New England

New England is a region of the United States and the location of Lovecraft Country, the semi-imaginary setting of many Cthulhu Mythos tales.
New England comprises the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut. The ancestral home of Algonquin Indians like the Narragansetts and the Wampanoag, New England was one of the first areas in North America to be colonized by English settlers. Their first colonies were established by religious Puritans at Massachusetts' Plymouth, Boston and Salem. Up through the American Revolution and behind, immigration to New England was dominated by departees from the country that gave the region its name, without the admixture of Dutch and German folk found in the Mid-Atlantic region, or the dependence on enslaved African labor of the Southern colonies.
==Horror==
Lovecraft would sometimes suggest that New England was particularly conducive to evoking the feeling of horror that his fiction specialized in. In "The Picture in the House", the story that first mentions the key Lovecraft Country town of Arkham, Lovecraft declares that the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.Similarly, "The Colour Out of Space" refers to "farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets". In "The Dunwich Horror", Henry Armitage muses: "Unseen things not of earth—or at least not of tri-dimensional earth—rushed foetid and horrible through New England’s glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain-tops."
Thurber in "Pickman's Model" describes Pickman's "frightful pictures which turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell," shewing "a pack of ghouls and witches overrunning the world of our forefathers,"
==Insensitivity==
At the same time, Lovecraft also used New England as a byword for a kind of prosaic insensitivity that failed to appreciate the weird: in "The Unnamable", Randolph Carter's friend Joel Manton is described as "born and bred in Boston and sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life." When Carter's story "The Attic Window" shocks readers in the South and on the Pacific coast, "New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance."
When George Gammell Angell in "The Call of Cthulhu" records people's reactions to the psychic disturbances that accompany (as we learn later) the rising of R'lyeh, he finds that "[a]verage people in society and business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there."
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Ward discourages a visit from his parents to his new friend Baron Ferenczy, as "the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk."
==Nostalgia==
Lovecraft at times expresses an overwhelming nostalgia toward New England. In "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", Chandraputra declares of Randolph Carter: "If any of you have been away from home long...I leave it to you how the sight of New England’s rolling hills and great elms and gnarled orchards and ancient stone walls must have affected him." The plot of the The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath revolves around Carter's search for a sunset city that turns out to be a dream reflection of his New England boyhood: As Nyarlathotep tells him, "your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth"--that is, "Home—New England—Beacon Hill—the waking world." When Carter awakes, he found he "had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him."
"The Strange High House in the Mist" tells that "the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England’s hills." In At the Mountains of Madness, the underground horrors of Antarctica are compared ironically to "the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England,"
==Xenophobia==
This sense of nostalgia could curdle in Lovecraft's writing into an overt xenophobia, in which New England represented an ethnic purity and sense of tradition spoiled by non-English immigrants. The narrator of "He" complains that New York City is dominated by squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.The folkorist Albert Wilmarth observes in "The Whisperer in Darkness":I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.In "The Terrible Old Man", Lovecraft declares that Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard.... Lovecraft's eugenic view of society, of course, could find taint in pure New England stock as well--as in the Dunwich of "The Dunwich Horror", wherethe natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
Category:Regions/Territories
Category:Locations Incorporated From the Real World