The Masses are Revolting: Victorian Culture and the Political Aesthetics of Disgust by Zachary Samalin (review)

Abstract

into this model, in which “everything slides into a hungry homogeneity,” including the personalities of the eponymous characters (26). This interpretation is belied by the stories themselves, in which the strongly individuated personalities of Morella and Ligeia transcend death rather than lose their selfhood within an undifferentiated totality. Similarly, in his chapter on Lovecraft, Newell represents the self-defined atheist and mechanistic materialist as actually a closet metaphysician, whose speculations about ontology in his fiction closely resembled that of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will. It is true that Lovecraft was familiar with Schopenhauer, sharing his pessimistic outlook about the inevitability of human suffering as well as his embrace of art as a coping mechanism. However, Newell ignores Lovecraft’s primary allegiance to Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical philosophy and avowal of aesthetic artifice; Lovecraft explicitly endorsed Nietzschean perspectivism against metaphysics. Further, Newell claims that Lovecraft’s alleged pursuit of metaphysics entailed a corresponding depiction of the universe in his fiction as a “malignant force” (19). This may be how it appears to the many victims in Lovecraft’s stories, who impose their limited human categories on an amoral cosmos, but it overlooks the sense of wonder that Lovecraft found as he scrutinized the stars, a sentiment that is also found in his fiction. Newell’s account of the weird as a genre that expresses its metaphysical preoccupation with the nonhuman through the affect of disgust has much to commend it. His clear definition of a literary category that eschews definitions is stimulating, often persuasive, and particularly useful in providing a feasible alternative to the shape-shifting gothic. Michael Saler University of California, Davis