Ghosts and l'écriture-femme

Green Tea

by Sheridan Le Fanu

To Trollope-l

Re: Looking Forward to "Green Tea"

November 29, 2001

Dear all,

I thought I'd put a few notes about Le Fanu's life on the list as we are now looking forward to reading his "Green Tea". Incidentally it is probably in more than the three places we've cited: online, in In a Glass Darkly and the Dover Best Ghost Stories. It is very famous and has been written about repeatedly -- partly because "green tea" was seen and still is seen as a hallucinative drug.

Sheridan Le Fanu. Since this is a Trollope list, I'll begin with saying he knew Trollope and their political outlook towards Ireland is similar. Both are Victorians, one Anglo-Irish, the other Irish-Anglo, both establishment types, involved in local politics to some extent.

Le Fanu's years are 1814-1873. He is regarded by some readers and scholars and critics as the greatest master of the English ghost story. M. R. James loved his stuff. Le Fanu was born in Irelaad, grew up in Dublin. His Irish roots are important as the Gothic genre has flourished in Irish literature -- as we said before. Perhaps the ruined landscape, the desperate colonised people, the mist and castles affect people; also Celtic folklore (Le Fanu's Carmilla is part banshee).

His outward life. He went to military school briefly as a boy, but was mostly educated at home, until it was time to go to university. He went to Trinity College, Dublin. He became a debator (as did Stoker); and when he left university, a journalist. In 1843 he married Susanna Bennett; there were 4 children; during this time he began to experiment with fiction and write ghost stories. His wife died in 1851, an event which seems to have devastated him. It is said that hee began to live the life of a recluse, and that towards end of his life was really almost wholly isolated from people.

About his writing: He liked to write in the dead of night. He would wake himself up from a dream, light two candles, and set to work. He wrote the first full-length Dracula novel, about a female vampire, Carmilla (1872). He wrote a fine gothic realistic book in Uncle Silas (1864), a movie with Peter O'Toole which is very good was made from it. Le Fanu was a scholar, an omnivorous reader, and saturated himself in reading from religious, occult, magical, hallucinatory literature of the day.

To whet appetites, without giving away what happens: "Green Tea" is a story of a horrific possession. The narrator is possessed by the vision of a malign monkey.

This comes from what I have read about his work in general: He is a psychologist. He delves into the mind through exploring dreams, madness, visions; he intertwined natural with supernatural.

I know there is a high artistry in whatever he does: like Edith Wharton he works hard to get his effects. He works hard to create realistic and picturesque effects.

Ellen

[Trollope-l] Sheridan Le Fanu and 'Green Tea': Chapters 1 to 2
Sender: trollope-l-admin@trollope.org

Dear all

Today we officially start our ghost and Christmas stories group read, so here are a few opening thoughts on Sheridan Le Fanu's chilling tale 'Green Tea'.

First of all, thanks to Joan for the information about this type of tea and its effects, or lack of them. I hadn't realised it was the same as gunpowder tea, but I don't think I've ever drunk it.

Here's a little more background information on the author, which I think is interesting in the light of our discussion of the Irish famine while we were reading 'Castle Richmond'. Le Fanu was Anglo-Irish, like fellow vampire author Bram Stoker, and, as Ellen mentioned earlier, his views on Irish politics were in general similar to those of Trollope.

However, the Oxford World's Classics edition of 'In a Glass Darkly' suggests that he reacted very differently to the famine and temporarily supported the rebels protesting against the British government's handling of the crisis. The chronology of Le Fanu near the start of the book says that in 1848 he "promised his support to John Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher in their attempts to unite Irish public opinion on the topic of Government's indifference to the great famine". The following year Mitchel was prosecuted for sedition and there was an attempted rebellion.

Robert Tracy mentions in his introduction that 'Carmilla' is partly based on Irish banshees, and also suggests that the deserted landscape of that story, with the people fleeing in terror of the vampire infection, draws on Le Fanu's experience of living through the famine.

'Green Tea' was first serialised over four weeks, in Dickens's journal 'All the Year Round'. Here are some thoughts about the first part - the preface and the first two chapters.

At the start of the story, the events are filtered through not one but two narrators. First comes an unnamed narrator, a doctor who has lost two of his fingers in an accident and now wanders the world forlornly. I found the loss of the fingers a chilling detail, starting the story with a shock in the very first paragraph and helping to give a mood of foreboding. Then we are told that this wounded narrator met another wanderer, Dr Martin Hesselius, and in him "I found my master". He has edited and translated his papers and the story of 'Green Tea' is told in the first person by Hesselius, in letters to a friend, with occasional interpolations by the first narrator, explaining where he has altered or cut the manuscript. We are also told that these events happened about 64 years ago, ie at the very start of the 19th century, giving a flavour of historical fiction. All this narrative apparatus helps to give a feeling of uncertainty about exactly what happened and what is true - often Gothic stories are surrounded with this sort of distancing narrative structure, with the tale being told third-hand or in letters.

Hesselius himself seems to have certain similarities with Sherlock Holmes, so I wonder if he was also influenced by Poe's detective Dupin, who inspired Holmes. 'Green Tea' reminded me in a way of Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', even though it's a supernatural story rather than a mystery - there is the same sort of intensity and violence. Also the ape theme, which comes a little later in the story, is another link between them, although here it's a small monkey rather than the orang-utan in Poe's story. The place where Hesselius most reminded me of Holmes/Dupin is where he first meets the tortured Jennings, and we are told that, as a medical practitioner, he "falls insensibly into patterns of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the the least likelihood of rewarding inquiry."

Hesselius uses his powers on Jennings, telling Lady Mary in Chapter 2 the things he has deduced about him after a brief conversation - he is unmarried, has been working on a book about some abstract subject, possibly theology, used to drink a lot of green tea, and "either his mother or father - I should rather think his father - saw a ghost".

However, unlike Holmes or Dupin, Hesselius doesn't tell us how he worked out all this, simply saying he deduced it "by the planets, of course, as the gipsies do". I was slightly disappointed not to get a Holmes-style explanation, but I suppose the failure to explain adds to the atmosphere of uncertainty and also makes us wonder if Hesselius really deduced all this from observation, or if his knowledge is somehow tied in with his awareness of the "spiritual world" behind the apparent reality around us.

It must have been hard for the original readers to wait a week for the next chapters!

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Re: Sheridan LeFanu's Monkey Story (aka "Green Tea")
Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2001

I have called "Green Tea" LeFanu's Monkey Story for, having read it, my view is it's deliberately misnamed. To put it another way, the name is misleading, a red herring thrown in our path to divert us from the central horror. Any explanation for why the phenomena occurs is beside the point.

The one about green tea could remind a reader of how Ann Radcliffe makes the mistake of providing a natural explanation which irritates readers because it turns the compelling and important into the banal the reader is invited to shrug at and dismiss. Except that we do not dismiss what happened as what happened to Mr Jennings is not simply a few shivers, some anxiety about intangible sounds or glimpses of things in the distance. Also the green tea is brought forward half-heartedly and carries little conviction.

