I’ll throw out a few ideas for you to consider as you read “The Outsider” (1921) by H.P. Lovecraft… (text and audio for the story)
1. Lovecraft himself called the story “my literal though unconscious imitation of Poe at its very height.” Lovecraft’s friend, fellow author, and publisher, August Derleth, once wrote that, if “The Outsider” were found unsigned in an attic, it would “pass for a lost tale of Poe.” What do you think?
2. In his writings, Lovecraft repeatedly used light to symbolize knowledge and darkness to symbolize ignorance. What, then, should we take from his comment in “The Outsider” that “it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day”?
3. Scholars such as William Fulwiler have taken the epigraph to “The Outsider” (from Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes, in which a baron and his warriors were “long be-nightmared”) to suggest that the story itself should be understood as the nightmare of the protagonist, just a bad dream. What do you think?
4. This last question contains significant spoilers!!!, so you may wish to skip it until you’ve read the story. Much has been made of “The Outsider” as potentially autobiographical, with the creature’s confesssion that “I am an outsider; a stranger in this century” expressing Lovecraft’s own perceptions of himself. (In fact, scholar Robert H. Waugh called his book about Lovecraft The Monster in the Mirror.) Certainly there is a degree to which Lovecraft was looking at himself through the story, mimicking how the monster discovers himself in the mirror.
This is not the first time in literature that self-discoveries were framed in this way, at least for the protagonist if not for the author personally: for example, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man,” the main character dreams that he sees himself in a mirror and only then realizes he’s been walking about in his burial shroud. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the creature gains new awareness of his tragic plight when sees his own terrible reflection in a pond. Can you think of other examples of this kind of revelation in literature? [MirrorofErisedcoughMirrorofErised] What do you think of the idea of fiction as self-discovery and/or a mirror to the soul? The human condition?
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1. Agree that The Outsider sounds very Poe-like (Poesque?) The tone of overwrought emotion building up to a crescendo of horror is similar to the tone and build up of The Black Cat :
The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!
or even more so, The Tell-Tale Heart:
But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! –and now –again! –hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! –
“Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed! –tear up the planks! –here, here! –it is the beating of his hideous heart!”
3. My first thought. upon reading the story, was that the narrator’s experience was roughly similar to my own, upon waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror. I then realized that the whole story – waking in the darkness and slowly and with excruciating effort climbing up through a deep pit into the sudden light, with the climax of looking in the mirror – was very much like waking up from a deep sleep. So no, it wasn’t a bad dream. Just waking up from one to reality.
4. Autobiographical? Maybe HPL too didn’t enjoy looking at himself in the mirror in the morning before he had a chance to shower and shave.
I guess it is worth starting with Narcissus and the Medusa, especially at a Potter site. Although neither really gains self-knowledge from their encounters with mirrors, they show the polar opposites of the effect of self observation.
In a modern novella, there is Oedipa Maas mirror in The Crying of Lot 49. While the knowledge gained is not really self-knowledge so much as it is a reveal of what Pynchon’s theme for the book is, the book almost fits into the fantasy genre.
Off the beaten track a bit, there is the Yata no Kagami, the mirror that lured the sun-goddess Amaterasu from her cave.
Especially considering the phrase, “a stranger in this century,” I think “The Outsider” as autobiographical has some merit as an analysis of this story. Lovecraft was, as Amy has said in her article, “New Shoggoth Chic,” something of an antimodernist.
I remember coming across a few others things as I re-read last night that led me to think along the lines of the story being autobiographical, but I’ll have to return to that later tonight, because I’m having trouble remembering at work.
Here’s an idea I put forth in my book: the Mirror of Erised is not only a place of revelation of one’s deepest desire, but can also be a place of revelation of one’s deepest fears. Ron, when standing in front of the mirror, sees himself as head boy, quidditch star, etc., primarily because he lives in his brothers’ shadow.
Ron’s moment of redemption – his real moment of courage – comes at another place of reflection: a pool (think Narcissus, as Mike A. mentioned). Beside the pool, after taking out the sword, Ron finally battles and defeats the fears that created the deepest desire which he saw at the Mirror of Erised 7 years prior – a fear that, in a sense, had been compounded by his friendship with superstar Harry Potter.
There’s also an interesting bit in George MacDonald’s Phantastes about a mirror, but I’m a little fuzzy on what happened there. I’ll have to return to it.
There’s something about The Outsider that is similar to The Thing on the Doorstep but from the other point of view ie. the moment of realisation that one’s self is a corpse.
If the story is autobiographical it is not obviously so. If I were to take it so, I’d have to think it were about someone who began to realise that they were at home among death, moral or physical corruption, disability or professional mediocraty. He/she is at home among the corpses, bones, rats, etc. (The protagonist’s only recollection of others is a memory of jeering or mockery comes to mind here. It also starts me thinking about John Merrick – The Elephant Man) They begin to realise that there is something better to life and having educated him/herself strives to climb out of their social, physical or professional torpor only to find that they really are a poor, grotesque specimen and that they belong slap bang back where they come.
In regards to the mirror I’m reminded of the wrens around my home who spend much of the day trying to fight themselves in the car mirror. That’s all well and good for a wren, who is a beautiful little bird, but what would a vulture think of their reflection.
I hope that doesn’t sound like too much of a ramble.
I wonder if there is some connection between the Invisibility Cloak and the Mirror.
Even by Lovecraftian standards, The Outsider seems stylistically overwrought. It is almost a pastiche of Poe, but hardly likely to be mistaken for one. One almost has to think of it as more of exercise in style than an actual story.
As to the question of whether this is a dream, the ‘nepenthe’ (opium) imagery does give a certain suggestion of a bad opium trip. But the detail about the narrator’s ‘life’ seem too specific for a dream. Instead I think the autobiographical idea is more likely.
The quote “it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day” follows the whole train of Romantic/Gothic/Decadent thought from Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” and Shelly’s Gothicism through l’art pour l’art, to Dorian Grey and finally to this modern horror twist of the idea of hideous truth being better than living in ignorance.
Speaking of facing hideous truths, Mike A., have you taken a look at yourself lately? Got to do something about that red maw, man.
A few literary examples of looking into a mirror and being “undeceived” occurred to me after listening to The Outsider. I thought of several places in C.S. Lewis’ writings where this happens: Eustace (in _Voyage of DT_) when he sees his reflection in the pool and realizes he’s become a dragon, coincident with the beginning of his repentance, and the narrator in _The Great Divorce_ when he’s looking with disgust at the other passengers on the bus, then sees his own reflection. Also, in George MacDonald’s _The Wise Woman_, there’s Agnes in that strange hollow sphere where she sees herself reflected and finally recognizes that “with sickening disgust that the child was not another, but her Self, her Somebody, and that she was now shut up with her for ever and ever…”
Those are the examples that pop to mind – a bit limited, and I’ll be interested to read more of others’ ideas about the use of mirrors to reveal reality in literature.
To continue Leanne’s comment, I’m a tad rusty on Lewis Carroll, but I was thinking of Through the Looking Glass where Alice in the first chapter ponders what is on the other side of the looking-glass. Would it be the same as the room she’s in, the only difference being that things go the opposite way. Throughout the rest of the book, Alice encounters a different (inverted) reality challenging her previous notions of it. Despite this, she faces the reality of her anxiety of growing up and becoming a young woman.