Welcome back to the Lovecraft reread, in which two modern Mythos writers get girl cooties all over old Howard’s sandbox, from those who inspired him to those who were inspired in turn. Today we’re looking at Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea,” first published in his In a Glass Darkly collection in 1872. Spoilers ahead.
Summary
Unnamed narrator trained in medicine and surgery but never practiced due to the loss of two fingers. Still fascinated by the art, he became secretary to renowned German physician Martin Hesselius, whose voluminous papers he inherited. Here he translates Hesselius’s notes on a singular case of, what, delusion? Spiritual insight? Read on and decide.
During a tour of England in the early 1800s, Hesselius met the Reverend Mr. Jennings, an agreeable and worthy clergyman by all accounts. Yet he has peculiarities. Though anxious to administer his Warwickshire parish, he’s several times succumbed to a nervous disorder that drives him to London. Hesselius also observes Jennings’s habit of “looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there.”
Jennings is interested in Hesselius’s papers on metaphysical medicine, of which Hesselius offers him a copy. Later the doctor speaks to their hostess Lady Mary, for he’s made some conjectures about Jennings he wants to confirm: that the Reverend is unmarried; that he was writing on an abstract topic but has discontinued his work; that he used to drink a lot of green tea; and that one of his parents was wont to see ghosts. Amazed, Lady Mary says he’s right on all points.
Hesselius isn’t surprised when Jennings asks to see him. The doctor goes to Jennings’s townhouse and waits in his lofty, narrow library. A fine set of Swedenborg’s Arcana Celestia attracts his notice. He pages through several volumes that Jennings has bookmarked and annotated. One underlined passage reads, “When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.” Per Swedenborg, evil spirits may leave hell to associate with particular humans, but once they realize the human is in the material world, they will seek to destroy him. A long note in Jennings’ hand begins “Deus misereatur mei (May God compassionate me).” Respecting the clergyman’s privacy, Hesselius reads no more, but he doesn’t forget the plea.
Jennings comes in and tells Hesselius he’s in complete agreement with the doctor’s book. He calls Dr. Harley, his former physician, a fool and a “mere materialist.” But he remains shy about the details of his own spiritual illness until several weeks later, when he returns to London after another abortive attempt to minister in Warwickshire. Then he summons Hesselius to his somber house in Richmond and spills his story.
Four years before, he began work on a book about the religious metaphysics of the ancients. He used to fuel this late-night project with copious black tea. Eventually he switched to green tea, which he found better stimulated his thought processes. One night, aboard a dark omnibus home, he saw something strange: two points of luminous red, near the floor. He moved closer and made out a small black monkey grinning at him. He poked it with his umbrella, which passed through the creature’s body without resistance. Spooked, he got off the omnibus early but soon saw the monkey following him. It had to be illusion, a symptom of nervous dyspepsia perhaps.
Yet it persisted, never leaving him, never sleeping, always watching, visible even in total dark via a halo like the red glow of embers. The first year it seemed dazed and languid. It disappeared one night, after a fit of furious agitation, and Jennings prayed he’d never see it again. However, it returned livelier and more malicious. For example, when he was preaching, it would spring on his book so he couldn’t read his text. After another three-month absence, it returned so aggressive it wouldn’t let him pray in private, distracting him whenever he tried, visible even when his eyes were closed. Finally the thing began to speak in his head, blaspheming, ordering him to harm others and himself. Why, he, a man of God, has become a mere abject slave of Satan!
Hesselius calms the clergyman and departs after telling Jennings’s servant to watch his master carefully and summon the doctor at once in any crisis. He spends the night going over the case and planning treatment. Unfortunately, he does this at a quiet inn away from his London lodgings and so doesn’t receive the emergency summons until too late—when he returns to Jennings’s house, the clergyman has cut his own throat.