If the story had not been entitled Green Tea, only the sort of reader who wants to explain away what is unnerving, and dismiss the disturbing would latch onto it. We are offered other explanations just as unconvincing: the narrator had on the night he first saw the two deep red eyes met a man who had been reading "odd old books, German editions in medieval Latin" in a "very out of the way part of the city" This "obliging person" had let Mr Jennings read these books. How good of him.

Dr Hesselius himself studies old mystic texts, the religious metaphysics of the ancients. He says it has not done his mind much good -- especially since his is a Christian mind.

These things are as much unclearly the cause of what occurs as Mr Jennings's habits with tea -- and Mr Jennings's susceptible nature which is a couple of times said to be the real cause of the attraction to him of this monkey.

So why the title? It functions in the manner of the double narrator. We have an unnamed narrator who met a Dr Hesselius who wrote these reports to a professor. So we stand at least two removes from Mr Jennings: we are not allowed to dwell with him but only see him twitch. Judy mentions the missing two fingers of the narrator: A "trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife"? Hmm. He has "enver been quite well since, and [has] seldom been twelve months in the same place altogether." Monkeys bite, and they can bite off people's fingers. Who is our narrator? We have only the narrator to vouch for this story. Now this looks forward to Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"

I realise the tone of the story recalls the detective fiction of Holmes, but the inner horror is something no ferreting out of clues could control or do away. The analogue for the tale is Maupassant's "Horla" and the supernatural ghost fiction of the later 19th century. "Horla" is another Gaslight text; it's located at:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/horlaX4.htm

Except that the madness and obsession of the narrator of Horla occurs in an atmosphere that is bright with daylight. Maybe it's more like Ambrose Bierce's tales of horror dream landscapes. Le Fanu's -- I mean Mr Jennings of course :) -- occurs in the dark repeatedly; veiled in these tremours and the obscurity of shadows, and the sense is of terror that comes at you that you cannot escape; it's sudden, it comes on; it feels like you are in control, like you are doing it, and yet you don't want this. It really embodies the meaning of the title of M. R. James's "Oh, whistle my lad and I'll come to you.' Invite me once, open the shutter, and I'll never leave you again.

What is the horror? A malicious monkey slowly materializes and then sticks by Mr Jennings wherever he goes. Under his feet. By his side. Creeping, crawling, revelling all around his body. Before his eyes doing things. Sometimes it does leave him for a while:

"'When it leaves me for a time it is always at night, in the dark, and in the same way. It grows at first uneasy, and then furious, and then advances towards me, grinning and shaking, its paws clenched, and, at the same time, there comes the appearance of fire in the grate. I never have any fire. I can't sleep in the room where there is any--and it draws nearer and nearer to the chimney, quivering, it seems, with rage, and when its fury rises to the highest pitch it springs into the grate, and up the chimney, and I see it no more".

At last though Mr Jennings sees a doctor. Dr Harley. He feels Dr Harley is helping because for three months he is safe. No return of monkey. But then it's time to return home. A pretty scene, a sunny morning, everything fine, and then they pass a stream with culvert and a stone with an old inscription on it,

"As we passed this point I drew my head in and sat down, and in the corner of the chaise was the monkey.

For a moment I felt faint, and then quite wild with despair and horror. I called to the driver, and got out, and sat down at the road-side, and prayed to God silently for mercy. A despairing resignation supervened. My companion was with me as I re-entered the vicarage. The same persecution followed. After a short struggle I submitted, and soon I left the place.

"I told you," he said [Mr Jennings talking to Dr Hesselius which report our narrator conveys to us], "that the beast has before this become in certain ways aggressive. I will explain a little. It seemed to be actuated by intense and increasing fury whenever I said my prayers, or even meditated prayer. It amounted at last to a dreadful interruption. You will ask, how could a silent immaterial phantom effect that? It was thus, whenever I meditated praying; it was always before me, and nearer and nearer.

It used to spring on a table, on the back of a chair, on the chimney piece, and slowly to swing itself from side to side, looking at me all the time. There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one's attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing--and unless I had started up, and shook off the catalepsy, I have felt as if my mind were on the point of losing itself. There are other ways," he sighed heavily; "thus, for instance, while I pray with my eyes closed, it comes closer and closer, and I see it. I know it is not to be accounted for physically, but I do actually see it, though my lids are closed, and so it rocks my mind, as it were, and overpowers me, and I am obliged to rise from my knees. If you had ever yourself known this, you would be acquainted with desperation."

Is it any wonder that Mr Jennings kills himself one morning. Does away with himself. How we are not told, for this part of the narrative is conveyed to us by the servant who stood outside the door wondering what was happening inside.

This part recalls the close of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Especially the forcing of the door. In fact the inner horror kept at a distance is precisely what Stevenson plays upon in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In the final paper the narrator tries to insinuate to us that Mr Jennings was suicidal. He had a suicidal mania, hereditary to which he succumbed. In Mary Reilly, the modern rewrite of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we have a modern reader's "take" on Stevenson's story in the final diary entry when the maid half-suggests that what really happened was Dr Jekyll simply killed himself and invented this story to explain his intense obsessive -- and to outsiders inexplicable -- behavior and melancholy.

But we are not fooled. We believe Mr Jennings because we saw and felt the monkey with him despite all the trappings.

And yet among the many different kinds of things one could say about it, there is the line in it that traces the vision as a kind of psychological poison that enters the mind and takes over slowly, like some infusion (ah, there's the tea, but I would argue the tea is a metaphor), which Dr Hesselius [as recorded by our narrator without the two fingers] describes when he is told Mr Jennings died on the other side of the door:

"It is the story of a poison, a poison which excites the reciporocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and interior. Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance."

When we come to the end of our read -- after "Afterward" I'll return to this comment: that in this story we see the moral prematurely make acquaintance with the immortal -- for at the heart of them is a metaphysics of malignity and indifference.

For try as people will the reality is Mr Jennings did nothing to deserve what happened to him. He didn't ask to be born. He didn't invent his nature. Nor did he seek anyone out; they sought him.

Ellen

Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2001
Re: "Green Tea"

Dear all

Many thanks to Ellen for all the stimulating comments about Sheridan Le Fanu's chilling tale, which I for one certainly feel have deepened my understanding of the story. I wrote a posting about the first couple of chapters yesterday, intending to follow through with more postings about the later chapters - but, after reading Ellen's posting, I'm changing tack and want to try to respond to some of the points. I can see more clearly now that this isn't really the sort of story you can take in pieces, despite originally appearing as a serial. It is tightly constructed and the tension builds inexorably towards the climax of the suicide.

