 “The Rats in the Walls” is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft about a man who lives in America in the 1920’s and is learning about his family’s history and ancestry through restoring his family’s old estate in Anchester, England. The main character and narrator, Delapore, knows very little about his ancestry, but as he restores this house and move into it he slowly discovers the evil and wickedness of his ancestors. The more he hears about his family’s past, the more he denies it to the reader and also to himself. This thread of denial is a recurring element to the story and also key in how the story ends. Using supporting evidence from the text, this paper will in detail show how de la Poer’s denial of the truth of his ancestral history, which was presented in front of him multiple times, not only led to his demise but also can show that closed mindedness and an unwillingness to hear out rumors and claims made by others could not only make forming and sustaining relationships hard in your life, but also could potentially lead you into a situation of shock and utter breakdown, as de la Poer was left in at the conclusion of the story.

Because of the fire that took the life of his grandfather, destroyed his house and destroyed the sealed envelope presumed to have the information on the history of his family, Delapore knows almost none of his ancestry except for how his family ended up in the colonies. The stories say that the only person who moved to the colonies had killed his entire family off and fled, but Delapore denies this, calling it a coincidence. Delapore’s only son, Alfred, wrote letters back while at war in England of many of the rumors and stories told by Captain Edward Norrys. These were rumors that had been floating around about what happened to his family to make them leave the country and what actions took place at the family estate, called Exham Priory. Delapore makes sure to mention that Norrys does not actually believe the stories himself: “they amused my son and made good material for his letters to me” (Lovecraft 76), but that they were nothing more than entertainment. His unwillingness to even think of the possibility of these stories being true begins setting up the extreme shock later to come in the story. . These stories however are what led him to decide to purchase Exham Priory for the purpose of restoring and living on the property. His son had told that while he was in England he was somewhat avoided because of the de la Poer name, and he says “I now found myself ostracized for a like reason until I convinced the peasants how little I knew of my heritage” (Lovecraft 77). This denial of his ancestral past begins a chain of denying one story or rumor after another, although he may believe that his family has a dark past, the constant denial of these stories begins to make Delapore himself believe that they are wholly false. 

As his restoration of Exham Priory begins, Delapore changes his name to the old spelling of his ancestors, de la Poer. “…de la Poer (for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name)” (Lovecraft 79). This subtle action indicates how he is becoming a little prouder of his family’s history, as he still does not know the horror of the truth and how he currently believes his family is more innocent than people make it out to be. When looking for laborers, he finds that no local laborers want to go anywhere near the property out of an “almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place” (Lovecraft 77). De la Poer had to go out of the local area just to find workers who were willing to work on the building, and had to lie about it as well so they would work. Perhaps in doing so, he furthers his belief of his family’s innocence – not purposefully, but subconsciously, by slowly believing those lies he was telling – and in turn making the end more dramatic and traumatic for himself and others. 

While discussing more rumors and reports of his family and the building, de la Poer refers to them as “fireside tales” and says that the source of how evil his family is seen is a result of “their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness” (Lovecraft 78). Referring to them as fireside tales to him makes them less real and more as tall tales, camp side horror stories formulated to focus on the fears of others and are nothing more than exaggerated stories passed along from one to the next. De la Poer is taking these stories and dismissing them as myths and legends, allowing himself once again to deny the claims and believe a little bit more that the horrors being told and the fears all people have about the family and Exham Priory are mostly false. He says “these myths and ballads…repelled me greatly…greatly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forbears” (78). All the “false” stories and myths remind him of the only one thing to go on in his family that is evil that he knows of. In response to more of the things he had heard about the property and his ancestors, he describes them as “hackneyed spectral lore” and he says that because of his denial of all those things and his optimism for restoring Exham Priory he is regarded as a skeptic. After hearing so many of what he believed to be crazy stories he wishes that when he was younger he had studied more comparative mythology. 

As the restoration finishes up, de la Poer moves in and decides to live there permanently. As he discovers in the first night, something is making all 13 of his cats go crazy. Not only would they go crazy, but they would all go crazy at the same time of the night and all be attracted to the same spot on the wall, clawing and meowing at it. Instead of thinking something was strange about the property like the servants thought, de la Poer blamed this phenomenon on an odor only perceptible to cats that was left over from old wood from before the restoration, not the possibility that the stories could be true or that building could in fact be infested with rats. 

De la Poer constantly denying all the bad and evil rumors he hears is building up this suspense of what is coming from behind the walls and lies beneath the cellar. And through his denial he is increasing the level of shock he will encounter when he does discover the truth. Had he taken more caution in his restoration of Exham Priory and taken the rumors and stories more seriously, de la Poer would not have had the insane transformation that did occur during his discovery. For anyone, the truth they had discovered would be shocking on its own, but for de la Poer, it was a different story. Through his fabrication of lies, in order to deny rumors and hire workers, he had created a larger gap between what he believed and the truth. Had he believed the stories the shock would not have been anywhere near as brutal and would not have led to his mental breakdown and the demise of Norrys. 

The final point of denial for de la Poer is how he claims, while in captivity and secluded from anyone else, that he was not responsible for eating Edward Norrys; that it was those terrible rats in the walls, the rats that he heard every night, that drove the cats crazy, that drove him to explore deeper in the house and make the horrible discovery. “When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats…the rats in the walls” (Lovecraft 89).

De la Poer’s extreme level of shock and complete regression back to his ancestral ways are caused by denying the stories and rumors he had been told for so long. Had he taken what he had called “myths” a little more seriously, he would not have had such shock and an extreme transformation, but a controllable shock instead. The sound of the rats, whether they are real or not, slowly pushed him closer and closer to insanity, and the discovery in the basement was that final shove to push him to act in the way his ancestors did three centuries before. His denial of everything just magnified the breakdown of de la Poer. Analyzing his breakdown could lead one to view the story as a cautionary tale of sorts, using the main character as an example of what not to do. The man’s closed-mindedness and refusal to take into consideration rumors and stories as true led him down the path of breakdown and shows that a closed-minded attitude can lead to an undesirable, that, in some cases, can lead to the end of a person like with de la Poer.