The doctor concludes with a letter to a professor friend who suffered for a time from similar persecution but was cured (through Hesselius) by God. Poor Jennings’s story was one of “the process of a poison, a poison that excites the reciprocal action of spirit and nerve, and paralyses the tissue that separates those cognate functions of the senses, the external and the interior. Thus we find strange bedfellows, and the mortal and immortal prematurely make acquaintance.”
He goes on to note that Jennings is the only one of fifty-seven such patients he failed to save, due to the man’s precipitant suicide. See his theories about a spiritual fluid that circulates through the nerves. The overuse of some agents, like green tea, can affect its equilibrium and so expose connections between the exterior and interior senses that allow incorporeal spirits to communicate with living men. Alas that Jennings opened his inner eye with his chosen stimulant and then succumbed to his own fears. For, “if the patient do not array himself on the side of the disease, his cure is certain.”
What’s Cyclopean: Jennings’s monkey moves with “irrepressible uneasiness” and “unfathomable malignity.”
The Degenerate Dutch: It’s difficult to interpret Dr. Hesselius’s conviction that green tea in particular is dangerously stimulating to the inner eye. It’s treated as notably more exotic than “ordinary black tea.” Does Hesselius believe everyone in China and Japan wanders around seeing demonic monkeys all the time?
Mythos Making: There are aspects of reality to which most people remain blind and ignorant—and we’re much better off that way. Stripped of its theological component, this essential idea is at the core of much Lovecraft.
Libronomicon: Jennings’s situation is foreshadowed by several Swedenborg quotes about the evil spirits that attend, and try to destroy, humans.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Hesselius diagnoses Jennings posthumously, and somewhat dismissively, with “hereditary suicidal mania.”
Anne’s Commentary
Dubliner Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu gets but passing mention in Supernatural Horror in Literature, even though one of Lovecraft’s “modern masters,” M. R. James, revered the earlier virtuoso of the ghost story. “Green Tea” appears in the collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), along with four other accounts from the archives of Dr. Martin Hesselius, prepared by his literary executor for the curious “laity.” The most famous of “Tea’s” companions is Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Carmilla. Huh. Dr. Hesselius plays so small a part in that novella I forgot he was even involved. But he’s at the center of “Tea.” Just not quite close enough, as we’ll discuss below.
Martin Hesselius, medical metaphysician, is the forerunner of a distinguished line of occult detectives and doctors to the supernaturally harassed. Not long ago we met William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki. Before long, I trust, we’ll make the acquaintance of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, the Physician Extraordinaire, and Seabury Quinn’s Dr. Jules de Grandin. In more recent times, journalists (Carl Kolchak) and FBI agents (Mulder and Scully) and cute brothers (Dean and Sam Winchester) have led the fight against the uncanny, but surely its most famous warrior can trace his distinguished ancestry back to Hesselius, and that is Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula owes much to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Its scholarly hero may be partly based on the vampire expert of that novella, Baron Vordenburg, but Van Helsing more closely resembles the erudite, open-minded and well-traveled Hesselius. In fact, “Van Helsing” is a near-anagram of “Martin Hesselius,” as “Carmilla” was an anagram of the vampire’s true name “Mircalla.” Van Helsing, as Dr. Seward tells us, is also a metaphysician. However well-grounded in the “materialistic” aspects of his profession (like the novel practice of blood transfusion), Van Helsing’s embrace is wide, gathering in the spiritual aspects as well. Both doctors are also pious, and because they believe in a Divine Physician, they can more readily believe in vampires and demons on temporary leave from Hell.
Van Helsing messes up a bit with Lucy Westenra, in the same way Hesselius messes up with Reverend Jennings—both leave unstable patients with inadequately informed guardians, the manservant in Jennings’s case, a crucifix-thieving maid and garlic-removing mother in Lucy’s. All very well to retreat while you formulate a treatment, Dr. Hesselius, but how about leaving a forwarding address to that quiet inn, in case Jennings should flip out in the interim? Oh well. Hesselius saved the other fifty-six patients troubled by an open inner eye and the demons it revealed.