Ellen wrote

So why the title? It functions in the manner of the double narrator. We have an unnamed narrator who met a Dr Hesselius who wrote these reports to a professor. So we stand at least two removes from Mr Jennings: we are not allowed to dwell with him but only see him twitch. Judy mentions the missing two fingers of the narrator: A "trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife"? Hmm. He has "enver been quite well since, and [has] seldom been twelve months in the same place altogether." Monkeys bite, and they can bite off people's fingers. Who is our narrator? We have only the narrator to vouch for this story. Now this looks forward to Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"

This is an intriguing thought. I hadn't really thought of the narrator as unreliable, only that his shadowy nature added to the distancing of the story - but, yes, there are definitely things he is not telling us. The accident with the dissecting knife is kept extremely vague. Certainly, the violence of the injury, with the loss of two fingers and collapse of his health, goes way beyond the dismissive description of 'a very trifling scratch'. Looking at the opening again, I am also struck by the thought that this mysterious narrator has become a wanderer, never in the same place for long - just as later we see Mr Jennings wandering in his bid to escape the monkey. It seems as if the narrator too is haunted, although we do not know by what spectre.

After reading Ellen's comment on the fingers and the possibility of a monkey bite, I remembered that Jennings himself uses the image of a maimed hand later in the story. In Chapter 9, 'The Third Stage', he says:

"But as food is taken in softly at the lips, and then brought under the teeth, as the tip of the little finger caught in a mill crank will draw in the hand, and the arm, and the whole body, so the miserable mortal who has been once caught firmly by the end of the finest fibre of his nerve, is drawn in and in, by the enormous machinery of hell, until he is as I am."

This again seems to link Jennings with the figure of the narrator. Looking back to that opening paragraph, you have to wonder if he too has been caught by the "tip of the little finger" and drawn in by the machinery of hell.

In the next section, Chapter 10, we come up against the unreliability of the narrator once again, when he suddenly jumps in to censor the text, putting a note not at the bottom of the page but in the middle of the flow of the story:

"(There occurs here a careful note of Dr Hesselius' opinion upon the case and of the habits, dietary, and medicines which he prescribed. It is curious - some persons would say mystical. But on the whole I doubt whether it would sufficiently interest a reader of the kind I am likely to meet with, to warrant its being here reprinted...")

Well, that's told us. We are not "readers of the kind" who want to know the full story - yet, surely, by now, most readers would be desperate to know everything possible about the case, all the evidence of whether the monkey is a creature of illness, hallucination, or a spirit in bestial form. This cut to the text here teases the reader in the same way as Hesselius' earlier refusal to say how he worked out the various facts he cited about Jennings, the green tea, the theology and the haunted father. We are left to wonder whether he used Holmes-style deduction or had some gift of second sight.

The mention of 'dietary habits and medicines' once again holds out a (slim) possibility that the monkey hallucination could be medically explained, but the word 'mystical' puts the other possibility, and faces us with the image of real spiritual evil once again.

Ellen mentioned 'The Turn of the Screw', and the more I look at Le Fanu's story, the more I feel it is built around the same sort of deep ambiguity. Maybe the green tea is indeed a red herring, and it certainly seems an hopelessly inadequate explanation for the horror which Le Fanu shows us unfolding so remorselessly. But, if you think opium or alcohol rather than tea, I'd say addiction is just as destructive as Swedenborg's evil spirits. We are left with several possible explanations, none of which fully explain what we have seen. It could just be that Jennings is ill, affected by the tea or the late nights, although this is hard to believe. It could be that the disturbing pagan myths he has studied have unsettled his brain, and led him to question his religious faith, a powerful theme in so much Victorian writing, leading to a "spectral illusion", or there is the possibility that he is really being pursued by a malign spirit.

For me, the story's unsettling power lies in this central unanswered question, the fact that we do not know whether the monkey is a creature of Jennings' anguished mind or a spirit of hell. Either way, the horror is the same, because it is enough to drive him to kill himself.

Apart from 'The Turn of the Screw', has anybody read any other ghost stories which centre on a spirit which may be really there or just imagined? I was reminded of Dickens's 'The Signalman', which we read last year - he insisted that all ghost stories must have this ambiguity, and fell out with Gaskell about it when she made the ghosts definitely appear in 'The Old Nurse's Story'. But I'm sure there must be other great stories with the same note of ambiguity.

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Re: Le Fanu's Monkey Story (aka "Green Tea")

Judy wrote:

"For me, the story's unsettling power lies in this central unanswered question, the fact that we do not know whether the monkey is a creature of Jennings' anguished mind or a spirit of hell."

I like the way Judy put that. It recalls Hamlet's sudden intense question to the ghost who visits him to tell him a story of how his father was murdered by his uncle and to accuse that uncle and by implication his mother of adulterous incestuous love. We later find out the ghost was telling the truth insofar as the uncle is concerned: Claudius murdered Hamlet's father. But what are the ghost's motives? He urges vengeance, but spirits from heaven are not supposed to urge violence. As a result of this visit which is repeated we have a heap of dead bodies on the stage at play's end, including Hamlet's. A key question of the play is then Hamlet's "Are thou a spirit of health or a goblin damn'd?" If the latter, why have you been permitted to harass, haunt and drive me?

There are many many ghost stories in which what happened is left ambiguous and we are never sure if there was a ghost or the eruption came from the individual's subjective obsessed haunted imagination. We have read a few on this list already: last year "The Library Window" was one; they are very common in the 20th century which is more sceptical than the 19th in spirit.

The narrator could be Mr Jennings himself. This is to take unreliability beyond common bounds, but then this story is beyond the common bounds. To decide we'd have to read the whole of In a Glass Darkly and see how Dr Hesselius and impersonal narrators are used in the other stories.

Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost stories are intricate teases, enough to keep the mind absorbed and then at work on cold winter evenings when you huddle close to the fire for warmth and security.

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001
Re: Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea"

I found this story completely gripping but at the moment of the suicide, it faded and I felt that Lefanu had got hold of a powerful image in the monkey but had no idea how to take it any further.

So for me the narrative is superb with all its touches of observation and horror, it builds well and the revelation is sustained at a tense pitch. And then its all over. crump. A creaky bit of plot and the story fits its allotted space.

Monkeys are often portrayed as malign. Do others know the Monkey's Paw by W W Jacob? That's a powerful horror story which uses rationalism and magic together.

Angela

December 5, 2001

Angela mentions "The Monkey's Paw". I have read it with several classes of students. It appears in just about all anthologies of ghost stories: it is justly famous. As she comments, the image of the monkey itself is central to the many gothic and other stories too (take Burney's Evelina> where at the end a monkey is bought for a nasty man) where it appears. The reason is not far to seek: there needed no Darwin to tell people from time immemorial that the monkey is a cousin to us. Swift's Yahoos are a version of chimp: the difference is they are so strong with their cunning, and they run around naked.

I agree with her that the suicide leaves us with a "crump". The energy is suddenly drained; there is some sort of release and all is over. Le Fanu's plots are creaky: they are contrivances; they important thing is the atmosphere and then the presence of the ghost interacting with a small group of haunted characters who are observed by a narrator who is enigmatically involved.

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001
Re: "Green Tea" and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Dear all

Sorry I haven't been around much this week, but I've been following the 'Green Tea'/ monkey story postings with interest. I take Angela's point that the story does fizzle out after the horrific climax - Dr Hesselius's feeble excuses about how he couldn't have helped it seem unintentionally humorous (well, obviously, he was too busy writing up notes to look after his patient).

