural. This “something” is, of course, some knowledge
concerning the Great Old Ones.
A story from the Cthulhu Mythos to start with is called “The Shadow Out of
Time.” In a certain sense, it can be seen as similar to “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward” because it also concerns a change of minds, but in this tale, not even the main
character is aware of what is happening to him and therefore, he finds himself on the
verge of insanity, confused and not knowing what to think about himself. The very
beginning of the story reflects this:
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, […] I am unwilling to vouch
for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia […]. There is
reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination […].
And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.
(Lovecraft and Derleth, 370)
The narrator named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee claims that his own ancestry and
background are altogether normal. “What came, came from somewhere else – where, I
even now hesitate to assert in plain words.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 371) When giving a
lecture in political philosophy at a university, he collapses (after, as he later remembers,
having had a headache and a strange feeling – as if somebody tried to possess his
thoughts).
He wakes up after more than five years and is told that in the meantime, he
actually communicated with the others, but in a very strange way far too different from
his usual way of speaking; not only was the style different, but he was also speaking as
if he no longer knew how to use his vocal organs properly. Despite the fact that his
memory had been damaged, the doctors soon found out that the patientʼs knowledge of
history as well as the future was excellent.
When Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee finally regains consciousness and is able to
control his actions, he tries to return to normal life and find out what has actually
happened. He is still haunted by obscure fantasies which he explains from the
psychological point of view; his disordered conception of time, for example, is,
according to him, a result of a psychological barrier. His search eventually leads him to
42
Australia where he makes a disturbing discovery in a cave: remains of an ancient city
which a human being has never entered; and a metal box with some documents written
not in the ancient language of the Great Old Ones, but in English, in Peasleeʼs own
handwriting. This throws a different light upon the peculiar state of his mind; however,
as it is evident from the beginning of the tale, Nathanielʼs rationality resists such an
absurd explanation and is more willing to doubt his sanity. Here, it seems, similarly as
in “The Rats in the Walls,” a self-defense mechanism is at work, persuading the narrator
to accept the more rational explanation of the fantastic event (even if it means to adopt
the idea of his own lunacy). After all, even if the cause was real, it can have some actual
effects on the narratorʼs mind. It would not be surprising, considering the fact that the
hypothesis that he has undergone “mind exchange with a member of an alien race”
(Joshi and Schultz, 245) must be a shock to Peaslee and therefore, it is possible that his
mental health has been damaged. At the beginning of the last chapter of the tale, he
describes his feelings when entering the cave:
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on – indeed, I
still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some demoniac
dream or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything
came to me through a kind of haze – sometimes only intermittently. (Lovecraft
and Derleth, 417)
The narrator of “The Shadow out of Time” is concerned with the idea that if his
experience is real, “then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of
his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralyzing.”
(Lovecraft and Derleth, 370) In other words: if what happened to him was real, the
human understanding of universe would be useless; it would turn into chaos and as
Donald Tyson - the author of The Dream World of H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His
Demons, His Universe - points out, “madness arises from chaos.” (80) It can be said that
if the narratorʼs madness is only imaginary, it means that the human race is about to be
thrown into chaos and madness.
Many characters from the Cthulhu Mythos feel an obsessive compulsion to keep
searching despite the fact that they know it can lead to the disruption of their mental
health. In “The Call of Cthullhu,” a young man is urged to find more about the peculiar
idol worshiped by strange cultist, in spite of being warned emphatically by his dead
43
uncleʼs diary. The idol depicting a strange monster with tentacles and bat-like wings
seems to be connected with horrible secret knowledge. It was made by a young man
Henry Anthony Wilcox and the appearance of the statue is based on one of his dreams.
Wilcox is not the only one who sank into terrible nightmares; in the spring 1925, there
were “outbreaks of group folly or mania” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 132), affecting mostly
people gifted with vivid fantasy, such as artists. One of the cases was an architect “with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism” who “went violently insane on the date of
young Wilcoxʼs seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to
be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 136)
A description of other newspaper clippings collected by the narratorʼs uncle
follows, including the one concerning a voodoo ceremony in the woods near New
Orleans during which a similar statue as Wilcoxʼs was used. Although the narrator
realizes that his uncle “died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to
learn too much,” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 149) he keeps searching. He travels to Oslo in
order to speak with Johansen – a sailor who, according to what the narrator read, went
through a horrific experience connected with the statue on one voyage. The narrator
finds out that Johansen is dead, but he gets Johansenʼs diary from which he can
reconstruct the whole event.
Johansen and the rest of the crew discovered a plateau in the middle of the
ocean, lifted from the sea bottom by a recent earthquake. On this plateau, the found a
cyclopean city of weird architecture and a monstrous gigantic creature, Cthulhu, that
killed everybody except for Johansen and another seaman, Briden, who soon lost his
mind and died; they escaped but Johansen was haunted by his memories until he died,
too.
After the narrator reads this, he has all the pieces of the puzzle and knows the
terrible reality. He states: “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror,
and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison
to me.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 158)
Donald D. Burlesson, the author of Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe,
comments on the story, pointing out its structure; it is a frame story, but rather a
complicated one because the framing is many layers deep. (79) Burlesson also
highlights the fact that apart from Johansenʼs narration, Cthulhu is not actually present;
44
and even here, Cthulhu is somehow absent because of narrative distance. (80, 81) “We
never quite get 'down to' Cthulhu, but only to his long handed-down effects.”
(Burlesson, 80) Elsewhere, Cthulhu is present rather telepathically. (Burlesson, 80) But
this does not reduce his power; on contrary, “Cthulhu is most significant […] precisely
for his effects in absence – his power from afar.” (Burlesson, 80) This makes Cthulhuʼs
power omniscient and timeless; the fear and madness he is able to rise, is present
everywhere in the story.
One of Lovecraftʼs longest stories – in fact, a short novel consisting of 41,500
words (Joshi and Schultz, 9) – even bears madness in its title: At the Mountains of
Madness. According to some critics, this text represents, together with “The Shadow
Out of Time,” the peak of Lovecraftʼs imagination (Schweitzer 2001, 53), although the
story was, at least at the beginning, also condemned by some who regarded it as nothing
more than “drivel.” (Joshi 2001, 374) This time, the setting is not New England but
quite a remote place – Antarctica, by which Lovecraft was fascinated all his life. (Joshi
and Schultz, 10) It is also linked to Poeʼs The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in which
a scream “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Poe, 869) appears; in At the Mountains of Madness, the
reader can read:
[…] forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his
Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic
tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance
connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally
snowy birds of that malign region’s core. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Lovecraft,
577)
The word “Tekeli-li” appears for more times in the novel as well as Poe; the very end of
At the Mountains of Madness is: “At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition
of a single mad word of all too obvious source: “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (Lovecraft, 586)
As Joshi and Schultz sum up in their An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, “The
Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930 – 31, led by William Dyer (his full name is
given only in 'The Shadow Out of Time') begins promisingly but ends in tragedy and
horror.” (9) Not only does the expedition end in tragedy and horror, but also in madness
connected with the experienced fright.
