Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s original stories. Today we’re looking at “The Thing on the Doorstep,” written in August 1933 and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales. You can read the story here. Spoilers ahead.
Synopsis
Daniel Upton is giving this statement to explain why he killed his best friend. He describes the origins of his friendship with Edward Derby when Derby was a child prodigy: sickly, brilliant, and obsessed with the macabre.
Derby meets Asenath Waite when he’s 38 and she’s—ostensibly—23. She is from Innsmouth and has a reputation as a magician: At school she was able to look at people and give them a feeling of “exchanged personality,” as if they were looking at themselves from her perspective. This was generally attributed to her hypnotic skill. Her father Ephraim (now deceased) had a similar nasty reputation.
Edward and Asenath marry swiftly, and settle in Arkham. Upton sees little of them for 2 years. However, he hears that Derby has started to act… out of character… sometimes. For example, although he didn’t previously know how to drive, he is now sometimes seen racing out of town with an uncharacteristically determined look in his eyes. Driving skillfully is apparently kind of nefarious—although maybe we in the 21st century have just forgotten that driving is a fundamentally predatory act.
When Upton sees him again, Derby hints at dissatisfaction, even to the point of fearing for his own identity. Strange rumors abound. A friend sees Asenath peering miserably from an upstairs window when she’s supposedly out of town. Derby starts to speak more directly of the horrors he’s seen, and drops hints that old Ephraim may not really be dead. Sometimes he cuts off abruptly, as if Asenath may be using some form of mind control to limit his communications.
Derby staggers out of the Maine woods, delirious and raving, remembering only enough to send a telegram to Upton. Upton picks him up and is treated to a rant about everything in the Lovecraftian mythos. Shoggoths are involved. Derby also talks more bluntly about Asenath forcing him to switch bodies. Furthermore—he admits at last—he’s discovered that Asenath is really Ephraim, that Ephraim stole her body and then poisoned his old body with her in it. Upton believes Asenath has put Derby through some sort of hypnotic ordeal, and resolves to help him get a divorce.
Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
He forces Upton to switch places and takes the wheel. Eventually he apologizes for his outburst, attributes it to “overstudy,” and promises Upton that he’ll be fine after a few weeks of rest.
Derby indeed disappears for a few weeks while Upton dithers, then shows up again seeming once more like himself. He claims to have marshaled his own occult defenses and forced Asenath to go away without him. However, he delays leaving the house he shared with her, and his moods swing wildly. At last he has a breakdown, ranting that even death can’t stop “it.” Upton commits him to the Arkham Sanitarium.
After a few weeks, the sanitarium calls to say that Derby’s reason has returned, although his memory is spotty. He should be able to leave in a week. However, when Upton visits, Derby exhibits the disturbing personality from the car. Upton senses an “ineffable cosmic hideousness.” He returns home to pace and worry.
That night, Upton hears knocking at his door—in the pattern that Derby always used to announce himself. He opens the door and finds a “dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing” that seems barely alive. The thing (on the doorstep) hands him a letter from Derby in which he confesses that he didn’t send Asenath/Ephraim away, but killed her. Even in death, however, Ephraim’s soul survived, and his cultists carried out the final sacrifice that would enable him to take over Derby’s body permanently—leaving Derby in Asenath’s corpse. Derby begs Upton to kill the thing in his body. He begs him to ensure that the body is cremated so that Ephraim cannot steal another one, for the sake of the entire world.
The thing stops moving. In the morning, Upton goes to the sanitarium and shoots Derby’s body. And the corpse on the doorstep is identified as Asenath’s.
What’s Cyclopean: This is one of Lovecraft’s favorite words. It only shows up once in Thing, describing the ruins in the Maine woods
The Degenerate Dutch: Lovecraft was prone to dropping extremely unflattering ethnic descriptions into his stories. To him any ethnicity other than pure “Nordic” seemed to be just another element of cosmic horror.
“Thing” is better than many. The standard description of the Necronomicon’s author as “the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” appears, and one of the servants from Innsmouth is “a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.” And that’s about it—this story is all about the misogyny.
Mythos Making: A significant portion of the Mythos shows up in Derby’s rants, but this story is particularly notable for being the second to make use of Innsmouth’s community of semi-amphibious cultists—although by necessity it takes place earlier.
Here, as elsewhere, it’s clear that mythos lore is well-known at Miskatonic, but not how many people believe it or have seen evidence. The “Bohemian crowd” at Miskatonic is rumored to perform black magic—custom drabble for the first person to come up with a “La Vie Boheme” parody.
The Hall School at Kingsport (Asenath’s alma mater) never gets mentioned elsewhere. I persist in believing it to be Miskatonic’s sister school.
Libronomicon: We get quite the library here, including Azathoth and Other Horrors by Edward Pickman Derby (poetry), The People of the Monolith by Justin Geoffrey, Book of Eibon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Junzt, and the Necronomicon. The secret of body theft is in the Necronomicon, but Derby won’t say what page.
Madness Takes its Toll: Justin Geoffrey “died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.” Abdul Alhazred was mad. Ephraim Waite ostensibly died mad, but one suspects that poor Asenath was all too sane at the end. Edward Derby winds up in Arkham Sanitarium, and Ephraim-as-Derby dies there (hopefully).
Ruthanna’s Commentary
This is one of Lovecraft’s final stories, but it’s a perfect starting point for the reread because it so perfectly encapsulates his contradictions. It has passages that take my breath away with how perfectly they evoke a mood, and words he uses so frequently that they just make me giggle. It has genuine horror and horrifying glimpses of the author’s prejudices. The creepiness and the problematicity are inextricable.
I learned, this time around, that Lovecraft wrote this story just after his divorce from Sonia Greene. (I’ve often wondered why a Jewish woman would marry Lovecraft in the first place. Apparently he helped her revise a story for publication and reviewed her fanzine in flattering terms.)
This explains why Thing is one of the few Lovecraft stories with a major female-presenting character, and also why it’s so unreservedly misogynistic. Not only do we get Ephraim-as-Asenath’s rants about the inferiority of the female brain, but when one looks closer, women in this story are almost entirely effaced. Derby asks: “Asenath… is there such a person?” There was, and her story is even more horrific than Derby’s. But we never see her or hear her voice. (And wouldn’t Derby reading some hidden journal of hers have made a fine addition to the creepiness?)
Women in Thing are, in fact, an illusion. Derby tries to marry one, but she’s secretly a man—and the realization that the only person he’s ever been attracted to is male seems to be deliberately part of the horror, albeit a subtle part. Upton has a wife, but she never appears on screen. Male friendship is the only real, healthy relationship, and it can’t save you.
One of the things I find interesting here is that from the outside, Derby’s relationship with Waite would look quite abusive—but in the other direction. Their estranged college friends see her imprisoned in the house and looking utterly hopeless, hear her cries, see her aging rapidly. And these friends, Upton included, use the little inconsistencies in that apparent picture as excuses to do absolutely nothing. This is possibly the most realistic and depressing part of the story.
