Horror Polaris: Lovecraft, Dickens, Poe, and the Horror of Polar Exploration

1 H. P. Lovecraft’s Polar Horrors

H. P. Lovecraft twice mentions Inuit – “Esquimaux” – in his fiction, on both occasions in racist terms and tones of repulsion. This may be merely unsurprising for a writer well known for implicating overtly racist themes in his stories of cosmic horror. Yet most of the obvious instances of racism in Lovecraft’s work bear equally obvious relations to his own sense of identity as a white Anglo-American man: the insidious infiltration of New York City by indistinctly non-white illegal immigrants in The Horror at Red Hook; the fear of slave revolt implicit in the figure of the shoggoths of At the Mountains of Madness; the nightmarish prospect of indigenous vengeance in The Doom That Came to Sarnath. In this context, indigenous peoples of the Arctic seem peculiar as a source of fear and revulsion on Lovecraft’s part. Apart from a two-year sojourn in New York City, Lovecraft lived his entire life in Providence, Rhode Island, and his travels were largely confined to the urban centers of eastern North America. To him, these people were an abstraction, a concept he could only have approached through reading and writing. They seemed to exist in a world utterly alien to his – a world, moreover, whose ideological significance to Lovecraft’s was uncertain and unstable. How does the writer in Providence relate to the polar extremes of the globe, and the people who live there? And why does he seem compelled to return to these subjects? Investigating these questions, we soon see that Lovecraft’s use of the polar regions in his writing forms part of a history of Anglo-American thinking and writing on the subject of polar exploration, which includes the work of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe. Both in fact and fiction, for all these writers the (Ant)arctic becomes a place of horror, at the end of which a white dream of exploration and domination finally goes terrifyingly wrong.

Lovecraft makes his first reference to Inuit in the early story “Polaris” (published in 1918), a relatively obscure entry among his works. The second occurs in “The Call of Cthulhu” (published in 1928), undoubtedly the most culturally visible Lovecraft tale. These are two very different stories told through widely diverging narrative techniques: the former dreamlike, personal and surreal, the latter detached, meticulous, almost pedantic in the narrative it documents. Yet both contain themes that we can find woven throughout the rest of Lovecraft’s oeuvre, and both contain peculiarly specific references to Inuit.

The overriding theme of “Polaris” is that of loss of identity, a common element in Lovecraft’s works. The narrator begins by recounting dreams of a fantastic and beautiful city, and in the course of the narrative his voice is taken over by the denizen of that city he dreams himself to be. The dreamer becomes the dreamed – and yet this is a double loss of identity, for the dreamed character finds himself in a world in which his own identity is meaningless:

But still these shadows of my dream deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call ‘Esquimaux.’ (Lovecraft 1994a, 35)

The narrator cannot seem to put the pieces of his own story together to see that these “squat yellow creatures” are evidently the descendants of the racial enemies against whom his people fought in the dream-country of Lomar: “squat, hellish, yellow fiends” known as “Inutos” (Lovecraft 1994a, 33). We can gather from these names that Lovecraft himself was aware of the term Inuit and was also aware that “Eskimo” was a name applied to the Inuit by outsiders. The narrator, in the dream-land of Lomar, had been tasked with keeping watch for the advance of the “Inuto” horde on his own city of “tall, grey-eyed” men. In this he was thwarted by the evil influence of the Pole Star itself, which cursed him to sleep for “six and 20 thousand years” – in the meantime, Lomar fell and was forgotten, buried under the Arctic ice.

Polaris, therefore, appeals to a certain Spenglerian conservatism: the men of Lomar stand for all that is good, but this goodness is doomed to decline and fall like any other civilization. There is no optimistic vision of an ever-expanding white empire to be found in Lovecraft’s work; just as all his good-natured protagonists are doomed to lose their sanity and their identity, the Anglo-American culture that, for him, represents everything good will inevitably collapse. In this view of history, nothing can substantially change, for every apparent change is merely a momentary oscillation when viewed in the long term. The men of Lomar, after all, have no traditional narrative of having inhabited that land since time immemorial: they are themselves immigrants, whose “ancestors, when forced to move southward from Zobna before the advance of the great ice-sheet (even as our descendants must some day flee from the land of Lomar), valiantly and victoriously swept aside the hairy, long-armed cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way” (Lovecraft 1994a, 34). The narrator’s guilt at his own failure to keep watch seems therefore to mask over a more historically obvious guilt: by what moral standard can the men of Lomar lament their own violent end when Lomar itself was established through the extermination of another group? In both cases, morality is considered to be a merely locally applicable concept, one that belongs to white men alone, that dies with them. The ancestors of the men of Lomar were just in their extermination of the Gnophkehs since the latter were (implicitly subhuman or non-human) cannibals. On the other hand, it is only just that their descendants be wiped out by the Inutos; not by the standards of some universally valid morality, but due to their own particular moral quality: “the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest” (Lovecraft 1994a, 33). As with his surprising failure to recognize the descendants of the Inutos in the present-day “Esquimaux,” the hypocrisy of the narrator’s ideology seems to be overstated and carefully engineered.