The mentioned structure described by George Hay is well preserved in this tale.
The narrator begins with explaining why he has decided to speak about his experiences;
45
he does so in order to warn the others (as well as in “The Call of Cthulhu”). “Doubt of
the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem
extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left,” (Lovecraft, 481) prefaces he at
the beginning, thus making the credibility of his testimony rather doubtful (at least for
the scientists planning to explore Antarctica who are supposed to be warned by his
narration).
In Antarctica, the group splits up; the narrator and some other men stay in the
camp, whereas the remaining members led by a biologist Lake decide to explore another
area. At first, everything seems to be all right – Lake and his group inform the others
about a discovery of strange creatures (some members of the Old Ones, preserved in the
frosty Antarctic climate), but soon afterwards, the connection fails. The narrator and his
companions set forth to help them. During the journey, they notice unnatural
regularities of the mountains they are flying over; the peaks are too cube-like, too
artificial. When the men find the base, they find dead bodies of humans and dogs as
well as the evidence “suggesting madness on the part of Lake’s men,” (Lovecraft, 511)
because some of the discovered examples are buried in a very peculiar way and eight
examples of a very good condition have vanished.
Later, the narrator and his companion Danforth follow the track of one man who
is not among the dead and obviously managed to escape from the camp. The narrator
provides a detailed description of a cyclopean city he and Danforth come to. It was built
by intelligent creatures millions of years ago; the narrator also makes the readers
familiar with the history of the ancient race of the Great Old Ones who inhabited the
city ages ago. The narrator discovers that the creatures can be compared with human
beings in terms of their social and economic organization. Also, the Old Ones were no
gods but extraterrestrials. Therefore, their followers are mistaken when worshiping them
like gods. (Joshi and Schultz, 11)
It is in a stone labyrinth where the narrator and his companion find the missing
man as well as one dog, both dead and wrapped in linen so that their bodies cannot be
damaged more. Danforth and the narrator decide to explore the city more deeply, but
they soon find out that they are not alone; it seems that one of the creatures still lives in
the labyrinth of stone tunnels. In fact, it is a creature of which even the Old Ones were
afraid; it represents “the horrors of which even the horrors are afraid.” (Schweitzer
46
2001, 13) A mixture of fear and insanity engulfs the narrator and Danforth. However, it
does not paralyze them; on contrary, it has the opposite effect: as if it switched them
from the rational state of mind (in which they would think about everything too much)
to the state of mind in which they are driven by their basic instincts forcing them to run
and leading them to safety:
I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—in stating
what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to
each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the
awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I
wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike
the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us
through—perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what
saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left.
(Lovecraft, 580)
The narrator recalls that his companion “was totally unstrung, and the first thing I
remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical
formula.” (Lovecraft, 580) Fortunately, both men manage to escape and consequently,
the narrator can warn people not to return to the places where fright and madness from
ancient times still lurk in the darkness.
Another story also making a link to Poeʼs work (this time it is “The Fall of the
House of Usher” – more precisely, the name of one of the characters from this tale is
used in Lovecraftʼs story) and depicting fear bordering on insanity is “The Haunter of
the Dark.” Apart from “The Shadow Out of Time” and At the Mountains of Madness, it
is not narrated from the first person perspective; the third person narration is used
instead. Nevertheless, the structure of the tale does not differ too much. The very
beginning of the stories narrated from the first person perspective usually contain a
confession that the narrator has made a horrible discovery and now wants to speak
about it. This is not possible in “The Haunter of the Dark,” because at the very
beginning, the protagonist (a writer Robert Blake) is already dead. In fact, the whole
story is based on his diary and represents a description of events leading to Blakeʼs
death. In this aspect, it reminds of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” but whereas in
that story the readers are sometimes not allowed to enter Wardʼs laboratory, finding
themselves at the same position as Wardʼs parents – in front of the door, listening to the
47
sounds coming out of Wardʼs room – in “The Haunter of the Dark,” the readers are
allowed to follow Blake everywhere. Thanks to this, the reader is directly acquainted
with Blakeʼs feelings – which is something missing in “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward.” Despite the fact that there is not a usual first person narrative statement
concerning the narratorʼs doubt concerning his own sanity, it is still present, only in a
different form (from the third person perspective). “[…] the entries in his diary are
clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by
certain old matters he had uncovered,” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 98) is one of the
statements reflecting the opinion of the public. And, shortly after, another one: “For
after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream,
terror and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral
sort.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 98)
In short, the writer becomes fascinated with an old church and his curiosity leads
to his decision to explore the building; however, he soon discovers what hides in the
darkened space of the abandoned church. He is overwhelmed by horror leading (at the
end of the tale) to his death. He is found in his study room, sitting in the chair, dead; the
expression of his face is terrible: “glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark,
convulsive fright on the twisted features.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 119) Evidently, he
was writing “his frenzied jottings to the last,” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 119), because a
broken pencil is found in his hand. For those who has found Blakeʼs body it is obvious
that his lunatic notes were written due to Blakeʼs “excessive imagination and neurotic
unbalance.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 120) There is an inconspicuous remark in his diary
connecting this tale to Poeʼs “The Fall of the House of Usher” via the name of the
character from “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “No light – no glass – see that steeple
– that tower – window – can hear – Roderick Usher – am mad or going mad - […]”
(Lovecraft and Derleth, 120) It is no coincidence that in Lovecraftʼs “The Haunter of
the Dark” Roderick Usher is mentioned; after all, some scholars, such as Louis J. Budd,
explicitly state that Roderick Usher “is mad.” (73)
In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” not only Roderick Usher plays an important
role. The role of the house is equally significant and can be analyzed in terms of
madness as well as the gothic setting; that is why it is discussed in this chapter as well
as in the chapter concerning the role of the gothic and sci-fi setting.
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Madness in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” seems to be very powerful.
