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

Abstract

This article explores a particular history of Anglophone writing about polar exploration, starting with the work of H. P. Lovecraft. In Lovecraft’s stories and novellas “Polaris”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, and At the Mountains of Madness, Earth’s polar regions and their indigenous people serve as a horrifying reminder of the historicity and finitude of colonial Anglo-American civilization. Fears and traumatic cultural memories of failed expeditions, cannibalism, indigenous vengeance, and the potential upending of social order recur in Lovecraft’s work as well as that of Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe – the latter of whom Lovecraft directly quotes in Mountains of Madness. This article traces a persistent association between the polar regions and these cultural fears, situating them in an ideological history of Anglo-American colonialism.