The fear of indigenous vengeance was a theme that still lurked within the Anglo-American psyche during Lovecraft’s lifetime. In 1890, the year of Lovecraft’s birth, soldiers of the United States Army killed three hundred Lakota in the Wounded Knee massacre. In response, L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz series of children’s fantasy books, wrote a pair of editorials in the newspaper he owned, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in which he called for the total annihilation of the indigenous people of the United States in particularly striking terms: “Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth” (quoted in Liguore 2017, 79). Baum’s openly held sense of guilt and self-conscious hypocrisy seem to prefigure Lovecraft’s own treatment of these fears. Indigenous vengeance and the desire for a total extermination of colonized peoples is the main theme of an early story written around the same time as “Polaris”, “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (published in 1920). In this narrative, the recently arrived humans of Sarnath exterminate the non-human beings of Ib and build their own city over its ruins, but thousands of years later are themselves overthrown and exterminated by these beings, who have been resurrected according to a supernatural curse. As with many of Lovecraft’s other descriptions of squishy, damp, soft, porous monsters, there is an obvious genital overtone to the description of these “voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears,” “weak” and “soft as jelly” (1994b, 50). The men of Sarnath appear initially victorious over both indigeneity and vaginality, only to later fall victim to the return of the repressed. And although the narrative voice appears to identify with them rather than with the beings of Ib, the narrator appears nonetheless to take some pleasure in their downfall, which is described with a certain amount of glee.

These themes of civilizational decline and fall, which loomed so large for Lovecraft in the years immediately following the First World War, seem to have faded in importance somewhat by the time of “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1928. Here Inuit appear in Lovecraft’s writing with slightly more nuance, but not more than he feels the subject deserves. Lovecraft’s narrator approaches the Inuit world entirely through writing, much as Lovecraft does himself – in fact, through multiple layers of writing. The first two thirds of the narrative consist of the narrator’s attempt to organize various written and other materials he finds in a box as part of the estate of his recently deceased granduncle, “George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island” (Lovecraft 1928, 160). Among these is a written account of a meeting of eminent American archaeologists in St. Louis, at which Professor Angell was in attendance. The conference takes a turn for the weird when Louisiana policeman John Raymond Legrasse arrives with a peculiar statuette depicting the eponymous Cthulhu, which is familiar to one of the archaeologists. One “William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note” remembers having seen a similar image among

a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. (Lovecraft 1928, 166; original emphasis)

In turn, this formula turns out to be familiar to Legrasse, who has heard it from members of a similar cult he discovered in the swamplands of Louisiana. The uncanny and disquieting nature of this connection lies in the implication that these are two manifestations of an ancient and globally distributed organization dedicated to the worship of the dreaded octopus-headed Cthulhu: “There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart” (Lovecraft 1928, 166). It is made absolutely clear throughout “The Call of Cthulhu”, however, that it is only possible for this cult to arise among non-white people. Greenland and Louisiana are presented as a pair of equal and opposite extremes relative to the axis of Providence. The “region” of swampland inhabited by the Louisiana cultists is “one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.” Legrasse and his fellow policemen are themselves, therefore, explorers in this region. The swamp is associated with disease, containing “[u]gly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss,” “malformed tree[s],” “fungous islet[s]” (Lovecraft 1928, 167). After being apprehended by the police, the cultists are found to be “men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type” (Lovecraft 1928, 168). Later, Professor Angell himself dies under suspicious circumstances after being “jostled by a nautical-looking Negro,” implied to be one of these racially inferior cultists (Lovecraft 1928, 160). If we recall the description of imagined Inuit in “Polaris”, we see that for Lovecraft the Arctic is also a place of disease: its inhabitants are “blighted by the cold,” and their “squat, yellow” appearance is implicitly malformed in comparison to the narrator’s “tall, grey-eyed” countrymen.