According to some scholars, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a tale of “psychic
conflict” or even a “psychodrama.” (Carlson, 196) To analyze Roderick Usherʼs
insanity, the question is whether he suffers from mental strain on the verge of madness
or whether it is actual insanity and, in any case, how it develops throughout the tale. It is
worth pointing out here that doctors of Poeʼs time perceived lunacy and vivid
imagination to be connected (Budd, 186) and that the vivid imagination “characterizes
romantics like Usher.” (Budd, 186) Artist (such as sculptors, poets or musicians) were
considered to be more likely to become lunatics that natural scientists such as
mathematicians or chemists; they also believed that lunacy can increase artistic ability,
which happens to Usher. (Budd, 186) This is something Lovecraft used in his “The Call
of Cthulhu” in which a sudden wave of madness also strikes people with imaginative
power.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” begins with the narrator coming to visit his old
friend Roderick; when arriving, he provides a detailed description of the house. Based
on this description and the description of Usherʼs physical appearance, some critics
believe that there is a deeper connection between Roderick and his home, which will be
discussed in the chapter “Role of the Gothic and Sci-fi Setting.” There might be another
explanation for the similarities of the house and its owner. However, it does not concern
Usherʼs physical but mental state. The narrator compares the windows of the house to
human eyes; the house is described as following:
The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole
exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. […] Perhaps the
eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible
fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way
down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of
the tarn. (Poe, 233)
This is the description of Usherʼs appearance:
I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. […] Yet the character
of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion;
an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and
very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew
model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely
49
moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy;
hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity… (Poe, 234)
And the description of Usherʼs peculiar behavior – of the state of his mind:
His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to
that species of energetic concision -- that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and
hollow-sounding enunciation -- that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly
modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or
the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense
excitement. (Poe, 234 – 235)
Even though there are some remarks concerning opium in the story, it does not
necessarily mean that the narrator or Roderick Usher is users of opium. (Poe and
Thompson, 199)
There are certain similarities concerning a transformation towards deterioration
in all the descriptions provided; what is also important is the effect on the narrator
because it is via him that the readers imagines the appearance of the house and Usher
and Usherʼs behavior. If it was not for his emotions, the readers could not discover a
link connecting not only the appearance of the house and its owner but also Roderickʼs
mind. The narrator is moved, but he feels gloom and despondency more intensively
when he arrives and glances at the house; he feels pity and awe when he looks at his old
friend; he is struck by Roderickʼs strange behavior at first, but then he comforts himself
that there have always been some peculiarities in his companionʼs behavior. Shortly, in
all three cases, the narrator feels certain mixture of familiarity and anxiety; in this sense,
the house, Usherʼs physical appearance and the state of his mind correlate. After all, as
it is evident from the beginning of the tale, the house does not only represent a mere
building, it also represents the Usher family:
the patrimony with the name, which had […] so identified the two as to merge
the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the
'House of Usher' - an appellation which seemed to include […] both the family
and the family mansion. (Poe, 232).
The old mansion is a place in which the members of the Usher family not only live
physically, but also experience all the important moments of their lives. Consequently,
50
not only Roderick Usherʼs physical presence and appearance is connected with the
house; the state of his mind is equally interconnected with the old mansion. Some
scholars equate the house to Usherʼs body and the interior to his mind (Carlson, 196);
however, they all seem to be so interconnected that it can also be simply assumed that
Roderick (his body and mind) is comparable with the house (the exterior as well as the
interior) and further distinction is actually not necessary.
In fact, there is a certain detail concerning the exterior of the mansion that might
be a direct connection with Roderickʼs mind. When the narrator comes and sees the
exterior, the overall atmosphere evokes deterioration; he also notices a “fissure” – a sole
sign of damage not only making a connection with the damaged appearance of the
owner of the house, but probably also with a fissure in his soul, the one significant event
that tortures his mind: his sisterʼs disease. At the moment of his final shock, at the very
end of the story when the horror culminates, Usher experiences the climax of his
nervous tension and then dies; soon afterwards, the whole house collapses, burying
Roderick and his sister beneath. This means the destruction of the house, of the last
members of the family (their physical death), and it can also be simultaneously
perceived as the end of Usherʼs sanity and its transformation into insanity at the very
moment of his physical death: “lady Madeline […] bore him to the floor a corpse, and a
victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” (Poe, 245) Consequently, the fissure - which
might be a symbol of the body as well as weakened Roderickʼs mind – widens and
completes the whole destruction: “that once barely-discernible fissure […] rapidly
widened […] and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the
fragments of the 'House of Usher.'“ (Poe, 245) In other words: the widened fissure,
according to some scholars, means the collapse of family and physical houses (Kent,
52); but it might also mean the collapse of one of its last living memberʼs (Roderick
Usherʼs) mental state.
When speaking about lunacy in Poeʼs stories, one tale should not be omitted:
“Berenice.” It represents an interesting insight into the narratorʼ sick mind and there can
be found some similarities with other tales by Poe. In fact, the narratorʼs insanity in this
tale caused disgust; when the story was published first, many readers found it too
repulsive, horrible and shocking, approaching the verge or bad taste. (Carslon, 169)
51
Later, Poe omitted a passage containing grim details that “some found in especially bad
taste.” (Poe and Thompson, 146)
The narrator named Egaeus is aware of his mental disease (monomania) from
the beginning of the story; he also mentions for several times that he has vivid
imagination. In contrast to the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he does not try to
persuade the readers that he is perfectly sane; on contrary, he admits that he is ill, “for I
have been told that I should call it by no other appellation – my own disease, then, grew
rapidly upon me […]” (Poe, 643) Shortly, he becomes obsessed with the idea of
Bereniceʼs (who is his cousin) teeth. Similarly as in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator
is obsessed with a fixed idea caused by a very ordinary and simple stimulus; in “The
Tell-Tale Heart” it is the old manʼs eye, in “Berenice” the stimulus is her teeth.
However, apart from the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Egaeus is not a lunatic
murderer but rather a mad scientist. Roger Asselineau states that in this story, love turns
to sadistic necrophilia. (15) However, there is no love in the sense of love between a
man and a woman at all; Egaeus directly claims that “during the brightest days of her
unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her.” (Poe, 645) Later, when she is
changed by her disease, his interest is far too materialistic than a feeling comparable
with love. He perceives his cousin not as an object of love, but as an object of analysis
(Carslon, 172), which is obvious from his following statement:
During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never
loved her. […] I had seen her - not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as
the Berenice of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the
abstraction of such a being; not as a thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an
object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory
speculation. (Poe, 645)
The act of pulling out her teeth – the object of his obsession and his main
interest – is, then, an absolute extraction of Bereniceʼs identity. (Carlson, 172) There is
also another difference between Egaeus and the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart:” when
committing the crime, the murderer from “The Tell-Tale Heart” feels in charge,
controlling the life and death of his victim; Egaeus, on the other hand, is not. This is
evident from the part that Poe omitted (see above) and that is provided for example in
The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds and
Contexts Criticism edited by G. R. Thompson. In this passage, Egaeus is overwhelmed
52
by his emotions and they take control over him; suddenly, he has “no longer power to
move” (146) and then runs away frantically: “I […] rushed forth a maniac from that
apartment of triple horror, and mystery, and death.” (146) Of course, before running
away, he pulled out his cousinʼs teeth; however, immediately after this horrible action,
he is so overpowered by his feelings that he gets into the state of mental paralysis – he
does not even remember what has happened, he can only recall obscure, confusing,
fragmented memories.
The act of pulling out Bereniceʼs teeth can also remind the reader of the act of
cutting out Plutoʼs eye in “The Black Cat.” Again, there is an important difference.
Despite the fact that in both cases mutilation of the victim is involved, the mental
backgrounds of the crimes differ. In “The Black Cat,” the main motives are anger,
revenge and relief; in “Berenice” it is obsession, relief and scientific interest.