Lovecraft can’t resist tying all the levels of horror together, and I think the blurring of scale ultimately interferes with the effect a bit. What could be a very personal threat is vaguely tied into Shoggoths and Shub-Niggurath and cultists. Ephraim is described as a cosmically evil threat to the world, but the simple line of stolen lives that he leaves behind seems starkly horrifying on its own. Adding Shoggoths into the mix doesn’t make it significantly worse.
Anne’s Commentary
In my grade school days, even vanilla heteronormative sex was a mystery, never mind more exotic flavors. One day I snuck into the library’s reference room and dug up the dirt, but the other girls refused to believe it. I had physiological sense on my side—didn’t my scoop explain those intriguing “down-there” differences? The doubters had an unanswerable counterargument: Would our parents have DONE anything like that?
Enough said.
This being my state of enlightenment when I first read “The Thing on the Doorstep,” I focused on its nonsexual horrors: sorcery and shoggoths and rotting but ambulatory corpses. My latest reread, the psychosexual issues have exploded off the page.
Lovecraft’s one story with a prominent female character welters in anxiety about sex, gender, and identity itself. The conceit that males are psychically superior through sheer masculinity is blatant, surface, and perhaps the least interesting aspect of the anxiety and its defenses. Subsurface, there’s much more writhing around.
With transfer of souls at story center, the question of identity’s inevitable. Let’s focus on gender identity. Poor Ephraim Waite. He sired no sons, so when he jumped from his failing body into his child’s, it was a leap from male to female. That would’ve been a shock for anyone, let alone a misogynist whose manly tangle of a beard is a prominent feature. When Ephraim exchanges Asenath’s body for her husband’s, Edward Derby also undergoes abrupt gender switch. But does Lovecraft (more or less subconsciously) imply that the switch is more appropriate for Edward?
After all, Edward’s described as weak-willed, soft, childish, chubby, parent-dominated, dependent, shy, inert. In contrast to beardy Ephraim, he can barely raise a moustache. Lovecraft doesn’t call him effeminate, but he might as well. He doesn’t call him gay, but does he hint at homosexual tendencies in Edward’s general behavior and in his involvement with a wild college set whose “daring…Bohemian” activities and “dubious conduct” must be hidden from the Derby elders? Edward’s presence at a “certain affair” is so shocking Edward must pay off a blackmailer to keep the scandal from his father’s notice. Lovecraft mentions the wild set’s rumored involvement in black magic after the “affair,” which makes me think the “affair” was of a mundane if unconventional nature.
And Asenath is most “feminine” when she’s really wistful weepy Edward, locked in the couple’s library like Mrs. Rochester in the attic.
And wasn’t the woman to wow and win Edward actually a man?
No writer of erotica, Lovecraft leaves sex offstage, where the imaginative reader can thoroughly unnerve him or herself. After Ephraim steals his daughter’s body (talk about extreme incest), “Asenath” attends a girls’ school, where “she” mesmerizes students and indulges in “leers and winks of an inexplicable kind.” We may well share Asenath/Ephraim’s “obscene zestful irony” about her/his wolfish presence among the young ewes.
Then there’s Edward and Asenath’s marriage. They honeymoon in Ephraim’s native Innsmouth, and Edward returns a changed man. Lovecraft tells us Asenath has made her husband shave his “undeveloped” mustache but passes that off as insignificant. Is it? Or is it instead a symbolic emasculation, a further subordination of Edward’s “feminine” temperament to Asenath’s masculine one? Have they consummated their marriage, and how’s that coupling gone, under Ephraim’s roof, probably in Ephraim’s old marriage bed?
Scary stuff. It may be more than exposure to Innsmouth that leaves Edward saddened and sober. Things get worse when Asenath/Ephraim inflicts on him the violation of body-stealing. The climax of repeated soul-rape comes when Edward slips back into his body during a coven meeting Ephraim was leading. Edward stands before “the unholy pit where the black realm begins.” Freudian interpretation is facile. He sees “a shoggoth—it changed shape.” And changing shape—identity—has become for him a horror. In a “fury of hysteria,” he cries “I can’t stand it—I’ll kill her—I’ll kill that entity—her, him, it—I’ll kill it!”
A her that becomes a him must become an it, too confounding for toleration?
More scary stuff, and I feel as if I’ve only begun to peel back the skin of this story.
Join us next week as we explore more body-switching horror and the world’s best library in “The Shadow Out of Time.”
Ruthanna Emrys’s novelette “The Litany of Earth” is available on Tor.com. Her work has also appeared at Strange Horizons and Analog. She can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal. She has strong opinions about Oxford commas, but then, doesn’t everyone?
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “Geldman’s Pharmacy” received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Thirteenth Annual Collection. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” is published on Tor.com, and her first novel, Summoned, is available June 24, 2014 from Tor Teen. She currently lives in a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island.
When I first started reading Lovecraft, I started a habit of looking up a newly-encountered word every other day or so, and trying to incorporate it into my daily vocabulary as much as possible. My first Lovecraft-ism was “cyclopean”. Fun word, if you don’t try to use it too much.
@1 Tabbyfl55
And it probably helps not to think about the unintentional inuendo. “One-eyed giant – hey, I got one of those too.” *nudging and winking ensues*
Especially in a “Misogyny, YAY!” story like this, good ol’ H.P.’s penchant for that word is…yeah.
On a more serious note, I fear that the blatant misogyny in this story as such isn’t even particularly eyebrow-raising when put in historical context. A ton of what I’ve read from that period, both fiction and non-fiction, contained that idea of female inferiority in no uncertain terms. It just gets worse here with the psychosexual aspect dumped on top of it.
The misogony inherent in this story does shine throw on a reread. When reading Lovecraft these days, it is rather like walking barefoot through a lawn strewn with thistles–there is the lovely grass between your toes and then a sharp stabbing pain.
Setting the unwelcome stabbing pains aside for a bit, the remainder of the walk is a lovely experience (well, lovely if you count viewing unspeakable horrors as lovely). In this story we do get views of the mythos through eyes of madness and as Ruthanna said, that does make it a good starting point.
I still don’t much like “The Thing on the Doorstep”. It felt as if it was something of a melange of other Lovecraft stories: there’s bits of “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and “Cool Air” in there but it doesn’t quite gel for me.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Lovecraft, I would like to offer the following:
There were several important things happening in Lovecraft’s life when he wrote “The Thing on the Doorstep”, the most important of which what his failing marriage to Sonia Green (as mentioned) and the end of his disastrous sojourn in New York. Like many writers, Lovecraft’s feelings of alienation from wider society and his wife are being exorcised in his writing. Has no one else written out their feelings after a bad “breakup” with a significant other? Specifically one’s “first love” which has gone sour? Lovecraft really only had the one intimate relationship and when he found himself incompatible with her (and his new surroundings) a man of Lovecraft’s obvious intellect would begin to fall into no small amount of self-recrimination mixed with a somewhat juvenile rage against women and the world he wanted but clearly could not have.
