In the Mountains of Madness, I feel like there is abjection. When members of the group are killed/go missing, William and his fellow crew member are more concerned over new discoveries rather than people dying. Maybe they were so shocked, they didn’t know how to react. There is also the sublime. When the pair discovered that the mountains were actually walls surrounding a city of some sort, that makes us wonder. Who could’ve made all this? The missing creatures that they found earlier? Who knows. As far as the uncovering of secret revelations destabilize identity, I’m not too sure, as I’ll have to look more into the story. I feel like there definitely are gender norms in Mountains of Madness. All of the crew members seem to be men and not a single women. This makes me wonder if Lovecraft thinks of women as inferior and incapable of thinking or enduring weather conditions. The ruins/city are symbolic as they represent the past, a civilization that once flourished, and human curiosity to expand the understanding of their world. The passage gives a clue to Lovecraft’s outlook on science by showing that everything may not be what they seem, such as the mountains actually being walls of a city. This also hints that Lovecraft believes there is a lot of mysteries out there that we may not know. Not only that, but could abnormal creatures like the ones in this story exist? After all, we haven’t even explored the all the oceans entirely. Maybe we’ll find something as bizarre as what Lovecraft describes or even more.
I agree that there is a setting of sublime as we see that there as they have seen the nice carved ice bergs but at the same time they have confusion and the area is also scary. The author does not add any females to the story and the thinking might have been that females were probably not strong enough to survive this. It could’ve also been that the author thinks that the females have their own roles such as taking care of men and this isn’t a part of their duty. It could have also been that the timeline this was written in had that mentality.
I like your connection between the city and how it could have built and a place to call home for those creatures that the scientists discovered. I do agree that not everything may not be what it seems. Perhaps the creatures that were discovered are not the only living species other than humans to survive as well. Meaning that humans believed that they were the only ones, but after finding out there are other creatures as well, there could be a possibility for a third kind as well.
-Ayshe
The descriptive massive icebergs that the author wanted to portray to us was an awe moment. Allowing us to feel like we are small and a big beautiful picturesque setting is in front of us. In society today, we only know less than half of the population species, there’s so many things we haven’t seen yet because of the vast undiscovered places in the world.