Which is a cool concept, backed here by Swedenborg’s mysticism. Everybody’s got attendant demons. Two at least. And the demons will tend to take whatever animal form best figures forth their essential life and lust. But we aren’t aware of them unless something upsets the balance—equilibrium—of our ethereal nervous fluids. The inner (or third) eye is a much older idea, with analogs in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as good Dr. Hesselius no doubt knew. He also places the critical area of the brain “about and above the eyebrow,” like the “brow” chakra or (though more rearward) pineal gland. [RE: Brow chakra, maybe. The pineal gland is above the eyebrow only in the sense that most of the brain can be so described.]
He doesn’t seem to have considered the opening of this eye a fortunate event, as it brought about a “premature” meeting of mortal and immortal, physical and spiritual, entities. In Jennings’s case, the causative agent—the stimulant poison—was green tea. Black tea didn’t bother Jennings, so I guess it was more than caffeine that disordered his nervous fluid. Not that excessive caffeine couldn’t have done a number on him as well, both in the active intoxification stage and during his voluntary withdrawal from his favorite brew. Plus genetics plays a role in the individual’s reaction to caffeine; not surprising then that Hesselius supposes Jennings must have had one parent who was sensitive to supernatural phenomena—who had seen ghosts.
I prefer to think the monkey wasn’t mere stimulant-driven hallucination, though. Because why? Because it’s so splendidly creepy, that’s why. Monkeys are one of those animals that can be so cute until they pull back their lips to expose their killer canines. Their tendency to flash from placid to hyperkinetic is also daunting. Particularly if they’re getting all hyperkinetic at you, bouncing around and grimacing and flailing their little fists, as Jennings’s unwelcome companion does whenever its furlough from Hell is up. There’s also the little matter of the red glowing eyes. Nobody wants to yawn and stretch and glance idly around the midnight study only to see red glowing eyes staring at them. Red glowing eyes are Nature’s way of telling Homo sapiens to get off its duff and run for the cave. Red auras are even worse. And it’s always THERE. Even, in the end, when Jennings closes his eyes. And it starts TALKING. Nope, have to draw the line at talking monkeys, especially when they indulge in blasphemies. I mean, you don’t have to be a Divell-pestered Puritan to object to sacrilegious earworms.
It’s enough to make you call in Dr. Hesselius, and not to be so delayingly coy about it, either.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
This is a weird story. The central narrative is compelling, even with the dubious theology. It’s compelling regardless of whether the demonic monkey is real or hallucinatory, an achievement in ambiguity that’s difficult to manage. However, the framing device drains power from the narrative, and the final section in particular is an exercise in patronizing pedanticism that any sensible editor would have cut entirely.
Some of my irritation at the conclusion may stem from a “scientific explanation” that wins some sort of award for Showing Its Age. Maybe in 1872, the idea that green tea opens one’s inner eye to Things Man Was Not Meant to Know seemed… plausible? Vaguely Acceptable Handwavium? Not completely undermined by the contents of most peoples’ kitchen cabinets? Ordinary black tea is entirely harmless, I suppose Properly British. The oxidation process strips Camellia sinensis of its occult powers, don’t you know?
I may be moving from irritation to falling off my bed laughing. It’s been a long week, and I take my amusement where I can get it.
Leaving aside the theological threat to my very soul lurking in my tea canisters, Jennings’s story is deceptively simple in its nightmarishness. If you must have an unpleasant supernatural experience, what could be easier to put up with than an incorporeal monkey? Sure, it’s staring at you all the time, that’s kind of creepy. It stands on your book so you can’t read; my cat does that and is almost as difficult to remove. It distracts you every time you try to complete a thought, and harangues you to destroy yourself and others… honestly, trying to outrun Cthulhu in a steamship is starting to sound pretty good.