Much of his latent racism and misogyny begins to erode away after his return to Providence from Brooklyn. Having experienced the wider world and in particular, having an intimate relationship with a “Jewess” helped him to recognize the inherited dogma of male anglo-saxon superiority heaped upon him by his family. While charges of misogyny are somewhat justified, they are also a bit misplaced; at least in this particular case. Much like the blatant racism found in “The Horror of Red Hook” (written early in his tenure in New York) compared with the “At the Mountains of Madess” (where he shows remarkable appreciation of foreigners in the form of the Elder Things), “Thing…” was written at a time of considerable turmoil, both emotional and personal. It is not surprising that he would “act out” in his writing.
His prejudices were in general; a product of his upbringing in a town almost entirely “white”, in a almost-aristocratic family. The influx of foreigners during his childhood and early adult years were doubtless expressed as undesirable by his family, an atitude he would have had little chance of escaping. When faced with the particulars during his later years, his attitudes began to change.
Yes, there is no small amount of racism and misogyny in Lovecraft’s writings (both in his fiction and in his letters). He was a product of not just his time, but of the late 19th century as remembered by his mother and aunts who wore the rose-coloured glasses of the Gilded Age. As he matured and developed a better sense of the wider world his prejudices began falling apart. A close reading of his correspondance of his later years bears this out.
I am not attempting to justify the racism or misogyny of his fiction, only pointing out that there was a lot more going on in his stories than is often claimed when charges of prejudice a leveled at particular works.
@5: all true. But knowing what was going on in the author’s world does not stop a reader from looking at it with their own modern eyes.
Otherwise Huckleberry Finn’s use of terms we cannot accept, would just be accepted as author writing appropriate for time and place. But since it is challenged all the time, readers are judging it based on their own views.
Thus people seeing a vibrant woman turn into sad lonely creature basically trapped inside her home, and not doing anything about it, while accurate for the time and culture, causes most modern readers to twitch. And want to yell at people to “Do something!”
Like SchuylerH @@.-@, I’ve never really connected with this story, but it has also been many years since I’ve last read it. Certainly, there’s a lot that should work. Body horror, possession, loss of self, and of course the ever present threat of madness.
It is rather eye-opening to consider this story with Lovecraft’s marriage in mind. OTOH, the marriage seems to have worked fairly well and although Sonia had to pry him out of Providence with a crowbar, HPL seems to have flourished in New York at first. He connected with a somewhat Bohemian crowd (some of whom were homosexual, though it’s debatable whether or not he knew that). But once Sonia left him alone there, he fell apart.
But where the events of the marriage apply to the story is elsewhere. Firstly, a lot of the description of Derby could easily be applied to Lovecraft. Introverted, bookish, not athletic, pretty much everything except the vaguely effeminate impression. How much of that he would have consciously applied to himself is a different question. More important, though, is the fact that it was Sonia who was the breadwinner. She supported Lovecraft with her hat shop and then, when it failed, moved around the country for work while he stayed behind. He even turned down the editorship of Weird Tales in this period, claiming he couldn’t move to Chicago. This is a pretty strong reversal of the gender roles that were the norm at the time. Even rather liberal freethinkers would probably have looked a bit askance at a woman supporting her husband while he stayed home and wrote stories for pocket money.
I think TTotD reflects some of what HPL felt from the nature of his marriage. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was emasculated, but he may well have felt slightly “feminized” by being a “kept man”.
@6
If modern readers who want to approach fiction critically, they must take into consideration the context and contemporary social milieu that produced the story. If they do not, they are not approaching the story critically.
Viewing period fiction with only modern sensibilities does nothing to advance literary criticism or understanding of fiction. Take your example of …Huckleberry Finn. Were you aware that Samuel Clemens was remarkably anti-racist? Does this fact change the reading of that novel? Does it allow a better understanding of the novel’s themes? Or do we just condemn Clemens and his novels because he used the word “nigger”?
Yes, we may be offended by words and concepts used by writers in less enlightened ages; we should be. But levelling charges of racism without any understanding of the fiction’s, and the author’s, context is itself prejudice.
It’s possible to read something with modern sensibilities *and* an awareness of an author’s personal and social context. I’ve been paying a lot more attention, for this reread, to what was going on in the world and in Lovecraft’s own life while he wrote–I think it helps me appreciate the stories more, but sometimes it actually makes the problematic bits seem worse rather than better.
Context is explanation, not excuse: no instance of prejudice, from the casual catcall on the street to homicidal fear, is the result of spontaneous generation. And to name prejudice for what it is is not to accuse its holders of some formless evil.
Saying that Lovecraft was racist, sexist, etc., is not the same as saying that his stories aren’t entertaining, interesting, or effective. I tend to think that in Lovecraft’s case, prejudice and effective horror are deeply entangled–the fascination of that entanglement is likely to inform most of these readings.
Finally, there is no neutral reading–not “modern sensibilities,” and not the sensibilities of Lovecraft’s peers. We all stand somewhere. And saying that particular prejudices were typical of a particular time (true of some of Lovecraft’s ideas, and not of others) ignores the fact that there were female people, Jewish people, black people, etc., alive and having a point of view in Lovecraft’s time. Their sensibilities were informed by their time as well.
Couple of points:
First, more body-switching horror to come next week – and, indeed, the idea of forced body-swapping, and even being trapped in a dying or dead body as a result, has been used in lots of subsequent stories. (The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers comes to mind.) But are there earlier examples – or is this something that Lovecraft came up with first?
My first Lovecraft-ism was “cyclopean”. Fun word, if you don’t try to use it too much.
“There’s an unnameable, unimaginable thing in ma basement, and I’d like it punted.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGTEOrX_I08
@9
Precisely. However, Lovecraft was not his entire society. He is a particular case. His views were not just informed by his immediate time, but by the values and mores of his family which was stuck in the faux-aristocracy Gilded Age family they invented for themselves. Added to this, Lovecraft himself patterned himself on an even older societal mode of the 18th Century. This is important information to understand why he wrote, what he wrote, and how he wrote.
This is context I am talking about that informs all of his work. To dimiss it is to do a disservice to criticism. As I said, I am not an apologist for HPL’s often abhorent views. That said, it is very important to recognize that after his exposure to the wider world through his marriage to Sonia Green and his time in New York (as well as his emense correspondence with a wide variety of people including Jews, homosexuals, free-thinkers and others), his views began to change and much of his prejudice eroded. This last fact is where his context is most important.
I don’t particularly agree that there can be no neutral readings, but that is an argument for another place. What we must do, however, is understand that even if we cannot have neutral readings, we must not allow our modern views to prejudice the text to the point where we dismiss the author and the work. This happens frequently and I have seen it happen with contributors right here on Tor.com.
I may be remembering incorrectly but isn’t it only Ephraim /Asenath /Edward that makes the misogynst comments? If so, and I could be off base, it might mean that Lovecraft was in the process of changing his views in regard to women. I believe that Lovecraft may have seen himself in both Upton and Edward even if only subconsciously. Edward seems to get all the problems the author had while Upton is an idealized version of himself, all the same interests but also still the “man of the house.”
