The Rats In The Walls

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1924

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Family History and Identity

In his lifetime, Lovecraft grappled with the fear of inheriting unfavorable genetic traits and predispositions. Lovecraft explores this fear throughout many of his works, and one of the major themes of “The Rats in the Walls” is the ominous connection between Delapore’s identity and his family history. For much of his life, Delapore knew little about where his family came from. His family history was written down and kept in an envelope, which Delapore says was tradition among American families during the Civil War. When Union soldiers attacked the Delapore plantation and set it on fire, the envelope burned. However, Delapore felt no great loss in the burning of his family record:

Neither my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained, and as I merged into the greyness of Massachusetts business life I lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree (Paragraph 4).

Although Delapore is content in his ignorance, the word “lurked” foreshadows Delapore’s unsettling discovery of his heritage. Delapore becomes more interested in learning about his family’s history after his son dies. Alone and with no other living family, Delapore seizes the opportunity to feel purpose and meaning in his life. Purchasing Exham Priory is a way for Delapore to restore his sense of identity by connecting with his family’s legacy. Because he has bound himself to the priory’s costly restoration, Delapore is unwilling to take the villagers’ stories about the Delapores’ crimes too seriously. He wants to “prove that a de la Poer […] need not be a fiend” (Paragraph 15) by living peacefully at Exham Priory and reinstating his ancestral honor.

Both dreams and animals, specifically rats and cats, are the harbingers of Exham Priory’s latent evils. Delapore can hear the rats in the walls because he comes from the de la Poer family. The sound of the phantom horde is his inheritance; none of the other characters (besides the cats) can hear the sinister noises. In his nightmares, Delapore sees a swineherd and many frightening creatures. Once he learns the truth about his family history, the meaning of the dream becomes clear: The swineherd represents the de la Poer family and Delapore himself, and the “beasts” are the humans that they farmed and enslaved.

When Delapore and the others venture into the underground grotto, they are all horrified. Delapore finally realizes the truth of where he comes from and learns that his identity is inescapably tethered to his family history. The violent urges that were dormant in his psyche rise to the surface, and he cannibalizes Norrys. There is a sense of inevitability in the story’s ending. Once Delapore learns about his family, it becomes impossible for him to continue to live a normal life. His lineage catches up with him, pushing him to act in ways he never would have before.

In the end, Delapore is successful in his quest to use his family history to understand his identity. Unfortunately for him and for Norrys, the identity he finds is outside of his control and rooted in grotesque violence.

The story ends with Delapore committed to a psychiatric facility where he can still hear the rats, suggesting that whatever identity he has awakened may be permanent. Delapore maintains that he did not do the “hideous thing” to Norrys, attributing the ghastly grotto events to the rats that no one else can hear. In this way, the rats in the walls reflect the innate desires circulating within Delapore. Lovecraft suggests that genetic predispositions are inescapable, just as he too experienced a mental health crisis like his parents.

Violence and Morality

“The Rats in the Walls” is an intense story, even by Lovecraft’s standards. There are depictions of violence throughout the tale, particularly toward the end. One of the major themes that the story explores is the connection between violence and morality. The narrative suggests that some violence is more morally justifiable than other violence. Likewise, some individuals may be more capable of understanding and justifying their use of violence than others.

Violence has been a part of Delapore’s life since his childhood; the Civil War forms a backdrop for some of his early memories. Delapore briefly implies that he had a wife who has died when he calls Alfred “a motherless boy” (Paragraph 5). Alfred also dies as the result of violence. Although he survives the war, he is severely injured and only lives for a few more years under his father’s care. When he first narrates all these events, Delapore describes the violence he has experienced in a detached way.

Delapore’s narration implies that violence through war is painful, but not necessarily unjustified because it is a fact of life. There is other violence in the story that is also justified, including Walter de la Poer’s murder of his family. The villagers considered Walter’s use of violence to be acceptable because they knew the truth about the de la Poer family. By neglecting to condemn his immediate family’s history as enslavers, Delapore implicitly suggests that enslavement of Black people in America was also a form of justifiable violence. Other forms of violence are unjustifiable and morally repugnant in the language of the story. The villagers all fear the de la Poers because they know that the family is dangerous. The men who visit the underground grotto are all horrified by what they find there; nobody attempts to justify the evidence of enslavement and cannibalism in this instance.

At the end of the story, there is a subversion of this theme as Delapore suddenly gives in to violent urges, killing and eating Norrys. He suddenly feels that the wars he has experienced were unjustified violence against him, saying that “the war ate my boy” and “the Yanks ate Carfax” (Paragraph 52). He suddenly feels that Norrys’s survival is a perversion of the natural way of things: de la Poers should control and consume the other people living nearby, not the other way around. It suddenly hurts Delapore that “[Norrys] lived, but [his] boy died” (Paragraph 52). In the final paragraph, Delapore once again reverses his stance on violence and morality. He tries to abdicate responsibility for his actions by blaming the rats.

Phrenology and Pseudo-Evolutionary Theory

Lovecraft held some views about race and human evolution that are no longer considered accurate. These views informed the plot of “The Rats in the Walls” and must be understood to fully grasp the story’s meaning. Throughout the story, Lovecraft makes several references to the now-debunked field of phrenology. According to phrenology, a person’s skull shape and physical appearance are direct indicators of personality traits and intelligence. Phrenology is directly linked to scientific racism, as it suggested that physical traits associated with white people were more “advanced” than traits associated with people of color.

The enslaved people in the grotto have devolved over time to become quadrupedal; their skeletons resemble earlier stages of human evolution. This concept is based on a mistaken understanding of how evolution works: Living beings do not exist on a continuum from less evolved to more evolved, but instead develop to fit into a particular environmental niche and change over time to adapt to that niche. Delapore compares the skeletons he finds to the Piltdown man, an alleged fossil of an early hominid that was revealed to have been a hoax some years after “The Rats in the Walls” was published.

Both phrenology and this pseudo-evolutionary theory are based on outdated scientific understanding, but they are important to the story’s plot and themes. Part of the horror of the story comes from the longevity of the cannibalistic enterprise in the underground grotto. The buildings in the grotto indicate habitation dating back to prehistory, and the enslaved people have supposedly been quadrupedal for at least 20 generations. It would be bad enough, the story implies, if Delapore’s direct ancestors had killed and cannibalized local villagers. It is much more frightening to imagine that these activities could date back thousands of years.

In light of Lovecraft’s racist views, “The Rats in the Walls” takes on an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Clearly, the actions of Delapore’s ancestors are horrifying, and it is wrong to imprison, enslave, and cannibalize human beings. Even Delapore, in his somewhat “unstable state,” describes what he saw in the grotto as “the antechamber of hell” (Paragraph 45). On the other hand, Delapore comes from a family of American enslavers. He expresses no remorse for his family’s history; giving his cat a racial slur for a name suggests that he still believes that some racial groups are superior to others. There is no clear resolution to the story’s dissonance.