But, all the same, I feel the tale has great power, and I think this relates to Ellen's posting today about Freud and 'An Eye for an Eye'. 'Green Tea' is also a Gothic tale, and there is that same death wish running through it - Jennings might consciously struggle to be free of his tormentor, to choose the light of life and religion, but subconsciously he is drawn towards the darkness and his fate.

Robert Tracy's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of 'In a Glass Darkly' suggests that the monkey is an aspect of Jennings himself, the bad/lustful side separated off, as with Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Tracy writes:

"Jennings does perhaps spend too much time in his study, where his interests resemble those of George Eliot's Mr Casaubon. Too much tea, green or not, can bring about a nervous state. His studies have led him into pagan mythology, to half-realize that the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome are metaphors for a sensuality he can neither accommodate nor confront: Venus is unbridled desire, Mars unbridled rage, Bacchus licentiousness, Pan sheer animality. His unintended invasion of the world of spirits causes him to see or imagine a metaphor for his own suppressed erotic self, his animal nature. When Stevenson's Dr Jekyll creates an alternate self so that he can indulge his baser nature while continuing to pose as a paragon of virtue, Mr Hyde is ape-like, with long simian arms. Hyde mocks and reveals Jekyll's repressions."

Tracy's mention of Jekyll and Hyde here reminded me that there is a possible theme of addiction worked into both stories. In Stevenson's great horror tale, the doctor has to take drugs to turn himself into Mr Hyde and back again, and gradually the drug which turns him back loses its power. I've read that Stevenson's wife, Fanny, wanted him to get rid of the element of taking pills, but Stevenson insisted it must stay in because this happened in the nightmare which inspired him to write the story.

I think he was right to keep this element in - it means we see how Jekyll accomplishes his own destruction, turns himself into Hyde by degrees, and the whole story will work as a portrait of addiction as well as on so many other levels.

It's harder to see the green tea as important in Le Fanu's story - but, if you can accept the tea as hallucinogenic drug, then it could just about be argued that it unlocks the spectre which can't be got rid of afterwards. I also found a posting on the story in the Victoria archives which mentioned that there is an expression "having a monkey on your back" to describe addiction. I've never heard this myself but thought it was interesting, though I don't know if it is likely this saying was current in the 19th century.

Angela mentioned Darwin, and Tracy's introduction also suggests that the monkey could "reflect Victorian anxieties about the unwelcome suggestion that man was of simian ancestry". Darwin's discoveries were felt to undermine religion, and I suppose this could be one reason for the monkey's fury when Jennings tries to pray - although somehow the demon explanation seems more convincing, to me anyway.

Has anybody read any more of Le Fanu's work? I've read two of the other stories in 'In a Glass Darkly', the vampire novella 'Carmilla', which is chillingly brilliant, and 'The Familiar', which to me doesn't seem quite as gripping as 'Green Tea'. It was actually written some years earlier and reworked to put in this collection.

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001
Subject: [Trollope-l] Spectral illusions and Dickens (long)
Sender: trollope-l-admin@trollope.org

Dear all A piece on 'Green Tea' on the Victorian Web, taken from the book "Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories" by Barbara Gates, mentions that Dickens was fascinated by the story - in particular by the theme of spectral illusions. Here's a link to the piece for anybody who is interested:

http://65.107.211.206/victorian/books/suicide/06d.html

Gates writes:

"Haunted suicides, who like Nickleby are plagued by phantoms of the self, appear with some regularity in Dickens, but they abound in the fiction of the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Dickens himself was fascinated by the work of Le Fanu and printed Le Fanu's "Green Tea" in his periodical, All the Year Round (1869). Dickens's correspondence regarding that publication is itself of interest. Convinced that Le Fanu was an expert on "spectral illusions" because of the writer's passages on Swedenborgianism, Dickens requested that Le Fanu send on to Madame de la Rue all possible information about such illusions. One of Dickens's friends, Madame de la Rue had suffered from spectres for thirty to forty years, and Dickens had already tried mesmerism as a cure."

I immediately found this interesting because there is quite a lot in the biographies about Dickens's relationship with Madame de la Rue, which played a part in the deterioration of his marriage - he tried to mesmerise her to cure her nervous troubles, and became obsessed with this, attempting to communicate with her telepathically. Dickens's wife, Catherine, was jealous of the intensity of his interest in his "patient", and he took bitter offence at this.

However, I was also interested because I had a feeling Dickens had written about his own experience of something like a spectral illusion, and I've found the passage, in 'The Uncommercial Traveller: Chapter 7'. It's quite long, but I thought it was so interesting I couldn't resist posting it. Be warned - this possibly isn't something to read just before going to bed!

Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled there. One Christmas Day, when I would rather have been anywhere else, I was attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all alone on his cold bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey hair, and running, drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it got to the corner of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made him look sly. One New Year's Morning (by the same token, the sun was shining outside, and there was a mountebank balancing a feather on his nose, within a yard of the gate), I was pulled in again to look at a flaxen-haired boy of eighteen, with a heart hanging on his breast 'from his mother,' was engraven on it who had come into the net across the river, with a bullet wound in his fair forehead and his hands cut with a knife, but whence or how was a blank mystery. This time, I was forced into the same dread place, to see a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was in a frightful manner comic, and whose expression was that of a prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids under a heavy blow, but was going immediately to open them, shake his head, and 'come up smiling.' Oh what this large dark man cost me in that bright city!

It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, and I was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats, observed monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, and asked monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if there were anything the matter? Faintly replying in the negative, monsieur crossed the road to a wine-shop, got some brandy, and resolved to freshen himself with a dip in the great floating bath on the river.

The bath was crowded in the usual airy manner, by a male population in striped drawers of various gay colours, who walked up and down arm in arm, drank coffee, smoked cigars, sat at little tables, conversed politely with the damsels who dispensed the towels, and every now and then pitched themselves into the river head foremost, and came out again to repeat this social routine. I made haste to participate in the water part of the entertainments, and was in the full enjoyment of a delightful bath, when all in a moment I was seized with an unreasonable idea that the large dark body was floating straight at me.

I was out of the river, and dressing instantly. In the shock I had taken some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for I fancied that the contamination of the creature was in it. I had got back to my cool darkened room in the hotel, and was lying on a sofa there, before I began to reason with myself.

Of course, I knew perfectly well that the large dark creature was stone dead, and that I should no more come upon him out of the place where I had seen him dead, than I should come upon the cathedral of Notre-Dame in an entirely new situation. What troubled me was the picture of the creature; and that had so curiously and strongly painted itself upon my brain, that I could not get rid of it until it was worn out.