Our intrepid reviewer Ruthanna touched on something though and I think it can get over looked in the midst of all the cosmic horror and the discussion of racism and misogyny of the author and the time. She talks about the description of Asenath as basically an abused wife and for myself this was one of the most horrifying parts of the story. Forget for a second that it was a man stuck in a woman’s body and here we have a short portrait of domestic abuse which grounds the whole story into an all too real reality. Yet as Ruthanna points out Upton and the neighbors only comment on it and move along with their lives. This in my opinion, isn’t just typical of the time or a result of Lovecraft’s own antipathy toward women, it’s a sad reflection of the world he knew and the world we all still know. I’ve seen it recently myself, and knowing there’s nothing you can really do about it because the victim won’t come forward and you’ve only heard about it second hand traps everyone in a very literal hell.
Tabbyfl55 @@@@@ 1: My opinion at this point is that it’s even more fun if you do use it too much.
Mouldy_Squid @@@@@ 5: Putting all your baggage out for the world to see–and scrutinize–is a hazard of the profession. Most of us can only hope to attract continued critique of our innermost neuroses a century on. And given Doorstep’s critical self-insert, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Lovecraft didn’t expect his readers to get an unmitigated good impression of him.
Braid_Tug @@@@@ 6 Huck Finn is actually a pretty odd–and interesting–example. It was quite an abolitionist book, and that still shines through. There’s a wonderful scene where Huck decides that if helping Jim free means he’ll go to Hell, well then, he’ll go to Hell. I’m not sure how Clemens would have felt about modern editions that change the word in question. I tend to be a big proponent of keeping original text even when it’s gotten problematic. On the other hand, he was a big proponent of choosing the right word–lightning vs lightning bug and all that–and might have prefered to change his phrasing as the connotations changed.
@13 R.Emrys
I think is is quite clear that “The Thing…” is auto-biographical. I am convinced that this story was his way of exorcising his feelings in the wake of his failed marriange. There is a lot of neuroses exposed there: his “feminization” (as mentioned by DemetriosX, it would have been quite a blow to have been supported by a woman however willing Sonia was to do so), the isolation of being trapped in a failing body (his health was suffering owing to his very megre diet while in New York), loss of friends, the psycho-sexual trappings. I don’t think this story can be read as anything else. This story is very much Lovecraft trying to come to terms with what he percieved as his failure in New York.
@@@@@ Mouldy_Squid: I’m a historian. I read the old stories and understand the world the author was writing from (most of the time). I was not condemning Clemens for his use of language. I think it should be taught as a way of showing how attitudes change. Nor was I condemning Lovecraft.
Just as many older works, can show how life was, and how our attitudes have changed. Like @@@@@9 said, it is possible to read with both levels of understanding. But there is no neutral reading. A reader can only read with an awareness of what their own biases are. And the readers, who I think get the most out of works, learn what the biases are of the authors and their times. Simply so you can be aware of them an appreciate those differences.
Braid_tug@15:Just so.
Tim W @12 It is indeed old Ephraim who believes that a female is inferior real estate for takeover by a male, especially a hairy ubermale like himself. This reminds me of the idea from DUNE that only a male could become Kwisatz Hadderach, or Quizzical Haddock as we used to call it down on the farm.
If I had been Ephraim, I’d have been gunning for Upton, who would have been played by Gary Cooper at his most firm-jawed.
I’ve enjoyed very much reading this post. And learning what Lovecraft was passing through while writing this story makes it even more interesting. I think it can be compared to “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, in which the ending is very uncaracteristic of Lovecraft. Lovett-Graff, while analysing “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, said that it was written at a time when Lovecraft had discovered he had a Welsh ancestor. To someone that was all into Aryanism and Nordic worship as Lovecraft was at the time, discovering he was not pure Anglo-Saxon but had some Celtic ancestry in him would be quite a shock. So “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is kind like a story of a racist discovering that he’s not a pureblood, and that’s one of the reasons it is my favorite Lovecraft story. The Thing on the Doorstep also shows Lovecraft exorcising some of his personal ghosts while writing a story, but the result, in the end, is different regarding our modern sensibilities.
At first, everyone is wary of Asenath as she is a non-caucasian woman (who dares go to the university even!) from out of town. Then everything indicates that she is submitted to abuse and no one will do anything to help her. When it becomes undeniable that there are indeed supernatural events occurring, the narrator seemed so antipathetic that I didn’t care for him and his interpretation of the facts. Except at the end: Derby and Upton have the body of the victim, the weapon and a written confession that Derby killed his wife while the suspect wan’t remember what’s happened, and yet they can’t manage to keep “Derby” in prison, and Upton has to resort to murder? He completely deserves whatever punishment he will face.
I love that this series has a section “What’s Cyclopean”!
Tim W. @@@@@ 12: Oh, what an interesting point! It hadn’t occurred to me that they might both be self-inserts, but now that you suggest it…
When I first read this story, I was expecting a bigger sense of horror. There wasn’t much horror in the story but ultimately I’ve come to view it as dark fantasy. The world-building was interesting in that the supernatural magic elements of the story contradict the science fiction flavor of HPL’s other stories such as “At the Mountains of Madness”.
Instead of misogyny, the story deals with the horror of the other and the inability to ontologically know another person. The horror of “do I really know this person I’ve just married?”. And then there’s the body horror of having one’s mind transferred into a hideously ugly person.
I don’t know, over time this story has lost a lot of its power. It seems like a great idea for a horror novel – except it’s under-developed in this form of short story.
First: apologies about the empty post that used to be here. Commenting seems to be broken for me on the iPad.
@19 – But at that point he knew he was dealing with an inhuman horror, and the killings were not of actual humans. Edward did not murder his wife, he killed the abomination that was stealing his body, in self defense. Upton did not kill Edward but the thing that had murdered his friend. This is exactly the case he is making in this story.
So I can forgive him for not considering human solutions anymore. In Arkham, it was probably the right call too. Plus, keeping it locked up was not a safe solution at all. Even killing and burying it wasn’t, after all.
I read this story for the first time and was pleasantly surprised at how fresh and easy it reads. I have played the Cthulu rpg quite a bit, and this could be straight out of one of our sessions.
I (unlike Lovecraft himself, I think) was not very horrified about the body switches, I wouldn’t mind experiencing the world from someone elses eyes all that much ;)
But I was genuinely horrified by the ending. I did not see coming that it was an animated rotting corpse. I believed Edward when he claimed to have chased her off and I was thinking Asenath had in the meantime transformed into a squid or something, and that was the thing.
All that makes the real Asenath definitely the one who had it worst. She gets murdered twice, her corpse gets abused and nobody ever gives a damn about what happens/happened to her… Not to mention what her life must have been like with dear papa still alive.
The implication for the marital relations is also pretty terrible. Best case scenario is Ephraim simply refused to do it, but the more realistic options… make it surprising Edward was still sane after the honeymoon.
@13 R.Emrys
re: Samuel Clemens
On the other hand, he was a big proponent of choosing the right word–lightning vs lightning bug and all that–and might have prefered to change his phrasing as the connotations changed.