Last but not least, “The Imp of the Perverse” should be mentioned in this
chapter. The major theme of the tale is the narratorʼs “self-destructive tendencies”
(Sova, 84) forcing him to confess to the crime he has committed. According to some
scholars, the narrator desires unconsciously to be caught and this desire can also be
found in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” (Sova, 84) Some critics tend to
limit the idea of perverseness to the phenomena of insanity, but perverseness is more
than a form of lunacy; it belongs to the field of theological morality. (Carlson, 250)
It would be understandable if the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” was
haunted by his bad conscience, but, “however paradoxical it may seem, there is no
pleasure for him in having gotten away with the murder unless he can reveal his success
to someone.” (Sova, 85) Pride, or rather, arrogance seems to play a significant role in
this story as well as in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” where the narrators
also boast, thinking they have everything under control. The narrator of “The Imp of the
Perverse” revels in the perfection with which he has committed the murder:
Of the remains of the fatal taper, I had myself carefully disposed. I had left no
shadow of a clue by which it would be possible to convict, or even to suspect
me of the crime. It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose
in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. (Poe, 283)
In the end, the Imp of the Perverse turns out to be the Imp of Irony in all the
three stories when the narratorsʼ crimes are, almost immediately, revealed and the
53
murderers are going to pay for what they have done with their own lives. In “The Imp
of the Perverse,” the narrator reveals how his satisfaction has gradually transformed into
the compulsion that eventually leads to his confession:
But there arrived at length an epoch, from which the pleasurable feeling grew,
by scarcely perceptible gradations, into a haunting and harassing thought. It
harassed because it haunted. I could scarcely get rid of it for an instant. […]
In this manner, at last, I would perpetually catch myself pondering upon my
security, and repeating, in a low, undertone, the phrase, “I am safe.” (Poe, 283
– 284)
Although he later reformulates the phrase into “I am safe – I am safe – yes – if I be not
fool enough to make open confession!” (Poe, 284) Nevertheless, that is exactly what he
does – he confesses openly in the public.
In short, in “The Imp of the Perverse,” as well as many other tales by Poe,
lunacy is a central theme and causes the destruction of the protagonist. Lovecraft used
insanity in a different way, rather as a result (real or only imagined by the) of a horrible
experience.
4. Role of the Gothic and Sci-fi Setting
Not only lunacy is connected with fear in Lovecraftʼs and Poeʼs work. In Poeʼs
as well as in Lovecraftʼs stories, the setting helps to create the atmosphere and together,
they contribute to the charactersʼ fear and its depiction immensely.
Edgar Allan Poeʼs short horror stories often contain the features of gothic
literature. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” the setting, more precisely Prince
Prosperoʼs refugee (a castellated abbey where a masquerade takes place) plays a
significant role. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” a great deal of attention is paid to a
description of seven rooms of the abbey; apparently, they do not serve as a mere tool
that should help the reader to visualize Prince Prosperoʼs refugee – each room has a
different color and it is one of the favorite pastimes of critics to identify the symbolic
meaning of these colors; the symbolic meaning of the seven rooms helps to emphasize
the gothic atmosphere of the story. (Poe and Thompson, 301) In this tale, the author
elevates a mere characterization of the seven rooms to a vital symbol emphasizing the
overall atmosphere of “The Masque of the Red Death”. The meaning of the seven
54
rooms could be the seven ages of man, the seven days of the week or the seven deadly
sins; there are many other explanations as well. (Poe and Thompson, 301) One of them
worth mentioning, also connected with some crucial aspects of human life, is the one by
Benjamin Franklin Fisher. He claims that the abbey where Prospero and his guests find
their refugee
very much resembles the interior of a human head […] The colors red and
black may represent life, particularly as it is maintained through sexuality, and
concluded in death, as it is represented by the awesome ebony clock. The
clock, too, reminds the dreamers of time, a fearful experience for them. (Fisher
in Hayes, 88)
The most remarkable room is the last one, the seventh room, that is shrouded in black
velvet tapestries; the color of the window panes is scarlet – “a deep blood color.” (Poe,
270) These colors - black and “deep blood” – connect the seventh room with the title of
the story – they are both included in it. The red color is directly stated in the title and
black is associated with death (www.color-wheel-pro.com), which is also contained in
the title of the story; together, the two colors correspond with the two words from the
title: Red Death.
A similar setting – large old mysterious mansion - is used in “The Fall of the
House of Usher” in which the old mansion of the Usher family plays an important part;
as it has been discussed in the chapter concerning lunacy, it can symbolize physical or
both physical and mental state of Roderick Usher. Nevertheless, some believe that other
meanings of the setting exist beyond these.
According to some critics, the whole old mansion and its surroundings is nothing
more than the narratorʼs dream and his companion, Roderick Usher, is not a mere friend
but his inner and spiritual self. (Hoffman, 299) Consequently, the house would not be a
symbol of Usherʼs body or (and) mind, but rather a symbol of the narratorʼs soul
because if it appears in his dream, it must originate in his mind - the house is “the
dominion of his soul.” (Hoffman, 301) According to this theory, it is not an actual
building, but an image (and its reflection in the pool is therefore the image of an image)
described as if it was a human head – the windows are compared to the eyes and the
cobwebs remind of Roderickʼs hair; the interiors with dark intricate passages and
Usherʼs lightened room full of musical instruments, books and furniture symbolize a
55
disordered mind. (Hoffman, 302) Again, as in the theory mentioned in the chapter about
lunacy, the interiors of the mansion seem to represent a human mind - but this time it is
not Roderickʼs mind but the mind of the narrator himself; whereas the first theory deals
with Usherʼs insanity, it is even more complicated with this interpretation. Lady
Madeline, for instance, is also no longer a real person but a symbol. According to
Hoffman, Roderick Usher represents “the rational, daylight self of the narrator” and
Madeline, his twin, “the dreaded because beloved muse-figure of that inner self.” (303)
Hoffman states that he is aware of some loose strands of this theory. (310)
Still, even as a mere old mansion, the house of the Usher family is beyond any
doubt a suitable gothic setting for this macabre tale of madness, death and final
destruction and contributes to the overall gloomy and mysterious atmosphere of the
whole story.
Lovecraftʼs “The Rats in the Walls” are influenced by Poeʼs “The Fall of the
House of Usher” (see the chapter “Sources of Fear”). The house where the narrator lives
is a priory, its architecture “involving Gothic towers” staying “on a Saxon or
Romanesque substructure of a still earlier order or blend of orders—Roman, and even
Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly;” the old building is also full of “moss,
bats, and cobwebs” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 33 and 35) A gloomy cellar opens into a
cave that hides a terrible secret. In this story, the architecture of the building is
purposefully described in such a way that it follows a simple rule: the deeper, the older.
The fear strengthens in the direction towards the cellar connected to the cave that is the
center of the horror. The setting reminds of a materialized period of time leading the
reader from Gothic to the ancient ages of mysterious rituals. The priory is not only an
atmospheric setting, but also a guardian of the ancient secrets, concentrating the thrill,
dread and the readersʼs interest in its center.
In many stories, Lovecraft places his characters in old towns (such as his
Arkham), old buildings or apartments. For instance in “The Dreams in the Witch
House” the narrator also finds out that the place is connected with a terrible secret – in
this case, it is a forgotten knowledge of witchcraft. Another example is “The Case of
Charles Dexter Ward” and many others, among them the majority of tales mentioned in
this thesis. In Lovecraftʼs world, an old mysterious settings and secret knowledge
causing fear are often interconnected.