I noticed the peculiarities of this possession, while it was a real discomfort to me. That very day, at dinner, some morsel on my plate looked like a piece of him, and I was glad to get up and go out. Later in the evening, I was walking along the Rue St. Honore, when I saw a bill at a public room there, announcing small-sword exercise, broad-sword exercise, wrestling, and other such feats. I went in, and some of the sword-play being very skilful, remained. A specimen of our own national sport, The British Boaxe, was announced to be given at the close of the evening. In an evil hour, I determined to wait for this Boaxe, as became a Briton. It was a clumsy specimen (executed by two English grooms out of place), but one of the combatants, receiving a straight righthander with the glove between his eyes, did exactly what the large dark creature in the Morgue had seemed going to do and finished me for that night.

There was rather a sickly smell (not at all an unusual fragrance in Paris) in the little ante-room of my apartment at the hotel. The large dark creature in the Morgue was by no direct experience associated with my sense of smell, because, when I came to the knowledge of him, he lay behind a wall of thick plate-glass as good as a wall of steel or marble for that matter. Yet the whiff of the room never failed to reproduce him. What was more curious, was the capriciousness with which his portrait seemed to light itself up in my mind, elsewhere. I might be walking in the Palais Royal, lazily enjoying the shop windows, and might be regaling myself with one of the ready-made clothes shops that are set out there. My eyes, wandering over impossible-waisted dressing-gowns and luminous waistcoats, would fall upon the master, or the shopman, or even the very dummy at the door, and would suggest to me, 'Something like him!' and instantly I was sickened again.

This would happen at the theatre, in the same manner. Often it would happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for the likeness, and when probably there was no likeness there. It was not because the creature was dead that I was so haunted, because I know that I might have been (and I know it because I have been) equally attended by the image of a living aversion. This lasted about a week. The picture did not fade by degrees, in the sense that it became a whit less forcible and distinct, but in the sense that it obtruded itself less and less frequently. The experience may be worth considering by some who have the care of children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and accuracy of an intelligent child's observation. At that impressible time of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed impression. If the fixed impression be of an object terrible to the child, it will be (for want of reasoning upon) inseparable from great fear. Force the child at such a time, be Spartan with it, send it into the dark against its will, leave it in a lonely bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it.

On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German chariot, and left the large dark creature behind me for good. I ought to confess, though, that I had been drawn back to the Morgue, after he was put underground, to look at his clothes, and that I found them frightfully like him, particularly his boots. However, I rattled away for Switzerland, looking forward and not backward, and so we parted company.

Although Dickens writes with a light touch here, the horror of the experience comes across all too clearly - and he even suggests it could make somebody feel suicidal, though he carefully applies this feeling to a child subjected to such an impression rather than to himself. It also strikes me that this whole strange anecdote shows just how different he was in many ways from his popular image. Somehow we don't imagine Dickens spending his Christmas day visiting the Paris morgue.

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Date: Sat, 08 Dec 2001
"Green Tea" and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Thanks very much Judy G for posting on the above and Dickens and the morgue. There is a great morgue scene in The Woman in White too, so I wonder if Collins also accompanied him sometimes? If you don't mind, I will cross post that to the Collins list and see what comes up.

I like the interpretation of the monkey as an external representation of Jennings own self.

Looking forward to our next read in this series.

Angela

Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001
Re: Sheridan Le Fanu's "Green Tea"

I agree with the apparently universal consensus that the conclusion to "Green Tea" was a great disappointment, and have been considering how the ending could have been improved. Perhaps if Dr. Hesselius had never left the Rev. Mr. Jennings, and the Rev. pulled out a knife and cut his throat before him, doing such a thoroughly efficient job that he bled to death before he could be saved? That narrator with the missing fingers seems rather chilling to me; perhaps he could have murdered both Dr. Hesselius and the Rev. Mr. Jennings and was writing this piece from prison as he awaited hanging.

LeFanu's Uncle Silas was, I believe, one of the first books we read on this list, and I thought it a wonder of suspense.

Jill Spriggs

Re: Spectral Illusions & the Gothic: Dickens, Le Fanu, Stevenson, Trollope

I too thank Judy very much for typing out that remarkable piece by Dickens. She is certainly right: as in the case of Trollope, the popular image of Dickens feels absurdly wrong when you get off the beaten-track of the very few really famous and perhaps occasionally read texts. Reading his "The Commercial Traveller" moves one back to a pro-fiction position: only the protective mask of the label "fiction" could've permitted Dickens to develop this material and publish it.

We don't begin to understand Dickens's break-up with his wife: why why it happened -- or what was the relationship between them that counted. I felt an intense poignancy in the reference to the child helpless against adults:

"The experience may be worth considering by some who have the care of children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and accuracy of an intelligent child's observation. At that impressible time of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed impression. If the fixed impression be of an object terrible to the child, it will be (for want of reasoning upon) inseparable from great fear. Force the child at such a time, be Spartan with it, send it into the dark against its will, leave it in a lonely bedroom against its will, and you had better murder it."

To whet appetites about M. E. Braddon's story the above statement may be taken as an interpretation of what happens in "The Shadow in the Corner", except that Braddon leaves out the spite, envy and determination to break a child's will precisely because the child is a rare individual vulnerable to the adults in charge of it that motivates the man who sends the child-heroine of "The Shadow in the Corner" into such a lonely bedroom.

If Victorians refused to talk about sex, they did not refuse to talk about the realities of relationships between adults and the children they are placed in charge of.

Judy's presents a cogent argument for considering the green tea in an intepretation of the story as a central element as it brings in by means of two words the whole terrain of addiction, psychosomatic visions and hallucinations which are induced by some drug from within a predisposed psyche.

I have over a couple of mornings been reading an essay by Adam Phillips in a recent issue of The London Review of Books (29 November 2001, pp. 20-23). Under the influence of this remarkable piece bringing together T. S. Eliot and Freud, these gothic stories -- and especially when they are of the ghost type present us with the soul of man under metaphysical and pictorial analysis. Instead of turning to Freud, the gothic writer turns to the nightmares and dreams of our existence themselves and does not make the move which dismisses the material by imposing a moralised understanding on it. Keats called this "negative capability". In realistic stories and many reader responses what we get is repression through imposition of explaining away the surface and saying nothing about what is not pragmatically discussable even though as we read we cannot ignore it. Here is an experience so mad and strange we don't know what to do with it: Mr Jennings's story kept at several removes and now the commercial traveller's placed before our very eyes.

I love Adam Phillips's phrase, "tapping the atmosphere of unknown terror" (in dreams and elsewhere) "and mystery in which our life is passed and which psychoanalysis has not yet analysed". This desire to tap what is not intelligible by reason or morality and what resists pressure from other people to hide it or to twist it or to make it conform to what is felt as not directly dangerous may lie at the heart of the Stevenson revival. He does tap this terrain. Trollope taps it (albeit discretely and in a medium which allows the reader to pass by silently the core of the story) in An Eye for an Eye.

Like Angela, I am looking forward to all our stories. Christmas is after all an ancient festival season, one rooted in liens on the supernatural connected to the archetypal seasonal world.

