old comment I know, but it seems like whoever wrote that seems unaware of the party switch in US History. Republicans were initially the more liberal party compared to the democratic party at the time. Lovecraft hated the Republican party at the time but the Republican party of his time was vastly different than the one we have now. If anything, I think if lovecraft was alive today he would be a republican.
Life is but a mask worn on the face of death
Gotta disagree there. That may have been true of Southern Democrats, who were mainly conservative on race relations. But Northern Democrats, like the ones the Rhode Island native Lovecraft were more familiar with, were normally socially liberal. So the party switch, to the extent it happened, wouldn’t really have affected Lovecraft.
Is it worth removing the Abe Books link and sentence saying the books of letters are extremely expensive? Looking at it today, you can get it for around $20, which isn't exactly breaking the bank.
Deleted the Writers Cannot Do Math entry, because aside from over-simplifying what non-Euclidean geometry actually is, it's pretty clear that when Lovecraft used the phrase "non-Euclidean" he's not talking about the mathematics of navigating on the globe, but about the at-his-time new idea that three-dimensional space as we know it is merely the surface of higher-dimensional structures, which can curve in ways that cause space to not behave the way we expect it to. You can think Lovecraft was silly for finding this idea disturbing (he found lots of things disturbing that you or I might not), but it's clear he understood the underlying subject-matter.
I do not agree that the trope of "Posthumous Narration" should be applied to "The Picture in the House."
Agreed the narrator does refer to "oblivion" when the lightning strikes the house (and how said oblivion saves him from going mad from the realization), but I always understood that to mean the oblivion of an unconscious faint.
In fact, the narrator himself makes mention of how he was "presently to open [his] eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins."
Obscurely worded yes, but as far as I can tell, the narrator was knocked unconscious by the blast of the lightning, and woke up after the house had mostly burned down.
He survived.
Edited by zachaquack1987
Pulled this for discussion. For starters, we don't use that "type X" example format; the trope intended is actually Chromosome Casting. However, I am not sure if female characters are actually that rare in Lovecraft's fiction, and whether the limitation on "characters with personality", "good characters" etc is valid. Even if, for example, Marceline and Sophonisba from "Medusa's Coil" are villainous priestesses/adherents of an ancient unspeakable cult, they're still female and it's no longer a case of "there are no women". In any case, the entry needs a better write-up that gets rid of the self-contradiction.
- Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Type 1, almost invariably.
- Made worse by the fact that the few female characters who have any personality at all are usually one of the following: a) possessed by ancient sorcerers, b) eldritch abominations in disguise or c) sinister witches in league with mentioned abominations.
- That said, Lovecraft did actually write a number of stories where the protagonist's gender isn't explicit; some notable examples being "Cool Air", "What the Moon Brings", "The Nameless City", "The Hound" (to which William H. Pugmire would later write an unofficial sequel in which the narrator is actually revealed to be a woman) and "The Music of Erich Zann". All of these stories lend themselves to alternate interpretation if one assumes the unidentified narrator to be a woman.
- Technically, many of the creatures in Lovecraft's works dodge this trope altogether, being either asexual/parthenogenetic or so alien that the notion of gender is effectively meaningless.
Pulled this for discussion. For starters, we don't use that "type X" example format; the trope intended is actually Chromosome Casting. However, I am not sure if female characters are actually that rare in Lovecraft's fiction, and whether the limitation on "characters with personality", "good characters" etc is valid. Even if, for example, Marceline and Sophonisba from "Medusa's Coil" are villainous priestesses/adherents of an ancient unspeakable cult, they're still female and it's no longer a case of "there are no women".
- Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality: Type 1, almost invariably.
- Made worse by the fact that the few female characters who have any personality at all are usually one of the following: a) possessed by ancient sorcerers, b) eldritch abominations in disguise or c) sinister witches in league with mentioned abominations.
- That said, Lovecraft did actually write a number of stories where the protagonist's gender isn't explicit; some notable examples being "Cool Air", "What the Moon Brings", "The Nameless City", "The Hound" (to which William H. Pugmire would later write an unofficial sequel in which the narrator is actually revealed to be a woman) and "The Music of Erich Zann". All of these stories lend themselves to alternate interpretation if one assumes the unidentified narrator to be a woman.
- Technically, many of the creatures in Lovecraft's works dodge this trope altogether, being either asexual/parthenogenetic or so alien that the notion of gender is effectively meaningless.
This was listed as a "subversion" under the Downer Ending entry; which should make it Happy Ending, I guess, and probably Not A Subversion. There seems to be no agreement on whether the ending of "Celephais" is good or bad. Never heard of "Poetry and the Gods".
- Subverted in some stories, though, most notably "Celephais". There is a hint of a possible Dying Dream interpretation in the story itself but in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" it is revealed that the whole thing counts, giving "Celephais" officially one of the happiest endings ever. The same goes for "Poetry and the Gods", which very strongly implies a happy ending for the whole world.
