The Colour.

Man’s greatest fear is that of the unknown. The greatest enemy knows how to pull its prey into a false sense of hope, only for it to be pulverized. +Utilizing these two techniques, H.P Lovecraft turns his short story “The Colour from Space” into a terrifying work. *Through Setting, character, and plot Lovecraft weaves his story.

A recount of the narrator being told the story of the colour from space by the last survivor of the incident, the story takes place in a small New England town, a huge meteor lands in the middle of the Gardner farm. Upon inspection of a sample of the rock substance, local university scientists are baffled at what the rock may be made out of.

“Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced with the unknown.”

Upon return to the site of the meteor, scientists, along with the Garner family, discover that the meteor has shrunk, and contains a extremely fragile sphere of unknown, indescribable colour.

“ The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it a colour at all…One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop.”

From the very beginning, Lovecraft has set up an aura of the unknown; one of Man’s greatest fears. Society relies on the knowledge of others, especially those of higher status, for a sense of safety. By showing a perplexed group of scientists from the beginning; Lovecraft evokes a feeling of anxiety in his reader. Months later, during the harvest, the vegetables of the farm have grown expediently to “phenomenal size”, falsely sparking Nahum Gardner’s excitement. Instead of creating the greatest harvest ever seen, however, every fruit and vegetable had a “bitterness and sickishness”. The colour then begins to overtake the remainder of the farm and the surrounding area, discrediting Nahum’s original hypothesis of the soil being tainted and may simply fix itself by the next spring.

Not confined to the crops; the horror soon spreads to the characters. The colour begins to infect the Gardner family. Despite the presence of many animals and young children, Lovecraft has the colour infect the mother first, losing a piece of her humanity.

“It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses that where not holy sounds. Something was taken way--she was being drained of something – something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be –someone must make it keep off—nothing was ever still in the night – the walls and windows shifted.”

Nahum seems to have disrespect for his wife, in that he never takes her to the local asylum, he simply locks her in the attic-- tosses her away-- where her screams are still heard. The colour doesn’t stop at Mrs. Gardner. After a trip to the family well, Thaddeus arrives home screaming about “the moving colours down there”. Nahum allows Thaddeus to roam around the farm for some time before locking him in the attic with his mother. The narrator states that Nahum is brave about his quickly-becoming-crazed collection of family in the attic. Only after two people are locked in the attic do the animals become brittle and unsustainable, this shows a lack of reason or acknowledgment of the “order of life” on the part of the color, further causing fear and anxiety in the reader. Mrs. Gardner appears to exhibit some kind of weakness not prominent in the children or the animals, causing her to rank below each of these, thus displaying a very protrusive

sense of a society pecking order. In addition to the lone woman of the story being infected by the color first, an indicator of the author’s feelings towards women, comparable to other men of the time period such as Schopenhauer or Freud, Lovecraft rarely has female characters in his stories.

Aspects of the setting and character combine into a terrifying plot. Coming from an unknown place in space with vile intentions, the colour, from the beginning, is enough to disturb the reader. When the colour then begins to ruin crops and livestock, the fear quickly increases. Humanity is an existence that believes itself to be far superior to that of the rest of nature, so much so that man often forgets that they are animals. Humanity is the untouchable last straw for evil to emerge in its fullest sense. Until violated, the human barrier invokes the reader and characters to still cling to the hope that only the animals will succumb to the terror. One of the Gardner children, Merwin, brings forth the idea of an invasion: “The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fantasized they talked in some terrible language”. If the color destroying an entire farm is not frightening enough, a sense of an invading creature now exists. The family is soon completely overtaken by the colour when neighbor Ammi discovers Nahum Gardner lying on a couch giving orders to the missing family member, Zenas.

“[Nahum] was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas….The stoutest cord had been broken at last, and the hapless farmer’s mind was proof against more sorrow.”

Nahum’s humanity had been decreased to nothing but mumbling about the family well. The story is concluded when Ammi and a group of men, despite the crazed mans warning, go out to the well to discover what Nahum had been going on about. Upon reaching the well, the horses are the first to realize something is wrong while the men again ignore them, consistent with the rest of the story, only to be overtaken by fear of a colour invading the entire environment. When the colour exposes itself to the entire group of men, they are awestruck. “Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road.” The final event of the story is anything but a hopeful one. “And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky.” The colour had given the appearance of awe and of a mission completed; however, Ammi was keen enough to see that the colour must’ve remained, in part in the well. The horror had seemed to be resolved and complete, but, in fact, it was merely lurking for its next opportunity to steal the humanity of another unsuspecting family. The preverbal nail in the coffin of this terror story

Lovecraft utilizes Man’s lifelong fear of the unknown to create an impressive timeless tale of horror. The wide expanse of the ultimate unknown creates an apocalypse of insanity for a family and their farm and home. A “colour from space” begins as a scientific oddity, one to be studied, and concludes with a legend of fear and the hope of the evidence of it being destroyed.

Spring '07