'baffling alienage' - HPL's body swap
Having mentioned 'The Thing on the Doorstep' recently it behooved me to have another read of it. My prompt was this note on modern-day 'sex and Cthulhu' type stories. THING (I'll adopt that reference from here on), I said, was an example of just how disinteresting sex was for HPL as a literary device, and probably in life - for the plot of the story would give ample room for sexual content if HPL had been interested in exploring it.
The central arena for this potential for sex is its theme of the mind/body swap - transference - possession - call it what you will. The narrator, Dan Upton, tells how his friend Edward Derby was preyed upon by the soul/mind of his young wife Asenath, who would swap bodies with him, lock 'him' in the attic, and go about in his body. When Edward rebels, having learned 'Asenath' is in fact 'her' own father Ephraim, he eventually comes to a rather sticky end... leaving Dan to clean up matters as best he can.
This is indeed a tale of "baffling alienage".
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It goes without saying that if such stories dwell too much on this aspect of their own plot they will have to, at some point, reach the issue of sex- and gender- difference/attraction itself. Star Trek reached this point in a Next generation story where Dr. Crusher's (male) love interest had his consciousness transferred into a female body - the argument that "it's still me!" didn't rest easy with a Dr. Crusher (and wary TV broadcasters) that couldn't countenance what would have been to all intents and purposes a homosexual romance. When Trek next did a body-swap plot, in Voyager, it was for an action romp about a devious bodysnatching criminal - "originally male or female we can't know" - with any sexual overtones entirely avoided.
What these films and shows never touch on is how horrific and frightening the experience of body-swapping would presumably be in actuality. It's very doubtful we, on waking up in someone else's body, would think immediately of the hi-jinks we could get up to. It would be an existential threat, a psychological horror, of the utmost extremity.
Enter HP Lovecraft!
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If the sexual story potential of the body-swap itself is ignored, it perhaps has a presentiment in what Dan Upton hints about Ed and Asenath's occult forays:
He [looked] enviously at the "daring" or "Bohemian" set [..] whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
and
He began to mingle in the more "advanced" college set [..] and was present at some extremely wild doings - on one occasion paying heavy blackmail [..] to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father's notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular
It's left of course up to the reader's imagination what 'wild' happenings and 'dubious' things were going on, but when one considers the university experiences of our own day and adds occult magic into this mix, certain things do rather come to mind...!
When the story develops, and the predicament of Edward Derby becomes gradually more apparent, the 'sexlessness' of the situation does strike the modern reader. HPL stresses Ephraim's apparent need to find a male body for his spirit's/mind's habitation. There is an inference that a female habitation isn't quite suitable - it's ambiguous if this is due to some magic/biologic difference or simply Ephraim's own chauvinism. It seems that once Ephraim/Asenath is in Ed's body it serves as a vehicle for the invader to go about doing weird occult researches, in environments that 'Asenath' couldn't get to alone (again, because certain sects wouldn't admit a woman? because Asenath's body is genuinely too frail? or what?).
What it isn't is a vehicle for the invader to indulge in sexual experiences which would be denied him in a female body - and of course this is explored in modern takes on the plot. Alan Moore's Providence has its Asenath-analogue swap bodies with the journalist Robert Black and then effectively rapes him with his own body. This is a shocking scene, but importantly the immediate aftermath, in which a stunned Black is threatened with the police - "that's your semen" - conveys the mixture of violation, shame, shock and confusion which the experience would really cause.
HPL's personal lack of interest in sex has been theorised as being a genuine disgust of it. If that is so, it may be that this in fact drives the horror of THING - the concept would certainly not be seen as a comedy jape by someone who's own biology caused disgust, let alone that of the opposite sex. And so HPL writes it as a tale not of humour, lust or action, but one of -
shocking, uncontrollable fright - a cosmic pain and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.
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With the central ambiguities of Ephraim being in Asenath being in Edward ("Asenath... is there such a person? [..] Who locked in whom?") there is room also for an even more modern and contemporary treatise, one based in 'queer' or 'gender theory'. That is to say, if a character's sexed physical body is relatively unimportant, and a mere vehicle for that mind or soul, does this somehow call into question the validity of such categories as male and female?
Lest any blue-haired trans-rights protestors immediately rush to clutch this story to their bosom, consider Edward Derby's own struggle with what pronouns to use in this situation:
I'll kill her if she ever sends me there again.... I'll kill that entity... her, him, it... I'll kill it! I'll kill it with my own hands!"
That'd be enough to get anyone banned from social media.
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