In H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling tale of a man succumbing to madness, “The Rats in the Walls”, the patriarch of the Delapore family sets out to restore his ancestral home. However, the ancient walls of Exham Priory hold dark secrets which eventually bring about his downfall. Throughout the story, Lovecraft uses the symbol of rats scurrying beyond the walls to represent the house’s sinister past and the narrator’s slow decent into insanity. The author creates a mysterious and sinister feeling in the text by using the rats in the walls to deprive Delapore any form of relaxation and isolating him from the rest of the cast of characters, slowly driving him insane. By sampling quotations and investigating the language and tone of the text where rats play a pivotal role, this essay will speculate on the meaning of this symbol and how it evolves or takes on new interpretations throughout the text. Paragraphs will discuss different possible meanings of the symbol based on evidence from the text and analyze details from the story. Featuring H.P. Lovecraft’s own words, this paper will dissect the rats and what they symbolize in “The Rats in the Walls.”

The very first time the rats appear in the text they are amongst superstitions the local villagers have surrounding Exham Priory. Mr Delapore, not allowing anything to hinder the construction of the estate that was his birth rite, disregards stories of a “ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even to hapless human beings” (Lovecraft 79) as foolish tales imagined by the common man. However, the story of the ravenous army of rats pouring out of the estate to come to the village and eat their crops, livestock, and people tell a frightening story that foreshadows the presence of rats later in the story. These tales also do a good job of questioning the history of the estate since the villager’s tales all warn of werewolves, witches, curses, and terrifying satanic rituals, all of which create an uneasy or suspicious feeling about the true nature of the estate. These folktales are included at the beginning of the story so that when the rats appear for the first time in the newly rebuilt Exham Priory we suspect the evil nature of them.

Soon after the completion of Exham Priory the many cats living with the narrator and his servants begin to behave strangely. The cats acted as though they could hear something in the walls, scratching at something none of the humans could detect. This also serves as a warning for the events that unfold in the rest of the text because animals seem to have a sixth sense that allows them to notice strange things humans cannot. Animals seem to have the ability to sense when a storm is coming because they act erratically or get to safety. And often in ghost stories and superstitions cats can sense or even symbolize the occult, a black cat crossing your path for instance or sensing a bad person and hissing at them. When a helper first brought up the possibility of rats in the walls the scene was eerie, describing “a triple Gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff and desolate valley”(Lovecraft 82). Despite suggestions that rats might inhabit the walls Delapore insisted “there had been no rats there for three hundred years” (82) and Capt Norrys, long-time friend of Delapore, agreed that no rats could have infested the walls so quickly. However, the following night Delapore awoke from a foul dream to the sound of gigantic rats scurrying within the walls. Springing out of bed and turning on the lights revealed movement among the tapestries, resembling “a singular dance of death” (82), and suddenly the scurrying became silent. Because of Delapore and Captain Norry insisting that real rats could not have burrowed into the walls so quickly it’s important to question if these are real animals or a mysterious evil living in the house. Lovecraft describes the beasts as a dance of death, suggesting that the creatures aren’t harmless field mice but dangerous monsters haunting the mansion.  

 Delapore continuing to hear the rats causes him to report the disturbance to Captain Norrys and convinces him to camp the night in the cellar in order to investigate the rats which always seem to escape deeper within the house. For the second time Delapore awakes from a foul dream about “a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts” (82) to the sound of rats crawling in the stone walls of Exham Priory. However, Captain Norrys hears nothing unlike Delapore who clearly hears thousands of the beasts rushing through the walls. This helps to establish the rats as a symbol of the evil and occult that haunt Delapore because Norrys is in the same room and cannot hear the same noise that Delapore does. The nightmare is also important to establish the rats as an otherworldly phenomenon that only the targets Delapore. The dream describe a twilit cavern home to daemon and his flock, but instead of pigs he leads a herd of deformed beasts. The dream and the rats occurring twice together show that they are connected and further connects the symbol of rats to the occult and evil by comparing it to the symbol of demons and twilight.

