Excellently put, this part in particular I liked, and a very thorough and interesting post. You also encouraged me to read some poems of HPL's that I hadn't previously read. It's obvious that Lovecraft did make some highly racist comments and clearly held ideas based on 18th-19th century pseudoscience and was a unrestrained anglophile. On the other hand I'd say that some of his resistance to changing these ideas were thoroughly engrained and added to by a seemingly anti-modernist approach to the world. From the way in which I read his works it seems to me more an artistic device in his stories rather than a particular attempt to introduce racial overtones (though of course it's an interesting question as to how much it shadows and affects his choices in this regard, the ideas of eugenics clearly hold interest for him and he explores them).
Yes, that's a point that I don't often see raised, but Lovecraft did have a strong belief in eugenics -- and that was very common in his day, even among the well-educated, a lot of the scientific community, etc. That one could make for some interesting articles on his work and thought.
As you noted miscegenation is often at least a minor or background theme (and in the case you mentioned a rather larger part is given) but I'd also say that he seems to look at it more from the point of effective horror writing than from a persuasive or polemnical one. He seems to me to be more trying to evoke a certain terror and foreboding with themes of mental and physical degradation and corruption that extends and worsens over generations and in which humankind is shaped and twisted to better serve or amuse dark forces (which incidentally helps give scale and proper scope to his more alien and ageless horrors) than trying to espouse racist views. It is in that sense probably a bit telling as to his views that he manifested those fears in that particular way but as you note they was hardly an unusual views (even or perhaps particularly amongst the more literate section of society). Of course that's just my opinion but it's the impression that I at least get from reading his work - all in all I think that his work isn't particularly racist, despite certain over tones and approaches to the issues and regardless of exactly what views Lovecraft himself held (something that's ultimately impossible to truly know anyway).
Well, Lovecraft openly espoused certain forms of racist ideas in his letters -- he frequently said that both blacks and Australian aborigines were biologically inferior. While with some of the other ethnic groups he shifted his arguments more toward keeping cultures separate rather than basing them on biological grounds (though with his more intimate correspondents he continued to argue on the biological grounds as well), when it came to those two groups he always saw them as midway between
homo sapiens and the ape. That, unfortunately, he stated quite bluntly and baldly on various occasions. The only mitigating factor was that he didn't wish them to be treated with any cruelty; but he was adamant about "the colour line", having been not only influenced early on by his family's (and the upper-crust society of Providence's) views, but also by a book he read when very young, called
The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn, by William Benjamin Smith; Lovecraft even wrote a poem, "De Triumpho Naturae", dedicated to Smith, at a young age.
Now, if we can step back from our own emotional aversion to the sorts of views espoused here, I find this aspect of Lovecraft's thought very interesting because it is the
one area where he never allowed the scientific evidence to influence him to any notable degree; and I think the reasons for that are many and complex. But also I find it fascinating that it wasn't a simple-minded racism that he brought to his creative work, either. Racist it was but -- as you point out -- it was not in general polemical or preachy. It was simply a part of the fabric of the whole but, because it was seldom brought into sharp focus as racism rather than horror, it is easy for a lot of people to be totally unaware of it.
The other aspect of this is something that ties in with another part of his views, and what informs a great deal of the horror of his tales: that we really aren't as much a separate species as we like to believe, that we can all-too-easily slip backward on the evolutionary scale (his views on temperance are tied into this, by the way, as he saw drink not merely as socially undesirable and disruptive, but as something that would genuinely degrade the individual and their offspring genetically, pushing them back down that ladder; cf. his "More
Chain Lightning" and other essays on the subject); and, if he saw certain groups of human beings as being closer to that plane already, then miscegenation would encourage such a devolution. He was always aware how much of our genetic heritage we carry around with us, and how easy it is for the "more highly evolved" traits -- the more intellectual, civilized, etc. -- to slip and for us to behave barbarically and brutally. That's the theme of "The Rats in the Walls", really -- the genetic past reaching out to claim De la Poer (and, as he is a synecdochical figure, by extension, the rest of humanity) and drag him back down to that primal, bestial level -- hence the use of the various dialects in that one paragraph of speech, to show his incredibly rapid descent from a highly-cultured modern man to the pithecanthropoid -- inside, if not out. The horror of it is increased, of coure, because he chose to use the first-person narration here, so we make that descent with De la Poer -- urged on by the ghostly rats (which we are left to wonder whether they are "real" spiritual phenomena -- after all, the cats react to them but, interestingly, the other humans do not... is this because they are not yet on their downward trend, or ...? -- or whether they are symbols of his own creation, taken from the inherited memories or from his fascination with the legends of the army of rats that devastated the countryside after the destruction of all the ancient family save his own ancestor, and exist only in his mind, because of the intimate connection of that ancient rodent army and his family's past).