Le Fanu’s demonic monkey isn’t too far off from real symptoms of schizophrenia. Voices that don’t seem like oneself, that harass with suggestions of self-harm… difficulty concentrating… hallucinations and unusual religious ideas… the modern psychologist armed with a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would come to somewhat different conclusions than Hesselius, but would have no difficulty recognizing the details of his report. And they’re frightening details, regardless of whether their ultimate cause is neurological or supernatural. Many people might prefer the supernatural version, where the enemy is at least genuinely external. They’d certainly prefer Hesselius’s version, where a change of diet is enough to effect a real and permanent cure. Assuming you believe his boastful afterword, of course.
Though like many a Lovecraftian narrator, even the patients so cured must suffer a certain disquiet, knowing what still surrounds them even with their “inner eyes” forcibly closed.
Le Fanu had a knack for getting at core creepy ideas this way. From Tea’s depiction of a thinly veiled unseen world full of Things Man Is Better Off Not Knowing and Things Man is Better Off Not Grabbing the Attention Of, we can trace his influence on Lovecraft. The classic “Carmilla,” appearing in the same volume of stories, claims ancestry over the whole genre of modern vampire stories including the better known Dracula. Personally, I think “Green Tea” would have been improved by removing the titular beverage and replacing it with some sort of malign influence from a lesbian vampire. But then, “would be better with a lesbian vampire” just might describe the majority of western literature.
Next week, Matt Ruff’s “Lovecraft Country” provides a travel guide to horrors both mystical and all-too-mundane. It appears as the first of a series of linked stories in his collection of the same name.
Ruthanna Emrys’s neo-Lovecraftian stories “The Litany of Earth” and “Those Who Watch” are available on Tor.com, along with the distinctly non-Lovecraftian “Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land” and “The Deepest Rift.” Winter Tide, a novel continuing Aphra Marsh’s story from “Litany,” will be available from the Tor.com imprint on April 4, 2017. Ruthanna can frequently be found online on Twitter and Livejournal, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story. “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her first novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with the recently released sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
Would this tale be considered an ancestor of Lovecrafts from beyond?
With the monkey being analogous to the entitys that are floating all around us, but harmless to us untill we become aware of them or they us and scientific dohickeys in Lovecraft taking the place of too much green tea.
On anthor note i was not aware of Carmilla being part of a collection of storys told as case studies by the learned profesor who narates the story.
Will add this collection to the to be tracked down and read list.
Thanks
Skipping this one. I’m visiting Costa Rica this winter, and don’t need to read in advance about evil demon monkeys.
Carmilla came out on its own as a serial, and then was reprinted in this collection the following year. I ended up rereading it after making reference to it–it has its problems and the pacing is deeply strange, but it definitely has the page-turning quality. Errata: Upon closer examination, the Countess Mircalla appears to be a *bisexual* vampire, and not a lesbian vampire as previously stated.
I was thinking of the “From Beyond” connection as well. I definitely see the link, though as with so many ideas Lovecraft’s version is much weirder, and much further from any straightforward human moral structure.
I had some real problems getting into this one. It may have been the poor digitization of the version of the linked version, the overly long lines, trying to read Le Fanu on the computer, general distraction caused by world events, or some combination of all of these. I certainly haven’t had problems with Le Fanu’s style in the past and the more I think about it, the more I remember this story from earlier reading.
I do like the way we can never be quite sure if the monkey is an actual spirit or the product of Dr. Jennings’ mind. There’s the way the bus driver gave Jennings an odd look when he got off the bus. Did the driver see or sense something or was it the way Jennings poked around under the seat and some other odd behavior?
I shall bow to Ruthanna’s superior knowledge on mental disorders and accept the monkey as schizophrenia, but while reading, I saw it as a symbol of depression. I suppose either could fall under the antiquated diagnosis of “hereditary suicidal mania”.
Don’t bow too low; my actual area of study is cognitive psychology, a long and treacherous leap from clinical. Depression would be a pretty reasonable interpretation, too. It was the external nature of the voice that made me think of schizophrenia, but I know a lot of people with depression conceptualize negative thoughts that way as well, as a metaphor and coping strategy if nothing else.