Cheers to all,
Ellen

Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001
Re: "Green Tea" - ambiguity; similarity with Jekyll and Hyde

(1) Disturbing aspects of Hesselius Concerning the ambiguity of Le Fanu's tale, there is even a suggestion that the narrator, Dr Hesselius, is a diabolic agent in the persecution of Mr Jennings: he leaves the latter at a critical moment with "One promise I exacted, which was that should the monkey at any time return, I should be sent for immediately", but then goes - strangely - and hides himself in an inn called (?significantly) "The Horns" where he *cannot* be sent for immediately.

Hesselius is also in some senses the Double of Jennings: "I was running the head of my pencil-case along the line as I read it, and something caused me to raise my eyes.

Directly before me was one of the mirrors [one of two narrow mirrors] I have mentioned, in which I saw reflected the tall shape of my friend Mr Jennings, leaning over my shoulder, and reading the page at which I was busy, and with a face so dark and wild that I should hardly have known him." - here we have Hesselius/Jennings like subject and mirror-image, though the reader is dragged in as a Double too - because Hesselius is reading and is aware of someone reading the same words over his shoulder.

The wild face of Jennings is like a deadly Medusa (like Hyde confronting Utterson in Ch 2 of Stevenson's Dr jekyll) - so presented as the Double of Hesselius: but a typical feature of Doubles stories is the way Protagonist:Double can change positions.

(2) Green Tea - Jekyll and Hyde

The similarity with Dr Jekyll is interesting: apart from the shared suggestion of addiction and consequent mental degeneration, there is the 'Double' (monkey/monkey-like Hyde) as a symbol of 'his own suppressed erotic self, his animal nature'.

There is also a similar teasing chapter title in both that has a past-tense verb, not normally allowed in titles ('Dr Jekyll was quite at ease', 'FOUR EYES WERE READING THE PASSAGE'), and a general ambiguity or indeterminacy of meaning that is produced by a broken-up collection of texts (typical of Gothic tales) and a multiplication of Doubles and doubling motifs and doubled linguistic and textual forms to create a 'chaotic' form that is hard to grasp and defines any simple interpretation (typical of Gothic and Doubles tales).

Just like the teasing optical 'paradoxes' of Escher, I would think that we find pleasure in such texts because we like to test the limits of cognition, taking a holiday from reason and logic.

Richard Dury

Date: Sat, 8 Dec 2001
Re: "Green Tea" - Hesselius as double of Jennings

Another suggestion that Hesselius is a Double of Jennings is in Ch. 3, when he is reading Jenning's books and sees a desperate pencil annotation in Jenning's hand - we then learn in Ch. 4 that he is using a propelling pencil ('pencil-case') to guide his eye along the lines. Perhaps Hesselius is somehow responsible for the annotations (rather as Hyde scribbles blasphemies in Jekyll's hand in Jekyll's pious works).

Incidently, I find the chapter title "FOUR EYES WERE READING THE PASSAGE" a bit disturbing. Normally chapter titles can be seen as the work of an Editor (the author functioning as Editor), but here we have a *bit of narrative* not a *comment about a bit of narrative*. I sounds like the voice of a mysterious other narrator, someone who has been watching the narrator narrating and the reader reading all the time and just interrupts this once out of the dark. Creepy.

Richard Dury

Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2001
Re: "Green Tea" and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Dear all

Many thanks to Richard for the fascinating comments on 'Green Tea' and its similarities with 'Jekyll and Hyde'. I really like the idea of Hesselius as a diabolic agent. Until reading this posting, I had vaguely assumed he was well-meaning, probably because his notes are used as a narrative framework for the other stories in 'In a Glass Darkly' - but, as you show, there is no reason to accept his own account of himself.

I had wondered why on earth he hides himself in the inn (thanks for pointing out the suggestive name the Horns) but thought he was just incompetent. However, the persecution idea ties in with Hesselius's own deep knowledge of demons - he looks into the Swedenborgian books fearlessly and even wrote one on a similar theme, but there is no suggestion that he ever had reason to fear spectres. This could also be one explanation for the strange passage I mentioned earlier where he somehow deduces all kinds of facts about Jennings, such as the fact that his father saw a ghost, but refuses to say how he knows all this. It could be that this knowledge too comes from the demons.

I was also really interested in your comments on doubling and mirrors, which play an important role in so many Gothic tales. This reminded me of Gaskell's story 'The Poor Clare', where a curse is put on a girl which means she is constantly shadowed by an evil/monstrous version of herself.

Richard wrote

There is also a similar teasing chapter title in both that has a past-tense verb, not normally allowed in titles ('Dr Jekyll was quite at ease', 'FOUR EYES WERE READING THE PASSAGE'), and a general ambiguity or indeterminacy of meaning that is produced by a broken-up collection of texts (typical of Gothic tales) and a multiplication of Doubles and doubling motifs and doubled linguistic and textual forms to create a 'chaotic' form that is hard to grasp and defines any simple interpretation (typical of Gothic and Doubles tales).

Just like the teasing optical 'paradoxes' of Escher, I would think that we find pleasure in such texts because we like to test the limits of cognition, taking a holiday from reason and logic.

I had noticed that the chapter title had a menacing flavour, but hadn't realised this was achieved by the past-tense verb - again many thanks for pointing this out. I definitely agree the story defies simple interpretation and is hard to grasp. In a way it has a dream quality, as with so many Gothic stories.

Cheers
Judy Geater

Dear Richard and Judy and all,

The perception that Hesselius is Jenning's double explains while it makes suggestively ambiguous and chilling a good deal of the tale. Hesselius' knowledge of Jenning's inner life recalls Jekyll's of Hyde's and Hyde's of Jekyll's. I also felt as I was reading we had narrators within narrators -- Richard adds that we have readers reading over one another's shoulders. Maybe this unfolding reactive psychology is why I also am so drawn to epistolary narrative: there too the depth and interest of the narrative comes from the sense the author builds upon that we are reading a letter over the shoulder of another character.

Note too the presence of unexplained people who turn up at moments when Jennings's life suddenly becomes obsessed and he is trailed and tormented by the monkey once again: for example, the man who had the odd books that Jennings is given access to; it is in the next paragraph that he first sees the red eyes. In fact reading the story can be a bit confusing: it's hard to tell who is speaking: Is this the voice of Hesselius, Jennings or our unnamed narrator who has lost two fingers?

Gothic tales require the reader lending him or herself to the mood and atmosphere; you must move into the reverie and respond to nuance. There are writers of the gothic who produce unsubtle or bold texts: they are the ones who become popular, e.g., Bram Stoker. But the quiet sort deadpan approach that Le Fanu characteristically seems to use can yield much more to the reader. In Jack Sullivan's _Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and Supernatural_, Sullivan has a good essay (in columns) on atmosphere; he quotes Lovecraft on how it is "the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation ..." Sullivan suggests one fundamental element in the gothic tale is the creation of a "palpable feeling of dread, or an underlying sense of menace"

I never did answer Judy's query about what I've read: not so much. I have done "Justice Harbottle" and "Uncle Toby's Will" with students. To me "Justice Harbottle" is a bit too external; it reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne: there's an obviousness to both, too much explicit, though Harbottle" is startling and colourful. It's interesting that Bram Stoker's "The Judge's House" is a kind of play or similar story to "Justice Harbottle" Both have this boldness and externality I talked about. "Uncle Toby's Will" is more in the vein of "Green Tea:" the doubts it leaves lingering and how rereading brings out all sorts of things you hadn't seen in the first place is found in both. Not that "Justice Harbottle" is all that obvious. I prefer the inward feel in all stories. Although the way in which the story is written is in the traditional narrative form of the 19th century so we get I did this, I saw that, in fact "Green Tea" is the projection of an inner soul laid before us -- it seems to have three selves -- Jennings, Hesselius and the unnamed narrator.

