| “ | I can the better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was | „ | |
| ~ H.P. Lovecraft , Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft 5.920 |
One of the most controversial aspects of Lovecraft's works is the author's inclusion of racist ideas and themes, which "does not endear Lovecraft to the modern reader," and comes across through many disparaging remarks against the various non-Anglo-Saxon races and cultures within his work.
As he grew older, the more "jagged" aspects of his original Anglo-Saxon racial worldview softened into a universal classicism or elitism, regarding any fellow human being of self-ennobled high culture as of metaphorical "superior race." Lovecraft did not from the start even hold all white people in uniform high regard, but rather he held Anglo-Nordic people, and especially persons of English descent, above all others. While his racist perspective is undeniable, many critics argue this does not detract from his ability to create compelling philosophical worlds which have inspired many artists and readers.
In his early published essays, private letters and personal utterances, he argued for a strong color line, for the purpose of preserving race and culture. These arguments occurred through direct statements against different races in his journalistic work and personal correspondence, or perhaps allegorically in his work using non-human races. Some have interpreted his racial attitude as being more cultural than brutally biological: Lovecraft showed sympathy to others who pacifically assimilated into Western culture, to the extent of even marrying a Jewish woman whom he viewed as "well-assimilated."
While Lovecraft's racial attitude has been seen as directly influenced by the time, a reflection of the New England society he grew up in, his racism appeared stronger than the popular viewpoints held at that time. Some researchers also note that his views failed to change in the face of increased social change of that time. It is noted that in his last year, Lovecraft embraced socialism and Roosevelt's New Deal, while dismissing many of his old right wing views.1
Despite the unique and interesting nature of many of Lovecraft's works, several are marred by a racist streak deeply ingrained in the author's personality. A common dramatic device in Lovecraft's work is to associate virtue, intellect, elevated class position, civilization, and rationality with white Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, which he often posed in contrast to the corrupt, intellectually inferior, uncivilized and irrational, which he associated with people he characterized as being of lower class, impure racial "stock" and/or non European ethnicity and dark skin complexion who were often the villains in his writings.
Some of his most hostile racist views can be found in his poetry, particularly in "On the Creation of *******," and "New England Fallen" (both 1912). Lovecraft once took this to an extreme, explicitly characterizing black people as sub-human:
| “ | When, long ago, the gods created Earth; In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were designed; Yet were too remote from humankind. To fill the gap, and join the rest of Man, Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan. A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure, Filled it with vice, and called the thing a ******. |
„ | |
| ~ HPL , "On the Creation of *******" |
In "The Call of Cthulhu" he writes of a captured group of "mongrel" worshippers of Cthulhu:
| “ | the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with suprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith. | „ |
The majority of the horror in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is the mixing of races and cultures in an old New England Town. The residents of Innsmouth not only worship the Deep One gods of Dagon and Mother Hydra but intermarry with the creatures, resulting in hybrids whose features are frequently described as repulsive and seem to have no personal interests beyond swimming and drinking bootleg liquor. The elderly Zadok Allen, a remnant from before the Deep Ones completely took over the town, seems more horrified by the concept of interbreeding than by his neighbors' habit of human sacrifices. The people outside of Innsmouth think this is the result of interracial matches and that the mysterious Innsmouth religion is also the result of mixing the beliefs of foreigners with Christianity but feel this is enough reason to hate them. The town itself is destitute and rotting, as though the hybrids have no desire to fight the decay of their home. The Elder Sign, which is used by islander to protect themselves from the Deep Ones, is described as looking like a Swastika.
Lovecraft also expressed racist and ethnocentric beliefs in his personal correspondence.[6]
| “ | For evolved man -- the apex of organic progress on the Earth -- what branch of reflection is more fitting than that which occupies only his higher and exclusively human faculties? The primal savage or ape merely looks about his native forest to find a mate; the exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity!!!! | „ | |
| ~ HPL , Selected Letters 1.61 |
In "Herbert West--Reanimator," Lovecraft gives an account of a newly deceased black male. He asserts:
| “ | He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life - but the world holds many ugly things. | „ | |
| ~ HPL , "Herbert West--Reanimator" |
In "The Horror at Red Hook", one character is described as "an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth". In "Medusa's Coil," ghostwritten by Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop, the story's final surprise--after the revelation that the story's villain is a vampiric medusa--is that she:
| “ | was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers.... [T]hough in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress. | „ |
In "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," there is a somewhat more patronizing description of an African - New English couple: "The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah." In contrast to their apparently alien landlord: "a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent".