This is a far step from schizophrenia and depression, but a particular food triggering an hallucination made me think of migraine auras and food triggers. While most auras involve lights and wiggly lines, some people see specific objects. I haven’t heard of anyone having full-blown hallucinations. But, if you were writing horror fiction, its always scarier to find out the glowing lights are attached to something looking at you.
Caffeine can help a migraine that’s started or trigger one. Also, foods that are harmless to one migraine sufferer can be a killer trigger for someone else. So, it seems quite possible that Le Fanu heard of someone who’d been find drinking black tea but began to have migraines or had them get worse while drinking green tea.
I know this is a very undramatic explanation, though.
‘Green Tea’ is one of those stories that seems to me successfully creepy in spite of its author’s efforts, not because of them. I remembered its general outlines from earlier reading, but the double framing of the story seems really unnecessary as does all the 19th century piety and pseudo-scientific spirituality. The germ of the story though – the malignant little creature that only you can see and whose attentions to you get more and more focused and hostile – that’s good nightmare fodder.
I’ll be greatly looking forward to your next book report – I just bought Lovecraft Country this last weekend, while on a trip, and inhaled it on the long plane ride back home.
It immediately went on my short list of “Best things done with the Cthulhu Mythos”, along with ‘A Colder War’ and ‘Litany of Earth’. Yet on reflection, despite the call-outs to Lovecraft the author, I’m not sure whether it actually is a part of the mythos, something I hope you’ll touch on next week.
It’s maybe worth noting that at about this time the movement from coffee (think of all those coffee houses in Dickens) to tea was getting into full swing in the UK. Maybe people were getting used to black tea (a bit), but green tea would still be quite exotic, and (up to a point, I don’t know exactly when), Europeans were still kind of uncertain whether green tea and black tea came from different species or the same species. The drying and oxidation processes was pretty much been figured out at around the time teaplants were, um, ‘obtained’ from China, and then planted in the vast (British controlled) Indian estates (thus triggering the influx of tea int he UK and the public movement from coffee to tea), but Green tea was probably still viewed as odd and maybe somehow distinctly different for quite some time.
During movement from coffee to tea in the UK, strange behaviour, frenetic activity and hallucinations were often blamed on tea. Culturally, for a while at least, coffee was considered old fashioned and non-threatening, whereas tea was the new fangled thing that could drive you crazy with its mind-altering properties. Some of the fears and panics were not very dissimilar to the sorts of things you might read in the media about people going crazy on LSD in the 70’s or ecstasy in the 90’s. Tea addiciton was considered a serious thing, with words like ‘theic’ meaning ‘a person with an inordinate fondness for tea’, to us the OED defintion (from memory).
Anyway, the historical context probably helps explain why Le Fanu thought tea in general and green tea in particular could drive a person mad / open up the mind to visions of spirits. It would have been all over the papers at the time.
Chris
I remember reading that there were people who would actually resell tea leaves, adding various things to them to make them look new and unused. I wonder if any of the things they mixed in could cause hallucinations? Or if tea leaves had their own version of ergot poisoning?
Lovecraft on LeFanu:
“The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson . . .” (SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE)
“What I have read of Sheridan Le Fanu was a great disappointment as compared with what I heard of him in advance—but it may be that I haven’t seen his best stuff. I don’t know ‘Uncle Silas’, but the thing I read (I can’t even recall the name) was abominably insipid and Victorian.” [Essential Solitude, p. 100]
“Just now I am making a bold effort to keep awake over an old Victorian novel which some damn’d misguided oaf recommended to me as ‘weird’—J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘House by the Churchyard’. I had been disillusioned before by Le Fanu specimens, & this one just about clinches my opinion that poor Sherry was a false alarm as a fear monger, & I shall cut him out of any possible 2nd edition of my historical sketch [i.e. “Supernatural Horror in Literature”].” [Essential Solitude, p. 216]
HPL on “Green Tea”:
“I at last . . . have read ‘Green Tea.’ It is definitely better than anything else of Le Fanu’s that I have ever seen, though I’d hardly put it in the Poe-Blackwood-Machen class” [quoted in an annotation to Mysteries of Time and Spirit, p. 15].
