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Peter G. EppsASAT ConferenceNovember 17, 2:30
Conspicuous Consumption: The “Weird Tale” and Social Fears
 In his 1931 introduction to the American edition of J. B. Bury’s
The Idea of Progress
,Charles A. Beard discusses the role of technology in making human progress inevitable. Amongother things, Beard’s paean to technology includes the following provocative passage:It seems reasonable to assume . . . that technology is producing other socialeffects which will make a return to an exact past impossible. Through the press,the radio, the railway, the post office, and enormous educational plants, it . . .becomes inconceivable that a basis of mass ignorance can ever be laid again, suchas existed for the slave-owning aristocracies of Rome or the clerico-feudal régimeof the Middle Ages. . . . whatever happens in the future, there will be noreduplication of the distant past. . . . history reveals a great gulf between theprimitive savagery with which mankind began and the best of modern socialorders (xxv-xxvi).Such faith in progress is a cornerstone of twentieth-century thought: the 1933-34 ChicagoCentennial Exposition was titled
 A Century of Progress
; its chief descendant, the Disney empire,is a dominant American purveyor of the myth of optimism.One key literary offspring of the “progress” which made “primitive savagery”“inconceivable” was the imaginative savagery of the “pulp” market in fiction. The “pulps”provided the perfect environment for the “weird tale,” the progenitor of modern Americanhorror, science fiction, and fantasy.
 
The most important writer of the turn-of-the-century “weird tale,” and its definitivetheorist, was H. P. Lovecraft. In his prominent essay
Supernatural Horror in Literature
,Lovecraft defines the “true weird tale” as follows:A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknownforces must be present; and there must be a hint . . . [of] a malign and particularsuspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguardagainst the assaults of chaos (4).Lovecraft’s definition marks horror literature as the primary form of the “weird tale,” withscience fiction and fantasy being direct descendants. Science fiction assumes no “suspension ordefeat of . . . fixed laws of Nature,” and fantasy allows variations from natural law which areneither particular nor uniformly malign. Only the tale of supernatural horror always includes theLovecraft’s four basic elements: dread, external unknowns, malignity, and particular violationsof natural law.Lovecraft’s “fixed laws of Nature” which are “our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos” parallel Beard’s “great gulf” between “the best modern social orders” and “primitivesavagery” preserved by the technological growth of secular society. I find it very significant,then, that the self-proclaimed “mechanistic materialist” Lovecraft spent his entire literary careerwriting stories “against [which] are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication[and] naively insipid idealism” (1). I believe that, in their stories of “dread,” Lovecraft and hisfellow “weird tale” authors provide valuable critiques of the facile optimism of the myth of secular progress.The popular appeal of the “weird tale” suggests that its sense of “dread” voiceswidespread social fears. Thus, tracing certain recurrent motifs in the modern American “weird
 
tale” gives us one index to the changing anxieties of modern American society. I propose toexamine H. P. Lovecraft’s 1924 story “The Rats in the Walls” and Ray Bradbury’s 1951 story“The Veldt,” two key examples of cannibalism in the “weird tale.” Both Lovecraft and Bradburyuse mediated images of cannibalism to disturb the complacency of the modern commitment tothe ideals of social progress, each in a manner appropriate to his time.Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” is narrated in the first person by its protagonist,Walter Delapore.
1
Delapore’s opens with a brief history of his ancestral home, Exham Priory:
1
Throughout, I use the text of “The Rats in the Walls” found in
The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft 
, S. T. Joshi, ed. (NY: Dell, 1997), 25-55.On July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory . . . The place had not beeninhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy . . . had struck downthe master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under acloud . . . the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorredline. . . . [That son,] Walter de la Poer . . . fled to Virginia and there founded thefamily which by the next century had become known as Delapore.Exham Priory [had been] much studied because of its peculiarly compositearchitecture . . . Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure,whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders–Roman,and even Druidic or native Cymric . . . This foundation was . . . merged on oneside with the solid limestone precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked adesolate valley.
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