H. P. Lovecraft's monsters of modernity read through J. J. Cohen's 'Seven Monster Theses'

Abstract

This dissertation offers a unified application of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s ‘Seven Monster Theses’ (first introduced in Cohen’s 1996 Monster Theory: Reading Culture), and Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926) to a reading of three stories from Lovecraft’s fiction: At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. The study’s purpose is to determine what influence major events and fears of early twentieth century American society might have on the construction and representation of Lovecraft’s monsters. The study finds that Lovecraft’s monsters are in part influenced by religious uncertainty following the First World War, the scientific advancements of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the economic uncertainty of the American Great Depression. Lovecraft’s monsters are, moreover, representative of their writer’s own racial prejudices, as well as those of the society he lived in. However, racial attitudes were becoming debunked, and subsequently changed in the early twentieth century. The result of this is that Lovecraft’s heavily racialised monsters are often represented in a subversive fashion: as beings ultimately revealed to be superior, analogous, or highly akin to humanity itself. The study consequently suggests that Lovecraft’s subversive monsters – situated within the field of cosmic horror that Lovecraft pioneered, and therefore inherently concerned with motifs of unfathomability and anti-anthropocentrism – are representative of the immense societal unease and existential dread that pervaded twentieth century thought. Such broader fears are distilled and localised within the bodies of Lovecraft’s heavily racialised monsters. These monsters undermine and reveal racist bodies of thought as arbitrary, thereby suggesting by extension that the very worldviews thought to be cruxes of American thought in the twentieth century – laissez-faire Capitalism and Judeo-Christian thought, specifically – needed to be reinterpreted within a time and place as ideologically volatile as early twentieth century America.