“
@9: As with any stimulant, heavy use of caffeine (and of course sleep deprivation) can cause hallucinations even without any other substances.
@8: The tendency of the 18th century English to believe all kinds of wild stories about tea addiction, while downplaying the effects of coffee, could certainly just be a cultural bias as you say, but I wouldn’t be so sure that that was all it was. Some people are going to abuse whatever the newest thing is to a degree that they wouldn’t have done with the familiar thing. Also, some people (like me) are just incapable of drinking coffee in large enough quantities to make them really weird, because it just doesn’t agree with their digestive tract, whereas they find tea to be milder and more chuggable; and some people (like me) are unusually sensitive to the other non-caffeine stimulants in tea. One of the most unpleasant drug experiences I’ve ever had was after I knocked back a single can of some kind of very strong matcha iced tea drink— I felt like my head and spine were vibrating at high speed while being microwaved like a baked potato for pretty much the whole day. I would almost rather have to see a demon monkey everywhere I go than ever have that feeling again.
I mentioned this in an earlier thread when “Green Tea” was first suggested, but I’ll say it again: anyone who likes comics, and especially anyone interested in unusual approaches to adaptation, should check out Kevin Huizenga’s adaptation of/homage to “Green Tea” that’s in his collection CURSES. He is one of the least gothic artists imaginable, but the result is still creepy; also, he adds yet another framing story.
I think Le Fanu is coming down against probing ancient metaphysics as much as he is against green tea. The systems that Reverend Jennings would have been studying are all very much less against suicide than the Church of England has ever been, and some schools, such as the Stoics, advocate suicide as a moral action in various circumstances. We don’t get told the exact content of Jennings’ research, and we don’t get told what the monkey says to him, but Hesselius insists that Jennings cannot have told him everything when making his final diagnosis. I’ve always figured that what Hesselius didn’t hear must have related to the research, the monkey, or both– the arguments Jennings is listening to in favor of his own death.
Libronomicon: Le Fanu’s religiosity goes well over into throwing shade here. I think this is the first time we’ve had a real book used as a source of Literary Eldritch Creepy in one of these stories, and certainly the first time we’ve had a real theological text, which some contemporaries of Le Fanu did take seriously. (Some people still do today– there’s a lovely little Swedenborgian Chapel down the street from me.) Generally, writers seem to be respectful enough not to head directly to holy books they don’t believe in for quotations for their horror stories, which, given the field’s history of racism and Orientalism, is faint praise indeed; I am very glad this never became a trend. That said, Swedenborg is an absolute treasure trove for a fantasy writer, and I would take it as opportunistic plundering rather than pointed commentary if the rest of the story, and Le Fanu in general, were not so insistently orthodox and pious.
@13: [regarding the references to Swedenborg] “Le Fanu’s religiosity goes well over into throwing shade here … Generally, writers seem to be respectful enough not to head directly to holy books they don’t believe in for quotations”
If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to be saying that Le Fanu is either criticizing Swedenborgianism, or making fun of it, or treating it as inconsequential but cool-sounding fantasy fodder. I’m not sure any of those are good assumptions. I don’t know a whole lot about Le Fanu but I’ve seen some descriptions of him having an eclectic interest in non-mainstream spiritual traditions, and Swedenborg shows up elsewhere in his writing in contexts that I don’t think you can characterize as “throwing shade.” See for instance this and this.
Lovecraft should have read In a Glass Darkly first: Le Fanu may not be the greatest in the British tradition of meddling with ghosts but he was one of the earliest and most influential of those authors.
“The oxidation process strips Camellia sinensis of its occult powers, don’t you know?”
I am glad I finally know why green tea gives me nausea and black tea doesn’t. Obviously I’m allergic to occult powers.