There is a significant element of this scene, however, that is passed off as a minor detail: Professor Webb is said to have encountered the Cthulhu-worshiping “Esquimaux” while on “a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth” (Lovecraft 1928, 166). What Webb was really looking for was evidence of a lost white civilization of the Arctic, the Norse settlement in Greenland which existed between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. The settlement was gradually abandoned in the 1400s, for reasons that remain unclear, but that seem to have involved a variety of environmental factors (Arnborg 2015). After the settlement’s abandonment, the ancestors of the present-day Greenlandic Inuit began to spread out along the coast. Lovecraft had clearly done some research on this subject, also evident in his use of the words tornasuk and angekok, corruptions of the Inuktitut tuurngaq and angakkuq. It is impossible to tell from these brief details how much Lovecraft really knew about the history of Greenland, but it is curious to observe the way in which he repeats – probably unknowingly – a trope that goes back to the Middle Ages. In 1364, a scribe at Bergen Cathedral in Norway recorded the account of a priest named Ívar Bárðarson, who claimed to have visited the Western Settlement of Greenland and found it abandoned by the Norse settlers and in the hands of the skrælingjar (a Norse term for all the non-Norse people they encountered west of Iceland) (Finnur 1930, 30). Ívar had been appointed by the lawspeaker in Garðar, the site of the episcopal seat in Greenland, to attempt to drive the Inuit out of the area. The recording of this story in the Bergen chronicle seems to have been intended to inspire a military expedition to the Greenland settlement, to eliminate the Inuit presence. But this North Atlantic crusade never materialized, and in the meantime the Norse settlement in Greenland withered away. Dano-Norwegian expeditions were mounted to find the lost Greenland colony, first in 1605, later in 1721. But these explorers found no white Christians, only Inuit. The latter of these expeditions led to the establishment of a mission at what is now Nuuk, and with this the Danish colonization of Greenland began in earnest.

Professor Webb fails in his quest to find the remnants of white civilization in Greenland, finding Cthulhu-worshiping Inuit instead of Norse runic inscriptions; just as the Dano-Norwegian explorers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries failed to find Norse survivors in Greenland, only ruins and Inuit, as Ívar Barðarson had found at the Western Settlement centuries before; just as the land of Lomar ultimately falls, and its white civilization is replaced by “Esquimaux.” In the same way, Lovecraft envisions his own Anglo-American civilization eventually dying out and being replaced by its perceived racial inferiors. The image of Norse ruins traversed by Inuit hunters was evidently an inspiration for this theme. In “The Call of Cthulhu”, the cultists consider Cthulhu to be a Messiah, who will be resurrected when “the stars c[o]me right again.” By that time, moreover, “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy” (Lovecraft 1928, 170); that is to say, from Lovecraft’s point of view, mankind will have ceased to be white. As with the men of Lomar in “Polaris”, Lovecraft seems to interpret the historicity of Western civilization as horrific in itself. A world in which the ideological configurations he knows have passed away is a world in which morality itself has died, and it was also the state the world was in before white civilization appeared to impose its will upon that world, for however momentary a period of time. Even at the time of its flourishing, Lovecraft’s Anglo-American colonial civilization can still find the signs of its inevitable doom: in the Arctic, where colonialism goes to die.

This theme of white scientists meeting with failure and insanity in the Arctic would later be revived and transposed to Earth’s other pole in At the Mountains of Madness (written in 1931 and originally published in 1936). In contrast to the disturbing, menacing indigenous presence in the Arctic, the Antarctic setting of this later story seems at first to be a place of perfect solitude for Lovecraft’s scientists to explore. The protagonists (including the narrator) are a team of researchers from Lovecraft’s fictional Miskatonic University of Massachusetts, and like most of Lovecraft’s heroes, each of them has a conspicuously English name: Dyer, Danforth, Lake, Gedney, Atwood, Pabodie – the last is likely intended to evoke Elizabeth Pabodie, held to be the first white child born in New England. What is ultimately discovered in Antarctica, however, is a disturbingly pre-human city built by the “Great Old Ones,” beings with radically non-human (though strikingly phallic) bodies, described in meticulous detail by the biologist Lake. When Lake’s advance party unearths a few hibernating Old Ones, the creatures awake and immediately slaughter the hapless humans, seemingly in order to dissect them for scientific study. Later Dyer and Danforth venture into the city itself and learn of the history of the Great Old Ones through a series of stone carvings. The carvings depict the arrival of the Great Old Ones from outer space, and their creation of life on Earth as a means of their own subsistence (it is implied that the evolution of humans was merely an unintended byproduct of this process). Unlike the men of Lomar or European colonists in the Americas, it seems that the Great Old Ones can make a convincing claim to being the first to settle the land they inhabit. Yet later carvings indicate that even this is not the case: there is a suggestion of an indigenous presence, so horrifying that it cannot be directly depicted, associated with the gigantic mountains to the west of the city: a place “shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil” (Lovecraft 2005a, 68). The Great Old Ones create a slave race of creatures called “shoggoths,” “multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community” (Lovecraft 2005a, 59–60). The shoggoths are disgusting “viscous masses” that naturally fill the human viewers with “horror and loathing” (Lovecraft 2005a, 64). These slave creatures over time attain “a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence” and mount a revolt (Lovecraft 2005a, 64), killing their phallic masters in a manner that leaves them “headless” and “slime-coated” (Lovecraft 2005a, 65). In the end it is implied that the Great Old Ones succumbed to a later slave revolt, as the carvings abruptly deteriorate and come to an end. Dyer and Danforth come upon the Old Ones who had slain their companions, themselves slain in a manner that has left them headless and slimy. In the story’s hysterical climax, the two humans must themselves exit the city pursued by a shoggoth. Danforth, who inadvisably peers beyond the huge mountains west of the city as the pair retreat by airplane, goes completely insane from a vision that seems to imply that the shoggoths are in league with the unmentionable indigenous presence of that region. In the end, the fate of the Great Old Ones is much like that of the men of Lomar on the other side of the globe: for all its grandiose achievements, their civilization is only temporary, and they are each inevitably replaced by their racial Other.