I’m not so sure, because in this particular case it’s not Samuel Clemens talking but one of his characters. Having his characters change their language because of his own changed sensibilities would either clash with their personality, or their personality would have to be changed thereby removing the arc of personal growth. “Nigger” is a word that Huck Finn historically would have used and considering this it makes him overcoming his prejudices all the more powerful. Just randomly inserting modern sensibilities here wouldn’t be true to the character or the setting.
To illustrate (rather ridiculously): I could write a story about a rapper and have him say in an interview “Yo, me and my niggas we love them phat ass bitches” (yeah, I’m sorry I don’t really speak Hip-Hop, please don’t hold it against me). That’s no language I would or should ever use personally. However, the character would and that’s the point. Having him say “I dare say, good sir, my acquaintances and myself rather enjoy the company of ladies of considerable posterior voluptuousness.” might be meme-worthy and less offensive but not appropriate for character and setting.
Uh…*reads that again*…does my rambling make any sense at all?
English authors never seem to get German conjugation right. A book title should be nominative: Unaussprechliche Kulte, not Unaussprechlichen Kulten.
@24: That’s an interesting point: it has been suggested that this is not the full title of the volume and that it should be something along the lines of Von or Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten. As it is, you can blame the initial error on August Derleth: Robert E. Howard called it Nameless Cults while Lovecraft tried Ungenennte Heidenthume before Derleth’s suggestion.
@24 birgit
Uh, that’s declension, not conjugation. But anyway, German grammar in general tends to be a B-I-T-C-H.
– “A bitca?”
Exactly.
Though, if the book was named “Von unaussprechlichen Kulten” (Of unspeakable cults) everything would be hunky-dory.
@25 SchuylerH
[i]Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten.[/i]
That would still be the wrong case (dative), it should be nominative Die unaussprechlichen Kulte.
Yes, I know…a bitca.
Well, this is odd. I drew a comparison with Bloch’s Psycho and it appears to have been deleted. Why?
@26: Thankyou for fixing the grammar.
@27: It hasn’t been deleted: you posted it as @37 on the “Introduction to the H. P. Lovecraft Reread” thread.
AMPillsworth @@@@@17 Well Upton certainly believes he is next and it never says that Edward’s body is cremated. The mad house was keeping the body for unknown reasons and if the court takes this confession of Upton at face value, Upton could be considered mad and end up close enough to the corpse for the transformation to begin. In fact I wonder if that wasn’t Lovecraft’s intention, for him so much of the horror is inevitable that perhaps nothing that poor Upton did could prevent Ephraim from stealing his body as well.
R.Emrys @@@@@ 20 It had never occurred to me before either till I started reading all the ways Edward was like Lovecraft from the initial reviews. Upton then started to seem like the better reflection in an evil funhouse, you know the one that shows you without any of the flaws. Upton has all the same likes, the perfect family life (well if your idea of perfect family would be a wife that seems to always leave you alone) and no financial problems to get in the way of all the writing and antiquarian hijinks!
If I’m right about Upton though it does strike me as more than a little sad that Lovecraft’s ideal self still comes off so stark and cold. I mean even with everything else going right for him, the only person he can truly call a friend is himself.
It also now occurs to me that Talia al Ghul shares the same fate as Asenath in Batman Beyond. I wonder if the writters of that episode had read this story?
@24
I’ve also heard that Abdul Alhazred doesn’t seem correct in Arabic as a name.
@31: It isn’t: I have seen Abd-al-Hazred suggested as an alternative.
I would call my new accent wall cyclopean, but the stones aren’t really THAT big.
@31
It’s not, which isn’t surprising since a young HPL made up the name based on his mother’s side of the family (Hazard) in order to play Arabian Nights. Chaosium came up with a relatively decent interpretation that could be interpreted as “The Servant of the Strangler”. They took that further and connected the Strangler with the Sphinx (which means something like “strangler” in Greek) and the Sphinx is connected directly to Nyarlathotep in Lovecraft’s texts. I don’t have access to my Call of Cthulhu books at the moment and it might have been in some issue of Different Worlds (which fell victim to a burst pipe), so I can’t say exactly what their “correct” form was.
@34: Several are given in the Encyclopedia Cthulhuiana. The one you are thinking of is rendered as Abd al-Azrad.
@31 Ryamano @31 SchuylerH
re: the Mad Arab
Here we have a little more leeway, though, since Arabic doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. In such cases, unless there is an officially agreed upon version, everything is sorta close-your-eyes-do-whatever-and-hope-nobody-notices. And on top of that, transcription is different for every bloody language ever invented and prone to mistakes.
Just think of El Kaida/Al-Kaida/al-Kaida/al-Qaida/Al-Quaeda/al-Qa’ida/just-pick-one-and-be-bloody-done-with-it (I might have made the last one up)…
So the Mad Arab could at least be justified in-universe as a faulty transcription that stuck, unlike a wrong German book title by a supposed German author.
@36: I might be minded to forgive von Junzt his grammatical error upon considering his state of mind…
Madness is no excuse for bad grammar, dagnabbit!
@30: I thought the same thing, and when I finished the story, I decided that it would have been much better with Batman (like anything else in fact).
The debates on German grammar and on the Mad Arab’s name raise an important question: who spell checks the unspeakable tomes of eldritch lore?
This was actually one of the first Lovecraft stories I remember enjoying as horror. I actually had the description of Asenath as my bio on a social media site at one point in time :)
I especially recall S.T. Joshi’s pithy commentary on it from my annotated version. (Something like, “This would be very interesting to feminist lit scholars, if any of them read Lovecraft”).
I suppose I didn’t read this story as misogynist until recently, instead seeing Asenath as a willing participant in her father’s soul transfer scheme, as a way to gain more freedom in a still very male-dominated world. I’m not sure the text supports or doesn’t support that one way or another, as even Edward never knew where Asenath ended and Ephraim began. I certainly won’t gainsay anyone who wants to read it as misogynist.
Also I read an interesting Asenath/Edward fic in French last year. Um.
Athreeren @40. That would be the dreaded Pa’pr’klp who haunts all tomes and punishes the heathens for their blasphemous spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes. Microsoft even uses a small avatar of the Old One for its own word processor. One day when the stars are right Pa’pr’klp will return for the final Check and the great Erasing!
@42 Tim W
I thought, according to von Junzt, grammar and spell checking was the domain of accursed G’rmm Ar-N’zi, an eldritch horror whose blasphemous appearance and loathsome name has haunted and driven to madness countless scribes since antediluvian times. The Pa’pr’klp are but a daemonic slave race lurking in the noisome city of O’f-Fice…
@40: I do wonder why anyone publishes these tomes in-universe.
“So, the acquisitions editor was found shredded in a locked office. The packaging department are reduced to gibbering at our suppliers, trying to source authentic spider skin. Maybe our customers will be luckier if we use the lower-quality woodcuts.”
As an aside, while looking through the Encyclopedia Cthulhiana to try to determine the possible fate of Daniel Upton (Fritz Leiber’s “To Arkham and the Stars” is rather upbeat), I noticed that the encyclopedia has statistics for use in Call of Cthulhu, with Sanity loss 1d6/2d6 but on the plus side, it can be used as an emergency weapon. Good to know.