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In “The Picture in the House” the house is also described as one of
little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted
upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of
rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while
the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost
hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow;
but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a
lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable
things. (PH)
This tale also demonstrates another feature of Lovecraftʼs stories connected with
the setting, which is isolation (for deeper insight, see the essay “Outsiders and Aliens:
The Uses of Isolation in Lovecraftʼs Fiction” in An Epicure in the Terrible: A
Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H. P. Lovecraft, 1991). In Poeʼs work, the
characters also suffer alone, in loneliness and isolation. (Serafin and Bendixen, 1034) In
“The Picture in the House,” it seems as if the narrator entered another world; that is
something often happening in Lovecraftʼs tales. Such a world is “claustrophobic […].
You enter into Lovecraftʼs world, as if walking through a small doorway with a great
stone door.” (Hay, 20) In “The Picture in the House” as well as in some others (“In the
Vault,” “The Pickmanʼs Model” or “The Outsider” etc.), the enclosure is oppressive,
confining and small and the characters long for the freedom. (Schweitzer 2001, 49) The
characters also often consequently find out that the world as we know it is only an
illusion; beneath, there is the real world, a world of raw, horrible and cruel truth.
Regarding the isolation in “The Picture in the House”, Schultz and Joshi point
out that the setting (the old house) is not isolated externally so much – only slightly off
a path. (168) Although it is not a frequent road, but rather an “abandoned road” (PH), it
is still a connection with the civilization. However, it is more important that the setting
is isolated in terms of otherness. The old cottage is a world of horror existing in our
normal, ordinary world, something strange and damnable existing inside the familiar.
(Schultz and Joshi, 168) Lovecraft explained that “at a laughably short distance from the
great industrial centers […] – amid smiling civilization - [there exists] an abominable
region where evils are practiced.” (Lovecraft in Schultz and Joshi, 168)
Lovecraftʼs stories belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos are not set on a strange
planet, nor do they take place in the distant future (Lovecraft occasionally used
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something that could be called mental time travelling in his tales, but it concerns ages
before the human race even existed). In fact, by adding the Great Old Ones, he
incorporated a certain ancient feature into his tales. By using our own planet as the
setting, the nature of fear also shifts. In stories in which the heroes travel to a distant
planet where they meet strange creatures and are threatened in several ways, the source
of fear is the remote planet – in Lovecraftʼs stories, however, the Earth is threatened by
the Great Old Ones or Cthulhu; if they returned to the Earth, its inhabitants would be
endangered. By bringing the source of fear right here, Lovecraft managed to make the
boundary between fiction and reality somehow thinner.
Not only was Lovecraft capable of bringing the feeling of fear closer to the
reader by placing it on Earth. Furthermore, Lincoln Child speaks about Lovecraftʼs
technique which Child perceives to be highly effective; according to him, Lovecraft
mastered a method of working with supernatural material under the guise of an
empirical (scientific) approach. He adds that this way of writing makes the stories much
more terrifying for the readers. (273) In Discovering H. P. Lovecraft, Schweitzer speaks
about Lovecraftʼs way of writing as about “scientific realism.” (2001, 11) Again, by this
method, fear is brought somehow closer to the audience because the scientific element
makes the story more real, more convincing.
The setting of Lovecraftʼs tales belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos often includes
old houses in towns such as Arkham, Innsmouth or Dunwich (Hay, 20); these towns are
usually described far from being modern; they are old, full of mysteries and urban
legends. For instance, in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” Arkham is depicted as
“changeless, legend-haunted city” with “clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag
over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in the dark, olden days of the
Province.” (Lovecraft, 654) Such a scene is much closer to the gothic setting than to the
sci-fi setting; sometimes, such as in “The Cool Air” or “The Case of Charles Dexter
Ward,” there is an old house hiding a laboratory, a place suitable for peculiar
experiments from the field of magic or science (or from the field containing the
elements of both at the same time). A similar mixture of sci-fi and gothic elements can
be found in Poeʼs “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” or “Narrative of A. Gordon
Pym,” the latter being sometimes classified as a mixture of gothic and early science
fiction. (Kopley, 259)
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The elements of the sci-fi setting are represented mainly by the towns built by
the Great Old Ones. These cities are bizarrely disproportionate. In “The Call of
Cthulhu,” the characters express their impressions when seeing such a city: “He said
that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and
loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.” (Lovecraft and
Derleth, 155) And later in the same tale, the reader can find the following statement: “
Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas
of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by
an angle of masonry which shouldnʼt have been there; an angle which was
acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. (Lovecraft and Derleth, 157)
In short, the geometry of these cities is “all wrong” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 148) and
even the Sun
seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from
this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly
in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed
concavity after the first shewed convexity.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 155)
The expression “sea-soaked perversion” shows the idea of perversity in Lovecraftʼs
literary world. For him, the unknown, foreign, not belonging to our world (or, at least,
to the world as we know it) is twisted and perverse – such as the architecture of the
cities built by the Old Ones. This may be connected with Lovecraftʼs lifelong, deep
racism. (Tyson, 6) In some of his stories (such as “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”), the
racist overtone cannot be overlooked. (Joshi 2001, 305) He was, nevertheless, aware of
Poeʼs idea of perversity as well; in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” the narrator claims:
“It must have been some imp of the perverse […] which made me change my plans as I
did.” (Lovecraft and Derleth, 330)
Poe and Lovecraft used the description of the setting not only to make the
readers familiar with the place in which the story takes place; in their works, the setting
(either as a tool for developing the mysterious atmosphere or as a deeper symbol) is
often interconnected with the charactersʼs state of mind and contributes to their fear.
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5. Integrity and Fragmentation
When speaking about the relationship of Poe and Lovecraft, one feature of their work
cannot be omitted. There is a difference in their works in terms of integrity and
fragmentation - Poeʼs work seems to be more fragmented because it consists of many
not related stories; in contrast, in Lovecraftʼs case it is more difficult. His tales out of
the Cthulhu Mythos are as fragmented as Poeʼs; the Cthulhu Mythos, on the other hand,
consists of the stories mutually interconnected via the theme. Whereas the stories from
the first group are scattered (as in Poeʼs case), the tales from the second group form a
mosaic of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Poeʼs stories are not so much mutually connected, but sometimes there seem to
be certain similarities. This is caused by the fact that he used for instance the theme of
lunacy and in various stories, he looked at it from various points of view; sometimes,
these points of view are very similar, such as in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black
Cat;” in both stories, there are insane narrators and their madness correlates in some
aspects and differs in others. But despite these similar points, the common denominator
– a mutual source of fear such as the Old Ones or Cthulhu in Lovecraftʼs work – is
missing in Poeʼs case, which makes his tales far less united than those belonging to
Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos.
