The Women of Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft is not particularly known for his varied and nuanced depictions of female characters. In fact, he’s known for barely depicting women in his tales of cosmic horror at all. Discounting female eldritch gods and dead queens, I’ve come up with a total of three women across Lovecraft’s oeuvre that play significant roles in his stories. Let’s take a look at how they fit into the mythos:

Lavinia Whateley (“The Dunwich Horror,” 1928)

Lavinia Whateley is a mother to monsters in Lovecraft’s popular tale “The Dunwich Horror.” The spinster daughter of the much-whispered-about Whateley family, Lavinia is described in the text as “a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five.” Her role in the story is to give birth to Wilbur—a man revealed to be half human, half scaly, furry, tentacled mess. Later in the story, an invisible eldritch beast escapes from the Whateley farmhouse and terrorizes the surrounding town, until the protagonists manage to defeat it with arcane knowledge. As it turns out, that creature is Wilber’s twin brother—and the spawn of an eldritch deity named Yog-Sothoth. Lavinia Whateley, here, fulfills a central trope common to many tales of witchcraft: the idea that women can form pacts with demons through sex. Of course, in this universe the demons in question are extra-dimensional deities. The natural consequence of this action leads to another trope that tends to afflict women in horror: the woman as a vessel for a demon baby. It’s hard to know how much agency Lavinia had over her situation, though. Her father, Old Whateley, seems to be the instigator of recurring rituals to commune with these eldritch beings, and at his death Wilber takes over as the head of the family. Lavinia is treated with careless contempt by her son, and she ultimately grows afraid of him, confessing “I vaow afur Gawd, I dun’t know what he wants nor what he’s a-tryin’ to dew.” This is the last we hear from Lavinia before her untimely death. She serves as a rather unpromising start to our exploration of the women in Lovecraft: a passive, pitiable character confined to the stereotypical roles of sex object and mother, and dehumanized for her failure to adhere to conventional beauty standards. 

Keziah Mason (“The Dreams in the Witch House,” 1933)

“The Dreams in the Witch House” is not one of Lovecraft’s most popular stories, but it contains a female character who takes on a more active—if still quite stereotypical—role. Keziah Mason is the eponymous witch from whom the house at the heart of this story gets its cursed reputation. She had lived in the attic of this house in Arkham, Massachusetts, before being accused during the Salem Witch Trials and mysteriously vanishing from a cell in the Salem gaol. In appearance, she resembles the cartoony witches we see every year on Halloween decor, with a “bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin.” Like the typical witch in the medieval European imagination, her main hobby seems to be sacrificing babies during occult rituals. But Lovecraft adds his own unique touch by depicting her witchcraft as merely an advanced form of non-Euclidean geometry—using special curves and angles with metaphysical properties to access another dimension. Like Lavinia, Keziah may have also given birth to a monster as part of her pact with dark forces: her part-human, part-rat familiar known as Brown Jenkin is described as having features that bore “a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s.” All this knowledge and power does Keziah little good, however, when pitted against a college student with a crucifix. Like a vampire, she seems to be repelled by the sight of the cross, and the story’s protagonist uses this moment of weakness to strangle her. While I applaud Keziah for succeeding in the male-dominated field of mystical math, ultimately she’s more of a pastiche of witchcraft tropes than a fully fleshed-out character.

Asenath Waite Derby (“The Thing on the Doorstep,” 1933)

And last, we have perhaps the best-known of Lovecraft’s female characters, although she may not really count for reasons I’ll get to shortly. Asenath Waite Derby is the central antagonist in what I consider to be one of Lovecraft’s creepiest stories, “The Thing on the Doorstep.” She is the wife of the narrator’s close friend Edward Derby and seemingly the cause of his increasingly erratic behavior. Unlike the other two women discussed above, Asenath is described as good-looking, except for her protuberant eyes that hint of her heritage among the fish-creature hybrid denizens of Innsmouth. She has a particularly terrifying power: the ability to switch bodies with others. Edward confesses to the narrator that he believes Asenath plans to permanently steal his body by killing her own body while they are switched, since she prefers to inhabit a male body and professes to find men’s brains superior. The reason for these misogynistic views is soon made clear: The person Edward Derby married is not really Asenath at all, but rather her father Ephraim Waite, who stole his daughter’s body to evade death. The real Asenath was apparently weak-willed and an easy victim for her father. Thus, the best-known female character with power, intelligence, and a significant role in a Lovecraft story turns out to not really be a woman at all, but merely grudgingly possessed by a misogynistic old man.

I can’t say I’m surprised, but this survey of female characters in Lovecraft’s stories was quite disappointing. From the few that I was able to scrounge up, it seems that Lovecraft primary depicts women as vessels for more powerful forces, breeders of monsters, and stereotypical old hags. But there’s good news! In recent years, several female authors have taken on the Lovecraft Mythos and added their own spin to it with strong female characters. Two of my favorite examples are Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys and Maplecroft by Cherie Priest. Have any other feminist takes on cosmic horror to recommend? Are there any female characters in Lovecraft’s stories that I missed? Let me know in the comments!