All this leads the narrator Dyer to a shocking conclusion about the Great Old Ones:

They had not been even savages – for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch – perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia … poor Lake, poor Gedney … and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last – what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn – whatever they had been, they were men! (Lovecraft 2005a, 92)

In a dizzying mise-en-abyme, we see that the Old Ones are themselves white scientists who conduct their own failed Antarctic expedition, seeking the lost remnants of their once mighty civilization among its ruins, only to meet their gruesome, emasculating end at the appendages of their erstwhile slaves. Dyer’s emotional investment in them is remarkable: he can excuse the dismemberment of his own human colleagues by these beings because he can identify with them in a way that is impossible for him to consider with the shoggoths. The lowest common denominator for being a “man,” it seems, is to exist in relation to “savages.” Even to be horribly brutalized is preferable to the upending of this racial order – as long as one is being brutalized by a fellow “man.” After all, they do nothing that we would not do in their place.

2 Polar Exploration, Cannibalism, and Dickens and Collins’ The Frozen Deep

For Lovecraft, Earth’s cold polar regions are places where white Anglo-American civilization meets its end. Death may coincide with this end, but its primary form is madness, loss of identity, emasculation, and racial replacement. Though he does not address it directly, we can gather that Lovecraft sees this end in his interpretation of the fate of the Norse Greenland colony. Yet there is a more recent and far more obvious example of a colonial expedition finding spectacular failure in the Arctic, an event which became a source of considerable trauma in the Anglosphere, with a lasting impact that would have been felt still in Lovecraft’s lifetime. In May 1845, the British naval vessels Erebus and Terror set out from Greenhithe, Kent, captained by Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames respectively, under the overall command of John Franklin, himself already a famous Arctic explorer in spite of the disastrous results of his previous expeditions into northern Canada. The mission of this expedition was to chart a western route from Europe to Asia via the Arctic, the so-called “Northwest Passage.” Erebus and Terror were encountered by the whalers Prince of Wales and Enterprise in Baffin Bay in July 1845, and subsequently vanished from written history. After two years had passed with no word from the expedition, the Admiralty began sending rescue missions in search of the lost explorers. The imagination of the British public was seized by this mystery that was increasingly turning out to be a tragedy, as evidenced in the popular ballad Lady Franklin’s Lament, renditions of which continue to be recorded into the twenty-first century. By 1854, enough evidence had been gathered to conclude that all hands aboard the two ships had been lost. It was not until 1859 that a written message was found in a cairn on King William Island indicating that the crews had abandoned the ships and set out over the ice, a desperate journey in which they had evidently perished. It was not until 2014 and 2016 that the wrecks of Erebus and Terror, respectively, were finally located (for a recent overview of the expedition’s fate, see Byard 2021).