Concerning this issue, it is sometimes said that thanks to the Cthlulhu Mythos,
Lovecraftʼs work (or, at least, this part of his work) gains a unity and depth that Poe
lacks. (Lévy, 117 – 118) On the other hand, this is also where a certain weak point of
the Cthulhu Mythos lies, because it is also true that there is little room for development;
simply, all these tales engage in more or less the same topic. When Lovecraft was forty,
he “had played every variation in his theme; he had mined the vein until there was
nothing left.” (Hay, 20) This also makes the tales more predictable; after reading some
of them, the readers become familiar with the style and they are able to foresee what
will probably happen. For example, the initial statements in which the narrators often
doubt the credibility of their experience lose their persuasive power very quickly; the
reader soon reads them with tongue-in-cheek, knowing that they have read a similar
declaration and it turned out to be false since beyond any doubt, everything the narrator
described had really happened to him. The source of fear is restricted to the Great Old
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Ones or Cthulhu, which, again, does not contribute to a surprising turn of the plot. On
the other hand, it is this unity that that elevates the tales above mere stories and makes
them something more, not a collection of stories, but a whole mythos.
6. Conclusion
Regarding the sources of fear in Lovecraftʼs and Poeʼs work, it is suitable to divide
Lovecraftʼs tales into two groups: the stories not belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos and
the tales creating the Mythos.
To compare Poeʼs horror stories and Lovecraftʼs tales out of the Cthulhu
Mythos, the analysis revealed that both authors engaged in the nature of fear, but they
used different stimuli to arouse fear in their characters.
In the analyzed Poeʼs stories, there seems to be the tendency to emphasize the
importance of the charactersʼ psychology, especially in the case of brutal murderers in
“The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Black Cat” in which the mental state of the narrators in
fact causes their fear, although they either do not realize they are mad (the narrator of
“The Tell-Tale Heart”) or they tend to ascribe the causes of all horrors to ordinary
objects in which they see something supernatural and evil – the old manʼs eye becomes
the Evil Eye and a black cat might be a witch in disguise. Another example of obsessive
behavior connected with fear is the case of the narrator of “The Premature Burial,”
whose paranoid worries of being buried alive are supported by the stories he collects
(the stories of people who have undergone such a situation) to justify the natural – but,
in his case, unnaturally strong - fear from being buried prematurely. A purely internal
cause of fear is also present in “Berenice” in which the narrator Egaeus is haunted by
his mental disease that leads to his obsession with Bereniceʼs teeth; no sooner can he
find the relief than he pulls the teeth out of her – allegedly dead - mouth. In William
Wilson, the narrator believes he is haunted by the character of that name; however, it is
revealed that William Wilson only exists in his mind. In these tales, the sources of fear
are primarily internal, which means originating in the charactersʼ insane brains.
It is slightly more complicated in “The Masque of the Red Death” in which the
prince and his guests are so afraid of death that their worst worries either materialize or
call in an actual figure (and the red death visits their masquerade to kill them all) or
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create a group hallucination (in that case, the phantom figure is only an illusion). In this
case, the sources of fear are also internal, but, according to the theory claiming that the
phantom figure is not a mere hallucination, the interpretation is that the source of fear is
external (which means the presence of another character – in this case, the figure of the
red death - causing the fear).
On the other hand, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” presents the
narratorʼs external source of fear – a dreadful result of his experiment engaging in what
happens to a human being after death.
In Lovecraftʼs stories, the proportion is quite different; in his case, the external
sources of fear seem to prevail. The most internally oriented source of fear is probably
presented in “The Hypnos,” but, as in “The Masque of the Red Death,” it can also be of
external nature in dependence of the analysis of the story. If everything the narrator
describes is a mere symptom of lunacy, than the source of fear is internal (originating in
his mind). However, if his soul is actually capable of detaching from the body, then it is
at a certain moment endangered by something foreign (and this unknown source of fear
would be external). Another story that incline more to the internally oriented source of
fear is “The Outsider,” but again, even in this tale, an external source of fear is present:
before the character finds out what has scared the other people, he is also afraid of being
attacked by an unknown monster; when he reveals that he is the monster, the external
source of fear transforms into the internal one.
The protagonist of “The Cool Air” is afraid of a cool draught because for him, it
is associated with a horrific experience. The primary source of fear – the experiments of
doctor Muñez – is external. As a result, the narrator develops a phobia he feels when he
is exposed to the draught of cool air.
Another story not belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos is “The Rats in the Walls”
where the source of the fear is also external; the protagonist further works
unconsciously with the source of fear in that way that he tries to explain it as something
quite natural rather than to consider the possibility of something supernatural being the
source of strange sounds. The very similar procedure is used by the characters in “The
Beast in the Cave” and in “In the Vault.”
Regarding Lovecraftʼs Cthulhu Mythos, the source of fear is of external nature –
the characters are exposed to a terrible experience when they find out the terrible truth
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about what is hiding in the distant universe or deep under the sea and pose a serious
threat to the human race; their horror is caused mainly by the Great Old Ones or the
great priest Cthulhu.
The first chapter “Sources of Fear” shows that generally speaking, there seems
to be a stronger tendency to engage in the internal sources of fear in Poeʼs tales than in
Lovecraftʼs stories.
This is connected with insanity, which is the topic of the following chapter
called “Lunacy.” Madness is something both authors used in their works, but they
approached it in a different way.
In many of Poeʼs stories, certain prominence seems to be given to the feelings of
the characters in comparison to the characters in stories written by Lovecraft. The
narrators of Poeʼs tales are often anything but ordinary; they are usually driven by their
emotions rather than by rational thinking. Unfortunately, the emotions are not noble in
many cases, but murderous (as in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “Black Cat”) or they lead
to the narratorʼs self-destruction (“The Imp of the Perverse”) or disfigurement of a body
that is assumed to be dead (“Berenice”). In Poeʼs artistic portrayal of lunacy, the
depiction of Usherʼs mental state and the depiction of the setting seem to blend together
in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which, again, proves that in his tales, emotions are
of central importance.
The mental state of the character is significant in Lovecfartʼs work, too.
However, Lovecraft does not primarily deal with it, he uses it to make the story more
real, to show via the charactersʼ emotions how dreadful the depicted horror is. In “The
Picture in the House,” the lunatic brutality of the old man is a mean to survive; here,
Lovecraft does not concentrate on the manʼs emotions when murdering somebody, but
on the hideous nature of such an act and on the perverted result of it (unnaturally long
life). It is similar in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” in which Joseph Curwen
reaches a similar goal through replacing his descendantʼs mind with his own. Moreover,
it is questionable whether Wardʼs interest in his ancestor is still strong curiosity or if it
should be rather labeled as mad obsession. Finally, there is another dimension of lunacy
in the story – the perception of the public. The public quite certainly assume that Ward
is a lunatic and he is placed in the mental asylum; the public do not know that he is not
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insane in such an “ordinary” way; the background of his mental state is far more
obscure and mad that anyone would expect.