@44 SchuylerH
I do wonder why [i]anyone publishes these tomes in-universe.[/i]
Indeed. You’d have to be mad to get yourself involved w– oh, right…
@40 et al.
You jest, but well…
I’m a translator and a chunk of my work involves video games. On one project, I spotted a misspelling in Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. And not in Cthulhu or R’lyeh either.
As for the publishers, don’t forget that most of these books are either manuscripts or come from very small print runs back in the days when publisher meant one guy with a printing press and a handful of employees. Just about the only real exception to that would be the Golden Goblin edition of Unspeakable Cults, which is highly edited and abridged. I’m trying to make some pithy connection to Lovecraft’s involvement with the amateur press movement, but can’t quite get there.
@43 Randalator Of the Pa’pr’klp, you speak the truth. They are truly the most loathsome entities known to Mythos scholars. Indeed, some hint in hushed whispers that mighty Cthulhu sank R’lyeh in order to free himself of their niggling interference.
I know that this thread is about “Thing” but I ask, plaintively, if anyone has a line toward finding a .mpg or other file of a reading of “The Music of Eric Zann” that was performed back around 1980, at some university I think, *with accompanying music* by (I think) the Turtle Island String Quartet? I heard it when it was broadcast on public radio at the time, and have been sporadically searching for a recording ever since. Many thanks!
PS Since this critical reading of “Thing” has proved so fruitful, likewise “Shadow over Innsmouth”, are there other juicy criticisms of his other “occupation by evil spirit” books?
@48: I couldn’t find anything for Turtle Island but there is this recording featuring the Kronos Quartet, narrated by Peter Hammill. It’s from a live performance in 1994: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITwT3CrcKFs.
Reading this today, I kept thinking:
Knock, knock, knock….knock, knock….”Upton.”
Knock, knock, knock….knock, knock….”Upton.”
Knock, knock, knock….knock, knock….”Upton.”
@49 SchuylerH- that’s the one, I think! Anyhow it was definitely Kronos not Turtle Island. too bad the sound quality is lacking but that’s what you get. thanks so much!
@51: No problem. If you want more insightful critical analysis about Lovecraftian stories of sinister possession, just stick around this reread: next week, it’s “The Shadow Out of Time”, where many things are cyclopean.
What else was in Weird Tales, Jan 1937:
The cover story was “Children of the Bat”, one of the “Jules de Grandin” occult detective stories by Seabury Quinn. The cover was by Margaret Brundage.
A short early Kuttner, “The Eater of Souls”, also appears.
Lovecraft features again with a reprint of “The Disinterment” (1935), a minor collaboration with Duane W. Rimel.
There were also stories by Paul Ernst, Thorp McClusky, Edgar Daniel Kramer, Alfred I. Tooke, Irvin Ashkenazy, Durbin Lee Horner and a reprint from G. G. Pendarves, along with a poem by Howell Calhoun.
Randalator @43. Which brings up an interesting question, do the various cults get along with each other? I’ve yet to read a mythos tale where Cthulhu’s cult gets into a fight with Hastur’s disciples for trying to start the end of the world first. What all these groups really need is like a mythos Council of Nicea to really iron everything out.
As for your correction, I see you are correct. That’s the risk of buying your Book of Eibon from an antiquarian swap meet. Who knows what else I could have gotten wro …
Tim W@54 – I imagine the Cthulhu cultists don’t get along at all with the Yog-Sothoth crowd: how is anyone going to show and kill and revel if the Earth is simply going to be wiped clean of all life?
Lise F@41 – “I especially recall S.T. Joshi’s pithy commentary on it from my annotated version. (Something like, “This would be very interesting to feminist lit scholars, if any of them read Lovecraft”).”
Oh, those feminist lit scholars and their narrow-minded reading habits. Speaking of mysogny… :)
Out of all of HPL’s stories, this is one of the very few that has never seen a comic book adaptation, at least as far as I know.
In terms of using the story as a springboard, there is at least one prequel, “The Prodigies of Monkfield Cabot” by Michael Minnis, found in the collection Eldritch Blue.
Sequels have been more common, although not as numerous as for HPL’s better stories. Authors, of course, caught on to the notion that Waite’s mind might try to overpower Upton. Peter Cannon has given us “The Revenge of Azathoth” (found in Chaosium’s The Azathoth Cycle) and “The House of Azathoth.” Both are reprinted in his book Forever Azathoth from Subterranean Press.
If you want more TTOTD discussion, here is a very good thread from 1998. I would particularly point out the disucssion of Donovan K. Loucks about the geography involved and where it derived from: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/alt.horror.cthulhu/the$20thing$20on$20the$20doorstep$20sequel/alt.horror.cthulhu/klQGYkAUmPo/ksZGNwuDqWAJ
My favorite throwaway reference was to Derby’s correspondence with the Baudelairian poet Justin Geoffrey, who was the main character in Robert E. Howard’s The Black Stone. Geoffrey’s poetry makes another appearance in REH’s “The Thing on the Roof”.
@41 & 55: “In a perfect world I would not have to be a feminist and gay activist and I could spend my life discussing H. P. Lovecraft.” – Joanna Russ, introduction to “On the Fascination of Horror Stories, Including Lovecraft’s”, To Write Like a Woman.
@56: Actually, there does seem to be a graphic adaptation of some sort. It’s in the anthology Graphic Classics vol 10: Horror Classics.
BMunro @55 One of the great attractions of being a cultist is fighting with other cultists, both intra- and extramurally. The Cthulhu cultists are always lobbying to get official cosmic deity status for the Big Squid, but Nyarlathotep and the other Outer Gods aren’t budging. The nerve of those upstarts.
@57: Thanks for the tip. As it turns out I had read that one years ago and forgot about it. The artist was Michael Manning. Strictly for completists, I’d say.
Lovecraft’s divorce was in 1929; this story was written in 1933; I think it is stretching it to claim a direct connection.
@55 and 57: I felt like I should look up the exact Joshi quote, in the hopes it was less snarky than I was presenting it. But, nope. In reference to the line “her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man,” Joshi writes, “a statement sure to provoke feminist critics if any bothered to read Lovecraft.”
So, uh. Take that as you will.
“Just about the only real exception to that would be the Golden Goblin edition of Unspeakable Cults, which is highly edited and abridged.” Well, so was the 1865 Matterhorn Press edition of The Revelations of Glakki, but again, that’s a very small printing purely for subscribers. It’s the only publication of any version of the book.
I was extremely hesitant to come here because most threads of this type, that I have perus’d online, tend to rant about what an “awful” writer Lovecraft is or dismiss his art because of his bigortry or some such nonsense. I am, therefore, EXTREMELY impress’d with the serious thoughtfulness of the comments here, with the maturity of approach, and with the knowledge of Lovecraft express’d. I love this story, and reading it again reminds me that E’ch-Pi-El was, first and foremost, a brilliant story-teller.