In the short story "The Rats in the Walls," one of the narrator/protagonist's nine cats has a name with negative racial connotations:
| “ | As I have said, I moved in on July 16, 1923. My household consisted of seven servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest cat, "N*****-Man," was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts ... | „ |
The narrators in "The Street", "Herbert West: Reanimator", "He", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Horror at Red Hook", and many other tales express sentiments which could be considered hostile towards Jews. Lovecraft married a woman of Ukrainian Jewish ancestry, Sonia Greene, who later said she had to repeatedly remind Lovecraft of her background when he made anti-Semitic remarks. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," Greene wrote after her divorce from Lovecraft, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind."[11]
To some extent, Lovecraft's ideas regarding race reflect attitudes common in his era; racial segregation laws were enforced throughout much of the United States, and many states had enacted eugenics laws and prohibitions against "miscegenation" which were also common in non-Roman Catholic areas of Europe. A popular movement during the 1920s succeeded in drastically restricting immigration to the United States, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924, which featured expert testimony to the United States Congress on the threat to American society from the assimilation of more "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.
Lovecraft was an avowed Anglophile, and held English culture to be the comparative pinnacle of civilization, with the descendants of the English in America as something of a second-class offshoot, and everyone else below them (see, for example, his poem "An American to Mother England"). His love for English history and culture is often repeated in his work (such as King Kuranes' nostalgia for England in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath").
Lovecraft's ideas about eugenics often extended to his white characters. He showed greater sympathy for white and culturally European groups. The narrator of "Cool Air" speaks disparagingly of the poor Hispanics of his neighborhood, but respects the wealthy and aristocratic Spaniard Dr. Muñoz, for his "Celtiberian" origins, and because he is "a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination." The degenerate descendants of Dutch immigrants in the Catskill Mountains, "who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South" ("Beyond the Wall of Sleep", 1919), are common targets. In "The Temple," Lovecraft's narrator is a highly unsympathetic figure: a World War I U-boat captain whose faith in his "iron German will" and the superiority of the Fatherland lead him to machine-gun survivors in lifeboats and, later, kill his own crew, while blinding him to the curse he has brought upon himself. However, according to Lovecraft: A Biography, by L. Sprague de Camp, Lovecraft was horrified by reports of anti-Semitic violence in Germany (prior to World War II, which Lovecraft did not live to see), suggesting that Lovecraft was opposed to violent extermination of those he regarded as "inferiors".
Lovecraft's racism has been a continued focus of scholarly and interpretive interest. S. T. Joshi, one of the foremost Lovecraft scholars, notes that "There is no denying the reality of Lovecraft's racism, nor can it merely be passed off as 'typical of his time,' for it appears that Lovecraft expressed his views more pronouncedly (although usually not for publication) than many others of his era. It is also foolish to deny that racism enters into his fiction."[3] In his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq argues that "racial hatred" provided the emotional force and inspiration for much of Lovecraft's greatest works.
Lovecraft racist antagonism is a corollary of his nihilistic notion of biological determinism: "At the Mountains of Madness", in which explorers discover evidence of a completely alien race (the Elder Things) who created human beings through bioengineering but who were eventually destroyed by their brutish shoggoth slaves. Even after several members of the party are killed by revived Elder Things, Lovecraft's narrator expresses sympathy for them: "They were the men of another age and another order of being... what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible... Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!"
These lines of thought in Lovecraft's worldview -- racism and romantic reactionary defense of cultural order in the face of the degenerative modern world -- have led some scholars to see a special affinity to the aristocratic, anti-modernism of Traditionalist Julius Evola:
| “ | Certainly "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" with its grandiose portrayal of the onyx city respires the cool and elegant spirit of Tradition, arraigned against which in several stories is the sink of decadence, Innsmouth, an inbred population made up of the offspring of lustful mariners and sea monsters, the negative force of counter-Tradition. The eternal struggle between the Uranian power of light and the telluric forces of chaos is reflected in Lovecraft's work | „ |
Some have interpreted Lovecraft's racial attitude as being more cultural than brutally biological: Lovecraft showed sympathy to others who were pacifically assimilated into Western culture, to the extent of even marrying a Jewish woman whom he viewed as "well assimilated".
H. P. Lovecraft was also homophobic, considering homosexuality to be unnatural and repulsive. (HPL: Selected Letters of H.P. Lovecraft 4.639)