However, there is a more frequent way in which the issue of insanity is treated in
Lovecraftʼs work. In his conception, lunacy or the state of mental tension bordering on
lunacy is usually not a cause of the central theme of the story (such as a murder), but
rather, such mental processes emerge as a result of a shocking experience the character
has undergone. For instance, Lovecraft used insanity as a result of a horrific experience
in his Cthulhu Mythos quite often. In many stories belonging to the Mythos, the
protagonists (usually the narrators) find out the truth about an ancient race of the Old
Ones or about the great Cthulhu and this knowledge results in a peculiar state of mind in
which the characters are unable to say whether he are sane or insane; sometimes, they
(at least at the subconscious level) feel that what they have experienced was real, but
such an eventuality is so horrible that they rather try to persuade themselves to accept
that they have gone mad. Whereas some of Poeʼs characters are actually mad, some of
Lovecraftʼs characters wish to be insane because it would mean they do not have to deal
with the horrible facts they have come across.
The setting also plays an important part in the works of both authors. In stories
by Poe, a gothic setting does not only help to depict the atmosphere, but it has also
a symbolic function. The example is the story “The Masque of the Red Death” in which
the description of the seven rooms of the castle is symbolic, representing seven ages of
man or other meanings, or “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which the house is
connected with the Usher Family much deeper than merely as a place where the
members of the family live.
Lovecraftʼs tales using a gothic setting usually serve as a guardian of an old
secret or forgotten knowledge of secret doctrine, but they are much less symbolic than
in Poeʼs case and serve more to evoke gloomy and mysterious atmosphere, in other
words – they create a suitable set for the characters to move in.
Even Lovecraftʼs tales of the Cthulhu Mythos often take place in old towns and
houses, thus being close to the gothic setting; the most significant element of a sci-fi
setting in the Cthulhu Mythos are the cities built by the Old Ones, with their peculiar
architecture and geometry that is “all wrong,” twisted and perverse to the human eye; in
Lovecraftʼs world, “perverse” means “foreign, twisted, of unknown origin,” whereas in
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Poeʼs stories, “perverse” refers to a weird state of human mind often leading to a selfdestructive tendencies of the character.
Last but not least, Lovecraftʼs and Poeʼs tales were compared in terms of
integrity or fragmentation, which is connected with the sources of fear. Thanks to the
fact that many stories by Lovecraft create a whole known as the Cthulhu Mythos, his
work seems to be more integral than Poeʼs. On the other hand, it limited the author
because stories dealing with the same issue are logically restricted in the scope of the
theme and also more likely to be predictable. For example, the source of fear in these
stories is exclusively the Great Old Ones or Cthulhu. Poeʼs stories often engage in
lunacy, but from more diverse points of view; there is no other significant common
denominator (for instance some characters appearing in more stories, such as the Old
Ones in Lovecraftʼs case) in his tales.
In his stories not belonging to the Cthulhu Mythos, Lovecraft seems to be
inspired by Poe more than in the tales of the Mythos; some of the stories, such as “The
Cool Air” or “The Rats in the Walls” are assumed direct descendants of Poeʼs “The
Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” by some
scholars. Regarding the Cthulhu Mythos, the inspiration of Poe seems to be less
obvious. There are, however, at least some remnants of it. In the Mythos, Lovecraft also
used certain elements as Poe, such as the gothic setting, lunacy of the characters or the
issue of perversity, but he treated them in his own way. This is because in the Mythos,
the central interest is aimed at the Great Old Ones or Cthulhu and the setting, madness
or perversity (perversity as something twisted, unnatural to the eyes of a human being,
not as a peculiar state of mind as in Poeʼs work) withdraw to a certain degree, being
used not as the main point of the narration but as an important tool emphasizing the
overall atmosphere of the story. In other words, the influence, although not as powerful
as in some stories out of the Mythos, is still apparent – in these tales, Lovecraft
evidently loosened the bonds tying him with Poe, finding his own way of writing, but he
did not get rid of them completely.
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Resumé
Jména Edgar Allan Poe a Howard Phillips Lovecraft mají své nezastupitelné místo v
Americké literatuře, konkrétně pak v žánrech gotické a sci-fi literatury kombinovaných
s hororovými prvky. Ačkoli tyto žánry bývají někdy literární kritikou opomíjeny jako
druhořadé, u čtenářů si získaly značnou oblibu, neboť emoce, které vyvolávají (tedy
především strach), jsou každému člověku blízké a působí pro čtenáře přitažlivě.
Lovecraft, především ve své rané tvorbě, demonstruje jasně vliv spisovatele,
jehož styl obdivoval; tímto spisovatelem nebyl nikdo jiný než právě Poe. Lovecraft je
však známý především pro svůj Mýtus Cthulhu, který podle kritiků již Poevým stylem
psaní ovlivněn nebyl, nebo alespoň ne tak výrazně.
Tato práce si vytyčila za úkol prozkoumat, jak oba autoři ve svých dílech
nakládali s vyobrazením strachu, jenž je v jejich příbězích propojen většinou
s šílenstvím a vhodnou volbou prostředí, přičemž se nabízela otázka, zda by se právě
skrze tato pojetí strachu nedala i mezi Lovecraftovými příběhy z Mýtu Cthulhu najít
určitá tematická pojítka s Poeovými povídkami.
Každý strach je něčím vyvolán, tj. má svůj zdroj, a tyto zdroje by se daly označit
jako vnější (kdy strach vyvolává další osoba či jiný předmět či jev nespojený nijak
s ústřední postavou), nebo vnitřní (kdy strach je vyvolán např. duševní poruchou, tedy
zdroj se nachází přímo v samotném protagonistovi příběhu).
Jak Poe, tak Lovecraft používali pro vyvolání strachu u svých hrdinů vnější i
vnitřní spouštěče, ovšem zdá se, že Poe inklinoval k hojnějšímu využívání vnitřních
zdrojů strachu, zatímco v Lovecraftově případě tomu bylo naopak (zvláště v příbězích
z Mýtu Cthulhu, kde zdrojem strachu jsou bytosti z jiných dimenzí). V některých
povídkách záleží interpretace zdroje strachu na úhlu pohledu; z Lovecraftových
jmenujme třeba „Hypnos“ a z Poeových „The Masque of the Red Death.“
Fakt, že Poeovy příběhy se týkají často vnitřních zdrojů strachu, kdežto u
Lovecrafta jsou výrazněny zastoupeny zdroje vnější, je dán i tím, že zatímco Poe se
zaměřoval ve svých povídkách často na postavy šílené či jinak vyšinuté a šlo mu
primárně o to zasvětit čtenáře detailně do duševních pochodů takového protagonisty,
Lovecraft se soustřeďoval na vnější okolnosti a jejich šokující dopad na postavy
popisoval spíše pro dokreslení děje.
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Podobným způsobem oba autoři nakládali i s problematikou šílenství, které je
významným tématem jejich prací. Oba zjevně považovali duševní stav svých postav za
pevně spjatý s hrůzou, které postavy prožívají, ovšem každý s danou látkou nakládal po
svém – Poe se zajímal především o to, co postava kvůli svému šílenství činí, zatímco
Lovecraft naopak ukazoval, jak postava ke svému danému stavu mysli dospěla. Poe tak
často ve svých povídkách zobrazoval i sadistické vrahy; typickým příkladem jsou
protagonisté z povídek „The Black Cat“ nebo „The Tell-Tale Heart.“
V Lovecraftově práci je těžší tento typ postavy nalézt, a i když se v ní i taková
postavy najít dá (jmenovitě v povídce „The Picture in the House“), nejedná se o
vypravěče; tím se právě opět zdroj strachu přesouvá (pro vypravěče) do roviny vnější.