It is not uncommon for gothics to have unnamed narrators: "The Turn of the Screw" comes to mind but there are so many of these (_Rebeca_ is famous; there's A. S. Byatt's "July's Ghost"). Sometimes the narrator is named but only once and then not again -- as in Gaskell's "Old Nurse's Story", Oliphant's "Open Door", or you get confused narrators. The device of impersonal documents put before us is not uncommon too, e.g., Ambrose Bierce's "Moonlit Road", and after all the concluding segments of Jekyll and Hyde

Cheers to all,
Ellen Moody

Finally, I copied and pasted part of a thread on "Green Tea" from Victoria:

From: brenda hammack
Re: Green Tea
To: VICTORIA@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU

In Phantastica: A Classic Survey on the Use and Abuse of Mind-Altering Plants, pharmacologist Louis Lewin discusses tea in his chapter on "Excitantia." He writes:

There is no doubt that the abusive application of concentrated infusions of tea is liable to call forth physical disorders of a general nature in persons susceptible to its action, if only on account of the theophylline which, medicinally applied, is apt to give rise to symptoms of convulsions. These are said to appear if more than 5 cups of a concentrated infusion of tea are consumed daily. A man who from youth had become accustomed to drinking exaggerated quantities of tea and had reached a daily consumption of 30 cups suffered from symptoms of anĉmia, suffocation, and hallucinations. (218)

Phantastica, published in 1924, summarizes Lewin's psychopharmacological work from the late nineteenth century. Park Street Press of Rochester, Vermont reprinted the book in 1998.

Brenda Mann Hammack
hammack@roanoke.edu

Re: "Green Tea": Is it hallucinatory?

Dear all

I'm wondering if anybody else has actually come across green tea and, if so, whether you think it is really hallucinogenic? I am mainly a coffee-drinker anyway, and wasn't at all sure how green tea differed from the more usual varieties, but there's a footnote in the Oxford World's Classics edition of In a Glass Darkly which sums up the difference: "green tea: tea that has not been fermented. The leaves are steamed. It is usually drunk without milk, sugar, or lemon."

I knew there had been a few discussions on green tea on the Victoria list, so I had a look in the archives and found a couple of interesting postings I thought I'd pass on too:

Thomas Carlyle fulminated against green tea: "it is a most felonious practice that of green tea in this City; and ought to be abated." Sure that it caused dyspepsia and insomnia, he would sometimes have his own black tea at home before going to a home where he anticipated being offered only green tea. When he did drink green tea, he always recorded suffering from it. He did not worry about its foreign origin or possible addiction.

emcurran@colby.edu

More recently, I remember that the veteran British MP Tony Benn became ill from drinking too much tea (apparently he drinks it non-stop from morning to night) but this was normal non-green tea and hallucinations were not involved.

Reading Le Fanu's chilling tale, I was surprised to come across Mr Jennings' comment in Chapter 6:

"I believe that anybody who sets about writing in earnest does his work, as a friend of mine phrased it, *on* something - tea, or coffee, or tobacco."

If anybody had asked me, I would probably have thought the phrase "on something" would be from the 1960s rather than the 1860s. But I have to say I've been surprised recently by how important a theme addiction is in Victorian literature. There are many haunting depictions of alcoholics of course, but also opium addicts.

Has anybody come across any other characters who suffer ill effects from tea-drinking?

Of course, all this is to assume that the green tea is implicated in the haunting of Mr Jennings. Given that the evil spectre of the monkey does not disappear when he gives up tea, I'm not convinced there is a connection at all.

Bye for now
Judy Geater

Hi Judy,

I've had many cups of green tea and have not noticed any different effects from it than the black.

It has a totally different flavor. I think it might be one of the early teas since it tastes a lot like "Gunpowder" which was a very early tea.

I can say now though, since the doctor has totally decaffeinated me that when I drank too much tea (or coffee or anything else with caffeine), I certainly felt the effect of it. It was more of a twitchy effect certainly not hallucinogenic but it could, I suppose by some, be interpreted like that. I have been told that my chemistry is very affected by caffeine--maybe others are more so.

I had more information about green tea once but it was on the computer that crashed last December.

Joan

To Gothic Literature

July 19, 2002

Re: Sheridan LeFanu's Monkey Story (aka "Green Tea")

Although I have not read "Schalken the Painter, " I have read online with a group of other people, Le Fanu's "Green Tea" -- and my and other people's comments may be found in the archives of Trollope-l. You do have to join the list to read these:

http://www.JimandEllen.org/trollope/trollope.list.html

On Trollope-l for about 3 years we read a group of ghost/Christmas stories during the winter solstice. I've also read and taught his "Squire Toby's Will" "Mr Justice Harbottle" and Carmilla". All these show the same gothic characteristics Matthew outlined, but maybe "Green Tea" comes closest to the sort of thing Matthew conveyed to us in his reading.

I tried to do something similar in the posting I wrote on Trollope-l which I called LeFanu's Monkey Story for, having read it, my view was it's deliberately misnamed. To put it another way, the name is misleading, a red herring thrown in our path to divert us from the central horror. Any explanation for why the phenomena occurs is beside the point.

The one about green tea could remind a reader of how Ann Radcliffe makes the mistake of providing a natural explanation which irritates readers because it turns the compelling and important into the banal the reader is invited to shrug at and dismiss. Except that we do not dismiss what happened as what happened to Mr Jennings is not simply a few shivers, some anxiety about intangible sounds or glimpses of things in the distance. Also the green tea (as an explanation for what hapepned) is brought forward half-heartedly and carries little conviction. It's really thrown there as a sop to the reader who wants such things explained away. My view is if the story had not been entitled Green Tea, only the sort of reader who wants to explain away what is unnerving, and dismiss the disturbing would latch onto it. We are offered other explanations just as unconvincing: the narrator had on the night he first saw the two deep red eyes met a man who had been reading "odd old books, German editions in medieval Latin" in a "very out of the way part of the city" This "obliging person" had let Mr Jennings read these books. How good of him.