Just as with Lovecraft’s Arctic colonists and explorers, however, it was not death itself that would inflict the greatest wound on the English colonial psyche as a result of the lost Franklin expedition. In 1854, Scottish surgeon John Rae, a Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, collected second-hand oral testimonies from Inuit who told of a group of non-Inuit men who had died of starvation near the mouth of the Back River, and these testimonies indicated that the men had resorted to cannibalism. The Inuit were in possession of a number of items that had come from Erebus and Terror, which seemed to Rae to lend considerable weight to their reports. Rae reported his findings in all frankness to the Admiralty, and this report was published as-is in the London Times on October 23, 1854. The notion that British sailors had resorted to cannibalism incited much outraged denial, with the most extensive and vociferous retorts coming from none other than Charles Dickens. Dickens immediately set about writing a series of seven articles challenging Rae’s account in the weekly magazine he edited, Household Words. As Lillian Nayder (2019, 65–6) points out, Household Words had already published a good deal of work that depicted Arctic exploration in particular as a pinnacle of English civilization; in spite of the obvious economic and strategic importance in finding a Northwest Passage, Dickens and his readers saw this exploration as a purely scientific, even selfless endeavor. One piece published in Household Words supporting this point of view was Henry Morley’s article “Unspotted Snow,” which was included in an 1853 issue of the magazine. For Morley, “[t]he history of Arctic enterprise is stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain,” and “men who are elsewhere enemies and rivals hold Arctic ground […] to be sacred to the noblest spirit of humanity” (1853, 241). Englishmen are thus thought to find their own fastidious whiteness in the Arctic, a reflection of their own nobility. As Nayder (2019, 65) argues, Morley likely has class differences between sailors and officers in mind when he speaks of “enemies” putting aside their differences in the pursuit of Arctic exploration. The beautifully sterile landscape of the Arctic should therefore have the effect of reinforcing the Victorian social hierarchy, rendering it harmonious and stable.

It is not the death of the explorers that threatens all this, but cannibalism. Dickens, as we shall see, was perfectly happy to let his explorers die as long as they didn’t eat each other. His denial of Rae’s reports was swift, lengthy, and explosive, and for him there was an obvious target on which to focus his ire: the Inuit witnesses. For Dickens, it hardly needed to be said that the attribution of cannibalism to white men must be an encrypted admission of guilt when coming from indigenous mouths:

Lastly, no man can, with any show of reason, undertake to affirm that this sad remnant of Franklin’s gallant band were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves. It is impossible to form an estimate of the character of any race of savages, from their deferential behaviour to the white man while he is strong. The mistake has been made again and again; and the moment the white man has appeared in the new aspect of being weaker than the savage, the savage has changed and sprung upon him. There are pious persons who, in their practice, with a strange inconsistency, claim for every child born to civilisation all innate depravity, and for every savage born to the woods and wilds all innate virtue. We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man – lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race, plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless, and dying – has of the gentleness of Esquimaux nature. (Dickens 1854, 362)

It is obvious to Dickens that Inuit, being “savages,” would immediately attack any white men they found in a weak and vulnerable state. This was a widespread notion in Dickens’ day; in this he was simply repeating a line already articulated in a leader in the Times responding to Rae’s report, which simply concluded that the Inuit were liars “like all savages” (Stone 1987, 8). Moreover, cannibalism is a practice that belongs properly to the “savage” world of non-white peoples – to the “hairy, long-armed” Gnophkehs, not to the men of Lomar. If the accusation of cannibalism is coming from Inuit, it is all the more obvious to Dickens that this accusation is really a repressed confession.

Yet racial alterity is not the only aspect evoked by cannibalism in the Victorian mind. As Nayder (2019, 66) stresses, “Rae’s vision of the explorers cannibalizing one another conjured up frightening images of mutiny and class war.” In both Dickens’ and Rae’s writings on the subject, it seems to be assumed that it would be the common sailors who would end up eating the officers. Thus, none of the interlocutors in this conversation appear to entertain the notion that the charge of cannibalism would have been a stain directly on the reputation of Franklin, or of Crozier or Fitzjames. Rather, the horror of cannibalism proceeds from the image of “a cannibal revolution, in which the members of the upper class feed off their workers until the workers, in turn, cannibalize the masters” (Nayder 2019, 66). Rae’s responses to his critics defended the character and reliability of his Inuit sources, but also cast some aspersions on the behavior of the English sailors – not Franklin and his officers, that is, but their lower-class subordinates (Nayder 2019, 67; Stone 1987, 13). In the image of cannibalism, the Victorian bourgeoisie saw the threat of a more widespread mutiny, of a general reversal of the proper order of society. Implicit in this fear is an unacknowledged awareness that this order is only “proper” insofar as it is existent – that it is merely arbitrary and has to be imposed. In the end, the horror Dickens finds in the Arctic is the same that Lovecraft finds in the Antarctic, the horror of the shoggoths, of being “sucked to a ghastly headlessness” by one’s inferiors.

