This collapse of security is where Lovecraft’s depiction of the monstrous Oriental takes full effect. But accelerating industrialization, the opening of transnational commercial channels, and the advent of American imperialism, the narrative suggests, have diminished the spatial distance needed to uphold these fantasies. In colonial times, when it functioned mainly as an outlet for accumulated domestic issues and tabooed sexual fantasies, the Orient appeared as a relatively secure space that could be conjured or ignored at will. In the story, the seductions of the Orient are represented as the causes of both the moral and genetic degeneration of an isolated Anglo-Saxon community, whose spatial innocence is being compromised by the encroachment of an ‘exotic’ culture and its religious practices. This article engages in an analysis of Herbert Philip Lovecraft’s horror novella “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), arguing that its nightmarish representations of Orientalized Others, hybrid identities, and miscegenation result from Lovecraft’s depiction of spatial transgressions and deliberate distortions of language.
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