Essay Questions

Lovecraft wrote chiefly for a white male audience in the 1920s and 1930s. Since then, social attitudes and norms have changed to the point that, if his stories were published for the first time today, the views expressed or implied in some of them would be extremely unpopular. Describe some of the potentially controversial aspects of stories from this collection, as viewed by a modern reader.

Four stories in this book depict outdated attitudes about race and ethnicity, and show signs of overt racism and ethnocentrism that was popular prior to World War II, but that has since fallen out of social favor. In "The Temple", the submarine captain is extremely proud of his Teutonic heritage and believes that it endows him with superior strength of will and character that are lacking in people from other ethnicities. In "The Terrible Old Man", three immigrants of obvious Italian, Polish, and Latin American origin are portrayed as opportunistic robbers who come to a deservedly bad end. In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", one of the major characters--a semiliterate, uneducated psychopath--is described in disparaging terms as belonging to a class or sub-race of truly inferior people. Finally, in "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", the salacious plot twist reveals that the family in question is partially descended from an obscure ape-like creature. Taken together, these stories can be interpreted as evidence of Western European white supremacist leanings either in Lovecraft himself or in the audience for which he wrote. Whether they are a form of venting, an expression of sincerely held views, or simply an example of the kind of material Lovecraft thought his publisher or audience wanted is still a matter of literary debate.

How are women depicted in Lovecraft's stories?

Female characters, in Lovecraft's stories, are almost completely nonexistent. The Old Ones may or may not have gender-- they are outside the limits of human comprehension-- but the human beings in these stories are almost universally male. Most of the stories contain no female characters whatsoever, and when they are implied in passing they do not take part in the story. The parents of the unfortunate Jervas in "The Tomb" contain by definition a mother and a father, but only the father speaks or appears in person. The synechdochic "wives and children" of the Street exist only as extensions of their husbands and fathers, and the housekeeper Mrs. Updike dies off-set, her death being related only by her erstwhile employer.

The only female things that are described in these stories are inanimate. Trever's mother appears only in the form of a portrait. The statue of Tyche in "The Tree" is nominally female. But the only representation of a female character is a statue of the ape-goddess depicted in "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family". This was once a female person, but as a mummified corpse she is conveniently dead and in no condition to speak. Accordingly, the female characters in these stories must be described as dead, nonexistent, or otherwise inanimate.

Compare and contrast two scientists: the narrator in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and Crawford Tillinghast in "From Beyond".

Both characters are male, both have a devotion to science, and both have enough skill and training in electrical engineering to construct electronic devices capable of expanding human perception. Both become aware of an alternate reality that is unknown to science, and both--through their experiments--are driven mad by it.

Whereas the narrator in "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" is a well-intentioned idealist who has a genuine desire to discover the cause of his patient's misery, Tillinghast is a paranoid megalomaniac. Tillinghast cares nothing for the lives of his domestic staff, all of whom are killed by the beings he discovers.

Several of Lovecraft's stories feature what is now called a "plot twist": a kind of climax that explicitly reveals an unexpected fact: a supposedly delusional or imaginary thing is actually fact, or one thing is not what it appears to be. Discuss the timing and effect of the plot twist in these stories.

In "The Alchemist" and "The Beast in the Cave", the unexpected revelations occur in or near the last sentence of the story. This closes the story in a strong and effective way, and leaves the reader to speculate exactly how the narrator responds to the revelation. In "From Beyond", "The Terrible Old Man" and "The Transition of Juan Romero", the story continues after the plot twist occurs. The details of the subsequent investigation or discoveries creates a sense of dramatic irony because the reader (and sometimes the narrator) knows a shocking truth of which other surviving characters remain ignorant.