Undeterred, or indeed spurred on by Rae’s defenses, Dickens set about replacing the unacceptable Inuit account with a white fantasy in which the lost explorers return to their loved ones back home, and/or die valiantly in discharging their duty. This was The Frozen Deep, a play Dickens coauthored with his frequent collaborator Wilkie Collins – although Dickens claimed much of the credit for the script, it seems that Collins did most of the work, and also revised the text four years after Dickens’ death to bring it closer to his own original script (Nayder 2019, 63–4). Dickens and Collins did not simply reverse the charges of murder and savagery onto the Inuit as Dickens had done in his earlier articles; The Frozen Deep presents an Arctic that is blissfully free of human life, in which the white explorers are alone with themselves. Richard Wardour, one of the play’s two main protagonists, highlights another pleasing absence himself:

“Good-morning, Mr. Wardour,” [Crayford] said. “We may congratulate each other on the chance of leaving this horrible place.”

“You may think it horrible,” Wardour retorted; “I like it.”

“Like it? Good Heavens! why?”

“Because there are no women here.” (Collins 2004, 40)

Again, we find a peculiar entanglement between the indigenous and the female in the colonial mind. For Dickens and Collins, the polar regions eradicate women, allowing the manliness of the English explorers to flourish. But although Wardour makes this statement as a generality, he really has a specific woman in mind. Back in England, Wardour had been jilted by the object of his desire, Clara Burnham, and set out with the expedition not realizing that her fiancé, Frank Aldersley, was one of his fellow officers. With this love triangle, and the swapping of the action between the Arctic (in which there are only men) and a domestic English setting (populated mostly by women), the authors ground their story in concerns that would have been familiar and relevant to their audience. Upon discovering that his love rival is trapped with him in the frozen wilderness, Wardour plots his revenge, but in his last moments he is shown heroically carrying Aldersley to safety, depositing him at Clara’s feet, and then falling down dead himself. Wardour may not have been perfect to begin with, but the Arctic has transformed him into a hero; the “enemies” have put aside their differences in the Arctic, just as Henry Morley envisioned. Most remarkable of all is the fact that the characters of Wardour and Aldersley were written to be performed by Dickens and Collins themselves, respectively. Dickens was thus willing not only to see the English explorers die rather than succumb to the “last resource,” he was even willing to perform that ideal death on their behalf.

If there is an antagonist in this play seemingly free of any indigenous presence, it is undoubtedly the Scottish nursemaid Esther, who Dickens claimed to be his own personal invention (Nayder 2019, 69). As Nayder stresses, Dickens was writing in an English milieu that tended to treat Scots as a colonized, “savage” people, doubly prevented from reaching the same heights of civilization as their English conquerors both by their racial characteristics and by the inhospitable climate in which they lived. Esther is intractable and gloomy, subverting the proper chain of command with her undue influence on her English employers. She also has a magical gift of second sight (an addition to her character made by Collins [Nayder 2019, 90]), and relays visions of the lost expedition to the anxious English wives left at home, indicating that Wardour and Aldersley are doomed to die in the Arctic. Though the impressionable Clara is deeply affected by these visions, in the end they prove to be inaccurate: Esther has the power to see the conflict between Wardour and Aldersley, but she is unable to predict the final reconciliation effected by the noble atmosphere of the Arctic. When Wardour arrives with his romantic rival in his arms, another of the wives, Mrs. Crayford, angrily demands of Clara: “which of us is right? I who believed in the mercy of God? or you who believed in a dream?” (Collins 2004, 99). Esther is thus depicted as a religious as well as racial outsider, whose pessimistic superstitions are inferior to an optimistic trust in God (who surely is on the side of the English). Esther’s Scottishness is clearly aimed at that of John Rae, who in Dickens’ view should have believed in the nobility of the British sailors no matter what evidence he was presented with. Dickens calls Rae’s loyalties into question by equating him with his Inuit sources, and yet this is not enough: he also has to turn Rae into a woman. Rae as woman is eradicated in Dickens’ ideal Arctic, where, as he says himself in his performance as Wardour, ideally “there are no women.”