Poe však často prostřednictvím úst protagonisty vypráví příběh duševně nemocného
člověka, díky čemuž taková povídka připomíná zpověď vraha.
V případě Lovecraftových postav z Mýtu Cthulhu se navíc často jedná spíš o
nepříčetnost představovanou; hrdina si není jist, zda to, co prožil, se stalo skutečně,
nebo pouze v jeho představách; tuší však, že přiznat si pravdu by bylo ve výsledku
mnohem obtížnější než přesvědčit sám sebe, že je šílený.
Podobný tvůrčí postup je možno vidět i v Poeově a Lovecraftově využití
prostředí, v němž se děj jejich povídek odehrává. Poe mnohdy zasazoval děj svých
povídek do prostředí typického pro gotickou literaturu, které ovšem ne vždy hrálo pouze
roli kulis; někdy mělo takové prostředí i hlubší, symbolický význam. To je patrné
například v „The Fall of the House of Usher,“ v níž se dají podle kritiků najít například
paralely mezi domem a jeho obyvatelem, Roderickem Usherem. Rovněž v „The
Masque of the Red Death“ není náhoda, že Poe popsal pokoje Prosperova útočiště
zrovna tím způsobem, jaký použil; názory kritiků na význam sedmi pokojů v povídce se
různí.
Lovecraftovým příběhem nepatřícím do Mýtu Cthulhu je například „The Rats in
the Walls.“ Tato povídka je považována za ukázku Poeova vlivu; konkrétně se dle
některých odborníků jedná o vliv právě Poeovy povídky „The Fall of the House of
Usher.“ Ovšem Lovecraft v ní prostředí nepopisuje kvůli tak hlubokému symbolickému
významu, spíše se zdá, že mu šlo primárně o vytvoření ponuré atmosféry. V této
povídce starobylé sídlo hraje jakousi role strážce tajemství, avšak spojitost s duševním
stavem vypravěče se zde dá nalézt jen do té míry, že je to právě dům, který se pro něho
67
stane místem všech hrůz a vyvolá v něm postupně rostoucí děs. Podobná role prostředí
– tedy místa s ponurou atmosférou, které vzbuzuje strach – se objevuje i v dalších
povídkách mimo Lovecraftův Mýtus Cthulhu.
V Lovecraftových povídkách nepatřících do Mýtu Cthulhu je popisováno
podobné prostředí, schází ovšem hluboký symbolický rozměr. Rovněž v Mýtu Cthulhu
se čtenář setkává spíše s gotickými kulisami (děj se většinou odehrává v městech jako
Arkham, tzn. ve starém městečku pocházejícího z dob koloniálních, kde minulost je
přítomna na každém kroku).
Co se týče prostředí vědeckofantastického, jsou v Lovecraftově Mýtu Cthulhu
významná především místa těsně spojená s tzv. rasou Prastarých, tedy především města
jimi vybudovaná, která (oproti lidským sídlům) vykazují pokřivenou, takřka
neuvěřitelnou architekturu a jejichž popis může ve čtenáři vyvolávat pocit, že se ocitl
v jiné dimenzi.
Právě v těchto pasážích Lovecraft odkazuje k stavbám slovem „perverzní“, což
je další prvek, jenž se objevuje i v povídkách, které napsal Poe. V nich (jmenovitě
například v „The Imp of the Perverse“ nebo v „Black Cat“) je však „perverzní“ spojeno
opět s duševními stavy, tedy se samotnou postavou, kdežto u Lovecrafta je
„perverzním“ to, co je cizí, pocházející nikoli od člověka, ale od rasy bytostí zvané
Prastaří. Nicméně fakt, že Lovecraft si byl dobře vědom Poeova chápání výrazu
„perverzní“ dokazuje třeba to, že v povídce „The Shadow Over Innsmouth“ se ústy
vypravěče odkazuje na Poeovu koncepci tohoto slova.
Právě stavitelé architektonicky podivuhodných měst, Prastaří, a jim podobné
bytosti (velekněz Cthulhu) jsou ústředním tématem Lovecraftova Mýtu Cthulhu. Díky
faktu, že množství příběhů od Lovecrafta spadá do Mýtu Cthulhu, je jeho práce
poněkud celistvější než v případě Poea. Tato celistvost zároveň přispívá k tomu, že je
do jisté míry omezena tematická různorodost; takové povídky a novely se zkrátka
zabývají stále jedním a tím samým tématem, nazíraným z různých, více či méně
podobných, úhlů.
V mnoha případech se dá rovněž odhadnout, jak se bude příběh odvíjet: úvodem
vypravěč (méně často někdo jiný, protože většinou je použita Ich-forma) zpochybní
svou vlastní příčetnost. Zatímco postava sama o svém duševním zdraví pochybuje,
čtenář si lehce domyslí, že přes fantaskní povahu toho, co bude následovat, se vypravěč
68
opravdu potýkal se silami, jejichž existenci odmítá připustit. Dalším bodem je potom
vylíčení událostí, jež protagonistu přivedly na pokraj šílenství.
Ovšem je třeba zároveň přiznat, že na druhou stranu je to právě tato ucelenost,
jež vytváří monumentálnost celého Mýtu Cthulhu, pro nějž je Lovecraft známý
především.
Odpovědět na otázku, zda Lovecraft byl, či nebyl Poeovým pokračovatelem,
není až tak složité: zvláště v jeho raných povídkách je více než patrné, že Poem
ovlivněn byl.
Pokusit se zodpovědět, zda se tento vliv již neobjevuje i v Mýtu Cthulhu, nebo
do jaké míry ano, je již komplikovanější. Pomineme-li stylistické prvky, dá se říci, že
v tematické rovině stále jistá podobnost zůstává – Lovecraft se, stejně jako Poe, zaobírá
i v Mýtu Cthulhu do jisté míry duševními stavy svých postav; příběh navíc zasazuje do
prostředí, které spíše než vědeckofantastické romány připomíná Poeovy povídky.
Ovšem tato témata, která jsou u Poea často v centru celého příběhu, Lovecraft umisťuje
spíše na okraj, pro dokreslení atmosféry.
Závěrem je tedy možné říci, že i v Mýtu Cthulhu byl Lovecraft stále Poem
ovlivněn, a to v tematické rovině. Tento vliv je však již o mnoho slabší než v některých
jeho raných povídkách; rozvíjení Mýtu Cthulhu jakožto ústředního tématu způsobilo, že
Lovecraft se odklonil od prvků, které Poea zajímaly primárně, a odsunul je na okraj.
Tím se tato témata nechovají již jako přímo centrální či alespoň značně důležitý prvek
vyprávění (jako je tomu často u Poea), ale spíše doplňují a dokreslují děj.
V pracích Poea i Lovecrafta tedy strach postav vychází z určitých zdrojů a je
propojen s šílenstvím a prostředím, v němž se tyto postavy pohybují, ale u Lovecrafta se
jedná o propojení volnější.
69
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