“The Innsmouth Look”: H. P. Lovecraft’s Ambivalent Modernism

Abstract

H. P. Lovecraft's apologia for the inclusion of horror fiction in the literary canon, entitled "Supernatural Horror in Literature," concludes with an argument that this genre is a particularly appropriate aesthetic response to the monumental advances in science, technology, and psychology that shaped modern America: Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, [horror writing] is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism ... and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago [the best horror fiction] fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure nineties. (1) Lovecraft suggests that the radical reformulation of common conceptions about human beings and their environment occurring in the early twentieth century prompted a concurrent reinvigoration of popular interest in horror writing because these new advancements rendered the known world strange. Psychoanalysts posited that there were parts of the human mind that could never be fully integrated into conscious thought. Scientific discoveries were revealing a universe incomprehensible in its vastness and seemingly infinite in its subatomic complexity. According to Lovecraft, these developments provoked an affective response of "wonder and fancy" in American writers and readers which translated into an aesthetic preference: fiction that reflected the disorienting and chaotic world modern scientists and philosophers were uncovering. Left unarticulated in Lovecraft's essay, but apparent in his fiction, is the way ambivalence towards the rapid social changes wrought by historical modernity, particularly in terms of increased opportunities for and likelihood of interracial contact, also finds expression in his horror writing. Philosopher Marshall Berman posits that ambivalence is endemic to living in a modern setting which "promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time ... threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." (2) In Lovecraft, the opportunities and the anxieties endemic to historical modernity that Berman identifies are often explored by and through the destructive potential of extra-terrestrials invading the New England landscape. As Michael Saler argues, "one of the most important legacies of Lovecraft's life and fiction is how he came to terms, not just with disenchantment, but also with difference." (3) Lovecraft's 1931 short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" literalizes the racial anxieties activated by modernist social change into a horror plot, and, through the resolution of that plot, reveals a writer working through and considering an empathetic, though still deeply ambivalent, aesthetic response to racial difference. The story's account of "otherness" and where it comes from, though paranormal in content, nonetheless engages a sociopolitical anxiety about the effect of interracial contact on the white, male subject. The unnamed protagonist of "Shadow" is a young traveler who becomes fascinated with the mysterious town of Innsmouth. The knowledge he eventually uncovers threatens a stable understanding of the human condition, including his own. Through interviewing residents, exploring the decaying city, and observing the secretive inhabitants of Innsmouth, the protagonist comes to realize that the townspeople have been inter-breeding with an aquatic alien race, resulting in a population of half-human "fish-frogs" that eventually grow grotesquely amphibian in appearance and return to the ocean. …