3 Edgar Allen Poe’s Antarctic Blackness and Whiteness

Given the traumatic reaction aroused by the report of cannibalism in the lost Franklin expedition, it is curious to note that a piece of fiction dealing with these very themes of mutiny, cannibalism, and polar exploration was published seven years before Erebus and Terror set out on their final voyage. This was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which Lovecraft, moreover, directly quotes in At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft’s citations of Poe bring that work into the fold of his own mythology; Poe’s novella is mentioned by Dyer as a “disturbing and enigmatical” tale, possibly based on “unsuspected and forbidden sources,” mentioned in a similar context to Lovecraft’s fictional Necronomicon, a tome of occult knowledge which features in many of his own stories. Poe’s first mention in At the Mountains of Madness, moreover, comes upon the Miskatonic expedition’s sighting of the Antarctic volcanos Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror, prompting the impressionable young Danforth to recall the “Mount Yaanek” of Poe’s poem Ulalume (which in turn leads Dyer to recall Arthur Gordon Pym) (Poe 1910, 20–3). These mountains had been named during the first polar expedition of Erebus and Terror, under the command of James Clark Ross (Francis Crozier had also captained Terror on this voyage). By Lovecraft’s time, the namesakes of these mountains were lying at the bottom of the sea on the other side of the globe, the memory of their mission indelibly stained by the charge of cannibalism. This history looms large over Lovecraft’s scene, and although he does not mention it himself, his narrator is reminded of Poe’s fictional tale of cannibalism.

It is the second of Arthur Gordon Pym’s two halves that most obviously reflects the Anglo-American racial fears of Poe’s time; it was this part of the story that, for example, preoccupied Toni Morrison, who stressed that “no early American writer is more important to the concept of American Africanism” than Poe (1992, 52). This second half involves the exploration by an Anglo-American crew of the fictional archipelago of “Tsalal” in the Southern Ocean, a region little known by the time of Arthur Gordon Pym’s publication in 1838. Though various expeditions had sighted the coastline of what we now call Antarctica, the extent of the continent had not been well established. Poe’s Tsalal is inhabited by people with perfectly black skin who conform to Dickens’ later image of “savages” in nearly every respect. The Tsalalians are stupid, superstitious, disorganized, primitive, and dirty. Most important of all, however, they are duplicitous and treacherous, drawing the white explorers into a trap with overtures of friendship and then massacring them – much as Dickens supposed the Inuit had behaved toward Franklin and his crews. The most peculiar aspect of the Tsalalians is their taboo against whiteness: anything white or pale, from an egg to a tooth to the explorers’ own skin, inspires fear, revulsion, and ultimately hatred. Conversely, everything the explorers expect to be white – even eggs and teeth – turns out to be black in Tsalal. Poe’s intentions in the Tsalal narrative are infamously cryptic, but he seems to aim at a sort of Swiftian allegory. The Tsalalians activate Poe’s own culture’s fear of slave revolt, but as a number of commentators have noted, his allegory goes some way toward deconstructing and even ridiculing that fear (Kennedy and Weissberg 2001, 251–2; Nelson 1992, 92; Worley 1994, 242; Edwards 2003, 4). As Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (2017, 55) puts it most succinctly, the Tsalalians “are a reflection of the crew members in black face, a negative image of the whites’ own deceptiveness, savagery, and, importantly, prejudice” (original emphasis).

With all this in mind, it is also noteworthy that Poe’s cannibals in Arthur Gordon Pym are not the Tsalalians, but Pym and his comrades themselves. In the first half of the story, the narrator stows away on a ship which is overtaken by a mutiny, and subsequently wrecked in a violent storm. The mutiny bears all the racialized fears we would expect to see at this point, led as it is by a monstrous Black cleaver-brandishing cook – a character who violates both the racial hierarchy of the time and the ship’s specific chain of command. Pym describes the cook’s execution of crew members as “butchery,” conjuring up the Black specter of cannibalism (Poe 1994, 86). Yet the cook is not the cannibal of the story either. In the end, four men are left clinging to the drifting hulk that remains after the storm: Pym himself; his weak and sickly childhood friend Augustus; Parker, one of the mutineers; and Peters, who had helped Pym and Augustus overcome the mutineers. Peters is said to be “the son of an Indian squaw of the tribe of Upsarokas” (Poe 1994, 88), and with his strength and presence of mind he repeatedly bails Pym out of various troubles. As both Weinstock (2017, 56) and Edwards (2003, 11) suggest, Poe seems to dwell on the arbitrariness of racial signifiers through the character of Peters, who at times is treated as another white man, while at other times his alterity is emphasized. It is Parker, the mutineer (implicitly white, as Pym does not specify his race), who first dares to bring up the prospect of cannibalism, “that one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others” (Poe 1994, 132). Yet, although Pym vehemently opposes this plan, it turns out that Augustus and Peters “had long secretly entertained the same fearful idea which Parker had been merely the first to broach” (Poe 1994, 133). Ultimately, the mutineer has to be sacrificed for articulating this desire: Parker is the one who draws the short straw, and Pym joins Peters and Augustus in eating him. After being rescued by the Jane Guy and brought along on its voyage of Antarctic exploration, Pym and Peters simply forget about their cannibalistic episode, displaying an amnesia which Pym self-servingly describes as a “species of partial oblivion … brought about by sudden transition” (Poe 1994, 148). It is only by means of this selective amnesia that the actual cannibal Pym is able to find himself repulsed by the “savagery” of the Tsalalians.