Martin A @@@@@ 60. I don’t see how you could say that one doesn’t have a direct link to the other just because there was a passage of time. My brother is happily married and has been for a year now, if you want to wreck his day though bring up his last significant relationship. Time can heal wounds or allow them to fester. I’d like to believe that this story was like therapy for Lovecraft and he came away from it a better person but it is equally possible that it was his way of eviscerating his ex in fiction. I think the real stretch would be saying that his real life had no affect on the story at all.
@64: If I remember correctly, Lovecraft’s divorce was amicable but never actually completed: he didn’t file the last document. I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was on his mind when he wrote this story: in 1933, Greene moved away to California.
@@@@@63 Welcome, W. H.! I agree with you about the responses to this series so far. Hope you’ll drop in often.
@@@@@ 64 I don’t get the impression that Lovecraft’s relationship with Greene was such that he felt a need to “eviscerate” her. I guess you could argue that Asenath is — literally — a woman too mannish for her husband to bear; again — literally — she IS a man in all but the physical shell. Bringing me back to the how the psychosexual tangles give this story a fascination beyond the supernatural horrors.
My own impression re Lovecraft, sex-wise, is that he rather envies his asexual races who don’t have to deal with all the problems of gender and mating. Spores are so neat, as long as you don’t let the gestational tanks overflow.
There was another “reversal” of the gender roles in Lovecreaft’s marriage. According to the biography that Sonia wrote, while he was an “adequately excellent lover” (adequately excellent?), she always had to initiate things. This was undoubtedly due to his general shyness and the repressive ideas pounded into him by his aunts, but he would very likely have again felt like he was handing over the “male role” to his wife. Nyarlathotep knows what he made of the idea of a woman with sexual appetites.
@66. I don’t really see it that way either but it seemed more likely than the idea that his divorce didn’t have any bearing on the story at all. Too bad there isn’t some tome we could use to bring him here to answer our questions.
@68: “Vincent Omniveritas” of Cheap Truth commented that, when it came to summoning Lovecraft, “there are things in the Cross Plains Dairy Queen that are best left unspoken.”
@67 Nyarlathotep DOES know, and the knowledge makes him smile with gentle derision. Of course, everything makes him smile with gentle derision. It’s not easy being the Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods and having to deride stuff when you’d just as soon have a beer on the transgalactic patio.
@62: If you really are “the” Ramsey Campbell, it’s a nice surprise to see you commenting here and I look forward to any further HPL-related thoughts you may share. That’s an interesting take on Psycho in light of how important Lovecraft was to Bloch; the “possession by an ancestor” theme was not as common in 1959 as it is now. Mrs. Bates died of poison too, didn’t she.
(Also, I somehow totally missed until now that you had a new Mythos novella out last year, so that’s a nice surprise too.)
Hello! It’s me all right, or at least my remains. I had in mind also that both the Bloch and Lovecraft tales have someone taken over by the spirit of a corpse in the cellar. Indeed, in the novel Bates has occult books, does he not?
To be fair, having occult books might just make Norman a nerdy zine-collecting fan and those are mostly harmless. Also, if you have a corpse, of course you’re going to keep it in the cellar— at least in the Midwest or New England; in California we don’t have a lot of cellars so the corpse is more likely to be in a freezer or a hope chest.
@72 & 73: Bates does indeed have books on the occult, including titles by Aleister Crowley and Margaret Murray. Nothing really face-melting. My understanding was that Norman Bates was directly inspired by the real-life Ed Gein case but if anyone would have a Lovecraftian idea floating around in the back of his mind, it’s Robert Bloch.
Additionally, might Lovecraft have been thinking of Poe’s “Morella” when he wrote “The Thing on the Doorstep”?
SchuylerH @@@@@ 74 Interesting suggestion, re “Morella,” eclipsed among Poe’s dead-wife tales by the widely anthologized “Ligeia.” Given that Morella’s spirit seeks to return not in the body of the second wife but in that of her own daughter, we again get that squicky incest factor, and here twice: Morella stealing the daughter’s body, the narrator (potentially) falling in love with his own child, now (momentarily) his wife.
As for the books, meh, if they won’t melt your face, why bother?
Amusingly enough, when I read this story as a teenager, it never occured to me that Old Man Waite was bodyjumping. I always assumed Asenath had taken over the body of her husband to enjoy the privileges of a man in that time. It made PERFECT sense! Who wouldn’t?
If anyone reading this is part of an acting group and ever thought about putting this story on stage, I have adapted it as a stage-play. Free of charge (it was a labor of love), you can check out a sample on my blog called ‘Pistons and Potions’, and if you want to produce it, email me and I will send you the entire thing. There’s not a lot of Lovecraft’s works that can successfully be brought to the stage, but I think this is one of them.
At the risk of resurrecting a thread that is now even less fresh than poor Asenath, one earlier example is The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham by HG Wells (1896).
Seriously Upton, you live in Witch Haunted Arkham and graduated from the only university in America with a School of Eldritch Horror yet you won’t believe your friend is being possessed his wife?
I wrote a paper combining Shakespeare’s Macbeth and “thing” . Enjoy
Macbeth begins and ends with witchcraft. It begins the witches placing a curse on a sailor and declaring a prophecy about Macbeth’s kingship. It ends with Macbeth dying from a man not of woman born. People accept belief in God even though they don’t fully understand the concept of God. Belief in God doesn’t negate the existence of witchcraft. Both can be true or only one of them can exist, because their concepts are valid individually. If Shakespeare included witchcraft as an integral plot point in Macbeth then it must have real validity and substance in the story.
Macbeth is a humble and righteous man. He is comfortable with what he has and is hesitant to each out and grab for more. In the beginning of the play He returns from battle as a hero. Everyone congratulates and honors him yet he doesn’t gloat or demand recognition. When the witches greet him and proclaim him king he is embarrassed and not exulted. When he is told that he will be the new Thane of Cawdor he says “why do you dress me in borrowed robes” (Shakespeare 7), he doesn’t want any new titles or prestige because he is complacent with what he has.
At this moment is when witchcraft is first used on Macbeth. Witches are agents of chaos and as such they know that if Macbeth rebels against the king then chaos will ensue. The chaos doesn’t come from the rebellion alone but rather from the perpetrator of the act. Because Macbeth is goodhearted if he is pushed to murder the king he would react strongly and violently afterwards. Whereas a person who is more predisposed towards such acts can handle the repercussions better because it isn’t against their basic nature. They knew that Macbeth would go mad and that is why they cast the first hex on him and it is starting to work. In the third scene of act 1 Macbeth starts to ramble about killing the king and Banquo observes that he is in a daze. The curse is starting to overpower Macbeth’s good inclination and plants the idea of killing the king in his head until he finally regains a hold over is thoughts. However, in the fourth scene the evil thoughts come back.