“Does Hesselius believe everyone in China and Japan wanders around seeing demonic monkeys all the time?”
Only if they overindulge, and if they do they just throw firecrackers at the monkeys to scare them off. :)
Reading this story, I couldn’t help but imagine it as a Church of Latter Day Saints cautionary tale against hot drinks, much as ‘Twilight’ has sometimes been characterized as a fictional take on Celestial Marriage.
I also wonder if Reverend Jennings was a precursor to Pete Puma.
@18: satanic monkey nowhere near as dangerous as Bugs Bunny.
I’ve been thinking about this story and I think one part of why it doesn’t work for me is it doesn’t handle it’s ambiguity well. What I mean is there is this supernatural explanation that is just proffered without any real proof, and there is also the possibility that this was a man struggling with schizophrenia who had some weird conversations with a quack doctor.
If this was a Lovecraft story in the end there would be some definite proof that the supernatural was real. Monkey footprints or something to show this wasn’t all in his head. On the other hand if this was The Yellow Wallpaper or a Poe story the possibility that this was mental illness would be highlighted more and the story would draw it’s tension from that ambiguity. Instead it accomplishes neither of these and falls flat for me.
Now it’s possible that the ambiguity is not really intended and the expectation is as an audience we just accept that green tea let’s you see the demons that are all around us anyway but honestly that just seems so silly to me, too ridiculous to work as horror.
On the issue of weird stuff that might have been in tea, according to the book What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, by Daniel Pool, it was estimated at one point in the 19th century in London, four pounds of fake tea–things like blackthorn leaves cut up to look like tea leaves with colors added to help make it convincing–were sold for every seven pounds of real tea. There were no less than eight factories in the London area recycling used tea leaves, adding dyes to make them look fresh. Up to 80,000 pounds of used tea may have been put back out for sale each year
So, poisons could have been added in the fake leaves or in the colors added to make the tea look fresh. There was also the possibility of mold on the used tea leaves. Hallucinations may have been a real problem for a lot of tea drinkers.
I just started drinking green tea on a fairly regular basis. If I run into any demonic monkeys, I’ll be sure to let you guys know. ;)
According to pages 90-92 of Sarah Rose’s book For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History, Chinese exporters of green tea of the 1840s used dyes make the tea look greener and get higher prices from Western buyers. Unknown to the Chinese, the dyes were poisons that could produce neurological effects.
It’s pretty entertaining to me to read through this comment thread and see that Le Fanu is still so far ahead of so many readers of today.
Jack Sullivan’s smart critical study “Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood” gives old J. Sheridan his proper due, and really digs into his use of framing devices and irony, especially as relates to Dr. Hesselius.
Speaking of Carmilla, a Canadian outfit based out of Toronto adapted it into a YouTube webseries running from about 2015-2017, with three (and a half?) seasons free online … and a movie! Starring Natasha Negovanlis in the title role, and Elise Bauman as Laura, her girlfriend. Being a series inherently about LGBT characters (even the supernatural ones), I think you guys would enjoy the progressive take on the original novella.
I’ve watched the free seasons (and part of what’s called “Season 0”), but not the movie yet. Most of it’s great. It expands the original story (of course) to namedrop Hastur & occasional other side-references to the Cthulhu Mythos, but more centrally it adds deity characters from Sumerian/Mesopotamian lore, who become more central later in the series.
Here’s all the webseries content! Please watch it if you guys haven’t yet, and feel free to review it all for this blog if you guys like!
That also sounds cool, and I need to pass it on to my housemate who is a huge Carmilla fan. (Also welcome! Which I neglected to say in my earlier comment.)
What struck me most was the idea of the monkey moving with “uneasiness.” I assume that’s actually linguistic drift, but it still conjures the image of the monkey being afraid. Maybe there’s something harmful to such entities about being seen, and they lash out in panic rather than malevolence (or malevolence too – hating what you fear needn’t be confined to humans).