- And then it gets subverted again, since although Kuranes gets to live what should be an idyllic existence, he's forever homesick for the world of his childhood that is lost forever.
- Subverted in some stories, though, most notably "Celephais". There is a hint of a possible Dying Dream interpretation in the story itself but in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" it is revealed that the whole thing counts, giving "Celephais" officially one of the happiest endings ever. The same goes for "Poetry and the Gods", which very strongly implies a happy ending for the whole world.
Pulled this trope entry for discussion: If someone has a wife, he's not celibate.
- Celibate Hero: All of them!
- Well, a few mention having wives, but that's about it.
The listing of Black-and-Grey Morality has been challenged by one editor, producing one of those bickering wiki-conversations we all love so much. Pulled for discussion.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: There are three races Lovecraft describes who don't want to outright consume or obliterate humanity (by desire or nature): the Mi-Go, the Elder Things, and the Yithians. However:
- The Mi-Go think nothing of extracting the brains of people and putting them in containers to take them travelling around the universe to enlighten them, whether they like it or not.
- The Elder Things created humanity itself as the result of a genetic experiment and view humans as little more than specimens to examine and dissect. That said, the narrator of "At the Mountains of Madness" comes to have a deep and sympathetic respect for them, recognizing them as Not So Different from human scientists performing autopsies on unknown animals.
- And the Yithians - who seem the nicest - only care about gathering and preserving knowledge in addition to saving their own lives. They fled their own dying world by stealing the bodies of intelligent beings of Earth's distant past, swapping minds with and dooming those beings to die in their place. They also think nothing of swapping minds with other beings througout history to learn about different ages while the displaced victims live for years in alien bodies, only to return to the old lives which invariably have been ruined by the Yithians' actions. The Yithians also plan to jump to new bodies of intelligent insects to escape death, dooming those insects to die in the Yithians' old bodies. Their one saving grace is their committment to fighting the race of half-polypous creatures that invaded Earth, who would happily consume humanity and anything else alive - and even then the Yithians only fight to save their own necks.
- Frankly, Lovecraft stated that human norms and morals simply do not apply to the Universe at large, so it's more like Blue-and-Orange Morality.
Madwoman Apparent
Lovecraft wasn't a good writer. That's part of what makes his works so powerful.
Hee sounds like a confused, scared, incoherent little man who has just seen something terrifying and has no clue how to explain it. In other words, perfect for his subjects
We have WMG pages in the Literature section for both H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. Do we really need both? I copied all the Lovecraft stuff into the CM page so why don't we just link to that one and delete the WMG "H.P. Lovecraft"?
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Not everything he wrote is part of the Cthulhu Mythos so i think it makes sense to have both.
Really no reason to hold back so much in the discussion of HPL's racism: he was viciously racist even for his time. There is virtually not a single work of his that doesn't appeal to racism in one way or another.
Joshi's discussion of HPL's racism is clarifying, as is Houellebecq's.
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You obviously havent read all of his stuff then. while some of it had rascist undertones very few of his stories has a message beyond youre not as important as you thought.
Edited by theclam5678
A central message, no, but people who weren't white, male Caucasians (women just didn't show up much) were pretty much universally treated with cringe-inducing disgust and disdain whenever they showed up. Even when they didn't, Lovecraft's work tended to have clear racist overtones - see the appeal against miscegnation in The Shadow Over Insmouth, for instance.
This is a man, let us remember, who named his cat Nigger-Man and had panic attacks when in mixed-race crowds.
What's precedent ever done for us?
Im willing to give alot of slack because i never lived in the twenties and thus dont know the standards
He also really liked cats so that was probably a compliment in his eyes
Erm, you've got to keep in mind that he lived in a time when being a member of the Ku-Klux-Klan was perfectly acceptable to most white people.
Seriously, why do people gleefully ignore historical context and like to put the "racism" stamp on people who lived at times when their ideas were not only accepted, but sometimes seem even downright progressive compared to the general attitude. Heck, at least HE was opposed to violence against other races.
Oh, and that's without mentioning the fact that he eventually changed his mind and publicly criticized his own former views. Like Gandhi said, don't judge a man by the number of times he falls but by the number of times he can get back up. So yes, he WAS very racist, but please, don't insult your intelligence and ours by acting that's all he ever was.
Nice (possibly) accidental effect: when you come to this page from the Eldritch Abomination article by clickin on the image there, Lovecraft's photo takes place of the Abomination.
Question about Lovecraft's quote about the Republican party. The addendum says that he moderated his political views later in life and "endorsed FDR for President" Is the last bit supposed to be evidence of his moderation? If so, is the OP aware that Franklin Roosevelt was a Democrat? It would have been perfectly consistent with Lovecraft's anti-Republican views for him to endorse FDR, so it doesn't really serve as proof that he softened his view of the GOP.
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