4 Conclusions

The horror of mutiny and cannibalism that Dickens sought so neurotically to erase from his Arctic had, we see, already been deconstructed in Poe’s Antarctic, dissected and displayed in all its contradictory glory. The Anglo-American bourgeois male ego sets out for the polar regions on a journey of self-discovery and self-development, dreaming of finally finding its long-sought ideal form in freezing solitude and sterility. What it finds instead are the revenants of its history, the ugly byproducts of the atrocities that ego was built on, that it cannot do without. It encounters this first of all in the simple fact that there is already human life in the Arctic. Inuit figure here as reminders of indigeneity, of the Western colonial encounter with the world and everything it entailed; not only the guilt of past injustices, but the knowledge of the West’s own historicity, the notion that its “civilization” is not eternal, but has a historical origin and will “fall” and be replaced.

While it is easy enough to see how issues of race and colonialism might be divulged in these narratives of disastrous polar exploration, it is more difficult to explain the consistent appearance of themes of gender and sexuality throughout them. If Lovecraft – who was given to loudly declaring his complete indifference toward sexuality (Sederholm 2016, 135–8) – is at his most self-conscious when he is annihilating his obliviously racist narrators, he seems to be at his least self-conscious when divulging his own sexual neuroses. Approaches to Lovecraft’s sexuality have tended to put him on the patient’s couch and focus all too narrowly on his own biography in their attempts to explain his antipathy toward sex and women (e.g. de Camp 1975; Nelson 2001; Sederholm 2016). Yet in the context of Dickens and Collins’ imagined Arctic and its own relation to gender, we can see that Lovecraft’s attitude is rooted in a certain ideological history rather than solely in individual psychology. In Lovecraft, the fear of women is not reducible to the fear of sex, nor vice versa; rather, the two fears form a shifting series of constellations. As Carl Sederholm (2016, 139) argues, Lovecraft’s antipathy toward sex is to a great degree an antipathy toward “the fact of the body itself.” His wish is “to separate the sexual from the nonsexual, the body from the mind, and the spirit from the flesh” (Sederholm 2016, 140). However, although Sederholm assumes that this attitude stems from a duality that is universal to all human beings and implicitly ahistorical, it seems rather that Lovecraft’s notion of “human” as “Man” is a historical, cultural inheritance. This “Man” is abstraction, a pure and ideally incorporeal observer, and in this white purity he ought to be able to find his reflection in polar exploration, “stainless as the Arctic snows, clean to the core as an ice mountain.” Ultimately, what is horrifying is Man’s failure to see that self in the supposed sterility of the polar regions – he sees instead everything he sought to escape. That the focus remains firmly fixed on Man himself would seem to militate against “posthumanist” readings of Lovecraft, which cast his self-professed “cosmic indifferentism” as a potentially emancipatory form of anthrodecentrism. Jed Mayer (2016, 117), for instance, argues that Lovecraft’s inclusion of “human beings” as well as “negroes” in a list of animals he has “no active dislike for” – as part of an essay on his own love of cats – could somehow pose “an implicit challenge to human exceptionalism.” Yet, Lovecraft was repulsed by the animality of humanity, and in his correspondence he repeatedly characterized his antipathy toward sex as an antipathy toward traits his own body shared with those of non-human animals, and with other humans he considered inferior to him.^[1] If anything, humans aren’t human enough for Lovecraft; perhaps the same could be said of many current desires for the posthuman or the non-anthropocentric.

For Lovecraft, Poe, and Dickens and Collins, Earth’s polar regions are a broken mirror in which Anglo-American Man attempts to see himself, but sees instead that which most repulses him: Inuk, woman, Black, shoggoth. Lovecraft reacts to this encounter in “Polaris” and “The Call of Cthulhu”, but in At the Mountains of Madness he is able to delicately abstract from it a unique manifestation of a broader trope of horror literature, the uncanny sensation of finding something where there should be nothing – intelligent artifice, in this case, where there should only be a frozen wasteland. Ultimately, none of these expressions of the polar colonial encounter leave any room for indigenous voices to interrupt. Lovecraft and Dickens’ Inuit are practically as imaginary as are Poe’s Tsalalians, who in turn are no more real than Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms, their neighbors in the Southern Ocean. Though these expressions take place within the history of Anglo-American colonialism, what they reveal is the imaginary relationship of the colonial core with its peripheries and frontiers – the freezing extremes of the globe, where colonialism meets its limits and recoils from them in horror.