So with "The Shadow over Innsmouth" -- the miscegenation here is also a way of descending that evolutionary ladder -- as Zadok Allen had said, we all came out of the sea, and it only takes a little change to go back again, to the primal forms of life, and lose what makes us genuinely human. (A theme which was shared by quite a few horror writers following Darwin -- notably Arthur Machen with his "Novel of the Black Seal", "Novel of the White Powder", "The Great God Pan", and "The White People" -- the beast is always there, and only needs the door opened a little to sweep away everything that has come since.
So this was a part of Lovecraft's racism, I think -- after long study and considerable thought: that keeping the various ethnoi apart, reducing the mixing of the "races"; helped insure the stability of both the culture (or cultures, as he did later feel that there was genuine worth in several cultures -- just that they should each be kept separate lest they degrade each other and become a mongrel culture) and the "race". It's still a question as to whether there's any substance to the argument about cultures, but biologically I'd say it's been proven to be unsound.
Nonetheless, as you say, it wasn't a simple sort of racism; it wasn't just "white supremacy"... though it began that way, I'd say -- he was an ardent Aryan in his earlier years, and never entirely lost that; but it was much more complex in that it was also concerned with preserving the human against the beast in all our backgrounds. (See "Facts in the Case of the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", where it is hinted, for instance, that this primeval city of "white apes" are actually the progenitors of all white races ... and that, again, we can slip back down that slope so easily.)
As to the way some people judge Lovecraft and others - well in a way it's kind of ironic that culturally we openly tend to have an attitude of false superiority over people of other cultures and times for having openly attitudes of false superiority over other people (and their cultures). And in the end let's face it you don't have to agree with a person's attitudes to greatly enjoy their writing.
I'd say that's a common fault with human society -- we always think we are more sophisticated, more adult, more educated, etc. than our ancestors -- "We're living in the enlightened 19th centry, man; no one believes in such things anymore!", etc. -- when frankly the change are more apparent than real. They're much more surface than we like to think. Our essential emotional makeup hasn't changed much during the whole of human history, nor is likely to, really, at least if we take that to mean at base. And that is, in part, because we've only been human for a rather short time, really; the evolutionary changes that would allow any major alterations in our basic emotional structure -- barring one of those period "evolutionary leaps", which were quite possibly brought on by extreme environmental factors threatening extinction (which make one wonder -- is global warming going to be the threshold for the next such leap? Or some other event?) -- such changes take a
lot longer than the entirety of recorded human history. The rest is veneer; put us under enough stress, and that veneer gets stripped away, I'm afraid. This may be a good thing, as it may enable us as a species to survive; but it also threatens our existence at times, and certainly isn't often connected to the things that we hold to be most "uniquely human".
PS All of that said it is kind of sad that his work is featured amongst many white supremacist sites (amusing in light of his views on degenerate white trash), I suppose that we can at least take comfort that it might make them into more literate racists at least - there's always hope, no?
This is something I wasn't at all aware of. Interesting. Yes, he'd be appalled, as he had no use for such; as said, he didn't wish any cruelty toward other races -- he merely wanted there to be a strict boundary and would prefer that each be kept within its own country really, save for a very moderate amount of interaction -- a thoroughly impossible ideal, even if it were a good one -- which it isn't; it's the interactions that prevent stagnation and foster new views and new ideas, new possibilities. He thought some violence might be necessary to initiate the separation, but -- save in his most emotionally distraught moments, when he was at his wits' end in trying to survive -- he never spoke of wanting anything of the sort.
As for it making more literate racists ... that's debatable. I grew up in a town where such was pervasive, and I'm afraid that, if HPL resisted the scientific evidence to question his views, they are a thousandfold more adamantine-skulled. But I suppose one can always hope....