So why the title? It functions in the manner of the double narrator. We have an unnamed narrator who met a Dr Hesselius who wrote these reports to a professor about what happened to a Mr Jennings. So we stand at least two removes from Mr Jennings: we are not allowed to dwell with him but only see him twitch. Much of the imagery of the face described by Matthew can be seen as related to the Death (which by-the-bye is visualized brilliantly in the face of the murderous hating mother in the film adaptation of Woman in Black -- the climax of the film occurs when you see her face close up as she hovers over a young man in bed, attempting it would seem to rape him as the figure of Death). Well in "Green Tea" there is a something which links up quietly: the narrator is missing two fingers of the narrator: A "trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife"? Hmm. He has "never been quite well since, and [has] seldom been twelve months in the same place altogether." Monkeys bite, and they can bite off people's fingers. Who is our narrator? Is he Mr Jennings? Did Mr Jennings die? We have only the narrator to vouch for this story. Now this looks forward to Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"

Dr Hesselius himself studies old mystic texts, the religious metaphysics of the ancients. He says it has not done his mind much good -- especially since his is a Christian mind.

These things -- the study of old texts, the isolation and withdrawal of Mr Jennings's habits, and especially his sensitivity, his vulnerability to the cruelty of others are as much unclearly the cause of what occurs as Mr Jennings's habits with tea -- Mr Jennings's susceptible nature is a couple of times said to be the real cause of the attraction to him of this monkey.

What is the horror? A malicious monkey slowly materializes and then sticks by Mr Jennings wherever he goes. Under his feet. By his side. Creeping, crawling, revelling all around his body. Before his eyes doing things. Sometimes it does leave him for a while:

"When it leaves me for a time it is always at night, in the dark, and in the same way. It grows at first uneasy, and then furious, and then advances towards me, grinning and shaking, its paws clenched, and, at the same time, there comes the appearance of fire in the grate. I never have any fire. I can't sleep in the room where there is any--and it draws nearer and nearer to the chimney, quivering, it seems, with rage, and when its fury rises to the highest pitch it springs into the grate, and up the chimney, and I see it no more".

At last though Mr Jennings sees a doctor. Dr Harley. He feels Dr Harley is helping because for three months he is safe. No return of monkey. But then it's time to return home. A pretty scene, a sunny morning, everything fine, and then they pass a stream with culvert and a stone with an old inscription on it,

"As we passed this point I drew my head in and sat down, and in the corner of the chaise was the monkey.

For a moment I felt faint, and then quite wild with despair and horror. I called to the driver, and got out, and sat down at the road-side, and prayed to God silently for mercy. A despairing resignation supervened. My companion was with me as I re-entered the vicarage. The same persecution followed. After a short struggle I submitted, and soon I left the place.

"I told you," he said [Mr Jennings talking to Dr Hesselius which report our narrator conveys to us], "that the beast has before this become in certain ways aggressive. I will explain a little. It seemed to be actuated by intense and increasing fury whenever I said my prayers, or even meditated prayer. It amounted at last to a dreadful interruption. You will ask, how could a silent immaterial phantom effect that? It was thus, whenever I meditated praying; it was always before me, and nearer and nearer.

It used to spring on a table, on the back of a chair, on the chimney piece, and slowly to swing itself from side to side, looking at me all the time. There is in its motion an indefinable power to dissipate thought, and to contract one's attention to that monotony, till the ideas shrink, as it were, to a point, and at last to nothing--and unless I had started up, and shook off the catalepsy, I have felt as if my mind were on the point of losing itself. There are other ways," he sighed heavily; "thus, for instance, while I pray with my eyes closed, it comes closer and closer, and I see it. I know it is not to be accounted for physically, but I do actually see it, though my lids are closed, and so it rocks my mind, as it were, and overpowers me, and I am obliged to rise from my knees. If you had ever yourself known this, you would be acquainted with desperation."

Is it any wonder that Mr Jennings kills himself one morning. Does away with himself. How we are not told, for this part of the narrative is conveyed to us by the servant who stood outside the door wondering what was happening inside.

This part reminds me of the close of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Especially the forcing of the door. In fact the inner horror kept at a distance is precisely what Stevenson plays upon in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

In the final paper the narrator tries to insinuate to us that Mr Jennings was suicidal. He had a suicidal mania, hereditary to which he succumbed. In Mary Reilly, the modern rewrite of Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we have a modern reader's "take" on Stevenson's story in the final diary entry when the maid half-suggests that what really happened was Dr Jekyll simply killed himself and invented this story to explain his intense obsessive -- and to outsiders inexplicable -- behavior and melancholy.

But we are not fooled. We believe Mr Jennings because we saw and felt the monkey with him despite all the trappings.

And yet among the many different kinds of things one could say about it, there is the line in it that traces the vision as a kind of psychological poison that enters the mind and takes over slowly, like some infusion (ah, there's the tea, but I would argue the tea is a metaphor), which Dr Hesselius [as recorded by our narrator without the two fingers] describes when he is told Mr Jennings died on the other side of the door:

"It is the story of a poison, a poison which excites the reciporocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and interior. Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance."

In this story we see the moral prematurely make acquaintance with the immortal -- for at the heart of such stories is a metaphysics of malignity and indifference.

For try as people will the reality is Mr Jennings did nothing to deserve what happened to him. He didn't ask to be born. He didn't invent his nature. Nor did he seek anyone out; they sought him.

The tone of the story recalls the detective fiction of Holmes, and readers who read quickly sometimes dismiss "Green Tea", but read slow and let it get to you, and you see the inner horror is something no ferreting out of clues could control or do away. The analogue for the tale is Maupassant's "Horla" and the supernatural ghost fiction of the later 19th century. "Horla" is another Gaslight text; it's located at:

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/horlaX4.htm

Except that the madness and obsession of the narrator of Horla occurs in an atmosphere that is bright with daylight. Maybe Le Fanu's story more like Ambrose Bierce's tales of horror dream landscapes. Le Fanu's -- I mean Mr Jennings of course, oops make that Dr Hesselius's tale -- occurs in the dark repeatedly; veiled in these tremours and the obscurity of shadows, and the sense is of terror that comes at you that you cannot escape; it's sudden, it comes on; it feels like you are in control, like you are doing it, and yet you don't want this. It really embodies the meaning of the title of M. R. James's "Oh, whistle my lad and I'll come to you.' Invite me once, open the shutter, and I'll never leave you again.

In Michael Cox's introduction to The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, Cox suggests the following line from a story by LeFanu shows just how important is literary tact, judgement, "le mot juste" for pulling off a ghost or gothic terror story. With the narrator the reader hears on the stairs:

a slow, heavy tread, characterized by the emphasis and deliberation of age ... and, what made the sound more singular, it was lain that the feet which produced it were perfectly bare, measuring the descent with something between a pound and a flop, very ugly to hear ...

To Cox, "hyperbole lays the literary ghost with deadly finality: it gathers strength through obliquity and operates most powerfully on us, in Elizabeth Bowen's words, "through a series of happenings whose horror lies in their being just, just, out of the true." Todorov's book on Fantasy is about how effective supernatural makes us hover between what we believe to be real and what the repressed imaginings of our dream world enables us to live.

Not that the full-throated approach -- which we find in Stoker's Dracula does not have its force, brilliant, memorability. But there you need a style of theatrics to carry it off.

Ellen