 Up to this point in the story there is no evidence that there are actually rats living inside the walls of Exham Priory that only the narrator can hear, the cats frantically scratching at the walls and few sprung rat traps which could have been coincidence or signs of darker forces at play. However, when the men spend the night in the cellar, the narrator awakes to hear the cats frantically scratching at the walls and the horrific sound of rats sliding around in the walls. But if the narrator so distinctly hears the creatures burrowing within stone walls, “if these were living vermin why did not Norrys hear their disgusting commotion” (Lovecraft 84)? By Captain Norrys inability to hear the rats Lovecraft makes the rats seem a psychological element that’s tormenting the narrators mind and not a physical being. Although the cats clearly sense the rodents meaning that their presence within the walls might mean this isn’t simply the imagination of a delusional old man but instead an eerie and unnatural occurrence which haunts the narrator. Delapore realizes “for here were anomalies which nothing normal could well explain. These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I shared with the cats alone, must be burrowing and sliding in Roman walls” (84). The rats for the first are describes as something unnatural, “spectral horrors” (84) and couldn’t be explained rationally. Delapore calls them creatures of madness because he alone can hear them except for the cat and knows that the monsters aren’t digging through the walls but something paranormal. The rats now represent a malicious haunting force which harasses the narrator along with the recurring nightmare, this points to either the houses dark past and the sins of the de la Poer family hinted at at the beginning of the short story, or foreshadow a tragic end to the story.

 For a while Exham Priory sleeps peacefully while the narrator and Captain Norrys travel to London, no instances of cats behaving strangely in the night and no rat traps sprung. Because of the strange occurrences on the estate and the recent discovery of an underground cave beneath the cellar, the men travel to London to recruit archeologists and experts to explore the underground and possibly find the source of the rats. The expedition reveals a twilit grotto, a subterranean town filled with demonic symbols and mountains of bones “over all were the marks of rodent gnawing”, “a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones” (87). This is important because it confirms the significance of the rats as symbols of death and the ancient evils that still haunt the house. As the story progresses the words used to describe the presence of rats become more and more extreme. Lovecraft chooses words like horror ghastly and hellish to describe the things they see in the cavern. The use of these stronger words is important because it helps to evolve the symbol of rats to a real and evil presence in Exham Priory and the grotto that haunt Delapore, they are transformed from ghost stories and sounds in the walls to a real threat that terrify Delapore to the core. The cursed walls of the Exham Priory still remember the slaughter of human beings performed by the de la Poer family in the “twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion” and punish the narrator for the sins of his family. The rats in the walls could the ghostly reminders of the monstrosities committed below and target Delapore for his shared blood. “It was the antechamber of hell” (88), the research team discovered “horror piled on horror” (88) as they ventured deeper into the cave. This part of the story is important because it give some context to the existence of rats and why Delapore is haunted by them. The grotto is described as the antechamber of hell and riddled with horrors and it provides a lot of insight into the de la Poer family history and the gruesome discovery explains why the home and bloodline might be cursed.

The psychological burden suffered by the narrator causes him to snap and lose control of himself in the twilit grotto, the visions of madness returned to the narrator when he separates from his and group and he hears the ravenous army of rats, “the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors” (Lovecraft 88). “That impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising” broke the narrator, overpowering his last bits of sanity as he ran through the cave, possessed by the same ancient evil practiced for generations in Exham Priory. While running through the complete darkness from the horde of rats Delapore asks “Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things” (89)? Essentially when Delapore asks this question he forgets who he is. He refers to himself as de la Poer not the new family name Delapore that was adopted when the family left Exham Priory. The following lines further show Delapore’s loss of sanity as he compares himself to the daemon swineherd of his dreams and starts chanting Roman which he wasn’t previously familiar with.  In the last page of “The Rats in the Walls” the symbol of rats evolves from a mysterious force that plagues the narrator to an evil or demonic ghost of the de la Poer past that corrupts the narrator and molds him to the cannibalistic and wicked ways of his forefathers.  

The rats as a symbol change over the course of the story, originally mentioned on an off-handed comment about local superstition but the creatures eventually take on a demonic energy, driving the narrator to commit acts a sane man never would. The rats represent insanity, evil, and the sins of the past. All the servants of the de la Poer estate, Captain Norrys, and the expedition party never heard or saw rats infesting the walls and caverns beneath the mansion so it seems the beasts are merely hallucinations of a crazed man, or they exist outside of the physical world, as messengers of an ancient god worshipped by his ancestors. The rats may be signs of a curse on the narrator, for his family’s past, murder of countless innocents, or a curse on the very walls of Exham Priory.Also, the descriptive text used to talk about the rats changes. The change in vocabulary serves as good indication of the narrator’s declining mental state, he begins using words like insidious, deamon, ravenous and eldritch to describe the rats as evil, demonic beasts “determined to lead [him] on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players” (Lovecraft 88). The rats represent harbingers of an ancient evil dragging the narrator to insanity in his own twisted fantasy, figments of a paranoid man’s imagination or a very real ancient evil. The story closes with the narrator completely out of his mind, tormented by imaginary rats living behind padded walls that “beckon [him] down to greater horrors than [he] has ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls” (89).
