H.P. Lovecraft’s Zadok Allen. A rebirth of the new England Backwoods Dialect?

Howard Philips Lovecraft’s main attempts at encoding a New England dialect are to be found in "The Picture in the House" (1920) and The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). In both stories, the variety used is described as the New England backwoods dialect, an Old Yankee variety. The problem is that Lovecraft’s correspondence shows that his perception of the dialect was not entirely clear. Therefore, the markers he used in his attempt to bring the dialect back to life may be expected not to be entirely in keeping with the actual features of the New England backwoods variety. On another level, it may be wondered to what extent Lovecraft’s carefully crafted linguistic proposition partakes of the fictional universe created by the author and of the genre that he is famous for. In this paper, I propose to review the linguistic features that might be expected to be associated with Lovecraft country and the Old Yankee dialect. I then study Lovecraft’s way of encoding dialect in the speech of Zadok Allen, the old drunkard in The Shadow over Innsmouth, to determine which of these characteristics are actually used in the process. In addition to features that belong to several sub-categories of New England pronunciations, the author uses markers of oral language, markers of eye-dialect, non-grammatical features and markers of former dialectal varieties. Such a combination of devices may allow Lovecraft to create an effet de réel (Barthes 1968). At the same time, the use of paralinguistic features (Brown 1990) and the description of the characters as very old and ‘abnormal’ partake of the construction of the cosmic horror that the author is famous for. In that sense, Lovecraft’s use of dialect is central to the process of storytelling, while it anchors the story in a certain literary genre.