When Lady Macbeth gets the letter from Macbeth of the news of his success and the witches curse her irritation grows yet she sees that her goals are moving closer to her grasp. If she cared for her husband even a little she would at least have expressed some relief in her husband’s safety and pride in his achievement. Instead she conspires to convince him to do the unspeakable act of murder. She is irritated because she is married to a man who will not do whatever it takes to become king, a man who will do only good and if greatness occurs it is incidental. However, she also sees an opportunity to make use of her own witchcraft to further push Macbeth to his breaking point. She also knows that she can’t trust him to kill the king and keep it quiet. So, she summons the evil spirits to give her the power to possess his mind and override Macbeth’s good spirit to kill the king.
When Macbeth arrives to meet Lady Macbeth there is struggle between his good nature and her evil spirit that was strengthened by her witchcraft. Before he greats her he has already decided not to kill the king. However, the combination of the three witches and Lady Macbeth casts doubt in his mind. Her words wrap around his mind like snakes that suffocate his resolve to do good and whisper evil thoughts that start to take over his body. She even mentions that they spoke of killing the king before and there is no evidence in the text of that. He struggles to reassert his good spirit but, in the end, “I am settled, and bend up Each corporal agent to this terrible feat. Away, and mock the time with fairest show. False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (Shakespeare 16). The use of the words “Each corporal agent” (aside from being overly dramatic) signifies the actual possession of her mind over his body.
Similar inconsistencies appear in the second act. Where before Macbeth’s speech was indecisive and rambling, it became confident, clear and concise upon speaking to Banquo. The more Lady Macbeth’s spirit possesses Macbeth, the more her personality is expressed in his words and actions. The floating dagger that he sees is actually a physical dagger. At this point the omen of the owl along with Lady Macbeth’s enchantment has become so powerful that he is not fully aware of the horrible crime he is about to commit. It is as if his spirit has left his body and can no longer grasp the physicality of the world “Is this a dagger I see in front of me, with its
handle pointing toward my hand? (to the dagger) Come, let me hold you. (he grabs at the air in front of him without touching anything) I don’t have you but I can still see you” (Shakespeare 17).
The shock of stabbing the king temporarily dispels the enchantment and Macbeth returns to his body. He awakens with the horror of what he has done and staggers through the castle with bloody daggers. Lady Macbeth sees him and realizes that it is upon her to restore stability and make sure that no one suspects them. Macbeth is in no condition to take care of anything and he is ridden with nervousness, guilt, and fear of what is to come. This causes him to kill the drugged guards, who were supposed to be the scapegoats, in sight of the other nobles.
In the third act Lady Macbeth is firmly entrenched in Macbeth’s body. He is confident and calm. Banquo is too close to the situation and knows too much. There is also the threat of the witches’ prophecy stating that Banquo’s descendants will become king against Lady Macbeth’s aspirations to be king in her husband’s body. There is very similar parallel in how Macbeth speaks to the assassins and how Lady Macbeth convinces Macbeth to kill the king in the second act. In both cases he/she questions the others manhood. In the first act she says “If you weren’t a man, then what kind of animal were you when you first told me you wanted to do this? When you dared to do it, that’s when you were a man. And if you go one step further by doing what you dared to do before, you’ll be that much more the man” (Shakespeare 15). In the third act Macbeth says “Are you so patient and forgiving that you’re going to let him off the hook? Are you so pious that you would pray for this man and his children, a man who has pushed you toward an early grave and put your family in poverty forever?” (Shakespeare 31). In both quotes he/she is questioning the others hesitancy and lack of desire to take control which they characterize as manly.
We also see that Lady Macbeth who is cunning and competent suddenly becomes ignorant of her own plans. When Macbeth is telling her to charm Banquo to distract him from Macbeth’s plans to kill him she says “What are you going to do?” (Shakespeare 34). Macbeth who didn’t know to throw the daggers away became the schemer and Lady Macbeth who was the schemer became innocent and naïve. This is more evident when Macbeth says “You seem surprised at my words, but don’t question me yet. Bad deeds force you to commit more bad deeds. So please, come with me” (Shakespeare 34). The woman who offered to kill her own child isn’t surprised by bad deeds, rather Macbeth’s personality is and he is seeing through Lady Macbeth’s eyes.
However, the transfer wasn’t complete and as Macbeth returned to his body the horrible guilt and revulsion returned and he saw Banquo’s ghost. He can’t help but to make a scene in front of the other lords which causes them to doubt his leadership and sanity. They also start questioning his innocence regarding King Duncan’s murder. He realizes this when he notices Lord Macduff’s absence from the party and becomes suspicious.
Macbeth also feels his wife’s possessing his body and goes to the only people who can help him, the three witches. He goes to gain advice on how to break his wife’s curse. What he doesn’t realize is they bewitched him first to be the lord of chaos and cause a peaceful Scotland to become a war zone. Much like Aries above the battlefields of Troy, their master feeds off chaos and destruction. As Hecate, the head witch, goes to gather the drop of water from the moon to strengthen the enchantment the other three witches continue leading Macbeth down the road of chaos and destruction. To the witches’ surprise when they see Macbeth they sense Lady Macbeth’s enchantment along with their own. They take advantage of this by augmenting Lady Macbeth’s enchantment and completing the transfer of her spirit and personality into Macbeth’s body. This is evident in the end of the encounter when he sees the vision with Banquo’s ghost and when we next see Macbeth the witches are gone and Lennox is giving him a message. Macbeth wouldn’t normally kill women and children even in war and he sets out to attack Macduff’s castle and kill all who reside there, men women and children.
When we next see Lady Macbeth in act five the insanity has completely set in. She walks around the castle constantly rubbing her hands because of the spot of blood that won’t go away and ranting about all the bloodshed she has caused. Macbeth is stuck in her body and can no longer carry the weight of the guilt for all evil he has caused. The killing of Macduff’s family finally broke him and he agonizes over the defeat of his weak mind against the strength of Lady Macbeth and blames himself for everything that has occurred as a consequence of that. He can take it no longer and kills himself.
When Lady Macbeth’s body finally dies all Lady Macbeth has to say is “Life is nothing more than an illusion. It’s like a poor actor who struts and worries for his hour on the
stage and then is never heard from again” (Shakespeare 67). It is merely a distraction in her plans to defend the castle. She believes herself to be invincible. The witches have convinced her that no one born of a woman can kill her so despite the large army marching against her she believes that she will be victorious. However, in the end her head is cut off and paraded around for all to see. The witch’s prophecy has fooled her into believing her immortality and she is killed, body and spirit, shamed with the name of Macbeth becoming a curse when it should have been a blessing.
In the end, Lord Macduff and the other lords were left to rebuild all the destruction lady Macbeth and the witches has caused. Chaos would reign for a while until the good people of Scotland were able to maintain a peaceful environment for all. As for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth he was the sleepless sailor and she was the sailor’s wife who would not share her chestnuts.
I have a feeling anyone who was in old Ephraim’s position would also be someone who wouldn’t care too much about committing such minor peccadiloes as mere incest. After all, let’s see, body stealing, mind rape, personality manipulation, etc etc….come to think of it, it’s not that astonishing that old HPL didn’t much like sex. Nobody who thought up all of that would.
Just Alan Moore focused the story from that aspect on Providence