GREEN TEA
by Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

Sheridan Le Fanu, a nineteenth-century Irish writer and grandnephew of playwright Richard Sheridan, was a prolific author, with 14 novels and many short stories to his credit. He is most remembered for his mystery novel Uncle Silas, which has been translated into several Continental languages and adapted to film, in England as The Inheritor and in the United States as Dark Angel. Most of his other novels, however, are inferior to the shorter pieces. Altogether Le Fanu wrote some 30 supernatural tales, most of which appeared initially in periodicals. Although many Victorian authors wrote ghost stories, Le Fanu was distinguished by his intense interest in psychology and his emphasis on the implications of supernaturalism for the personality of the believer. He had read widely in the psychological theorists of the time, as well as in the mystical theories of Emmanuel Swedenborg. As a result his stories are a sophisticated blend of the natural and supernatural, of the conscious and unconscious, and of the symbolic linkages between the outside world and the human mind.

"Green Tea" was published in the collection In a Glass Darkly, a group of tales connected as narratives reported by a German physician, Dr. Hesselius, who is interested in exploring the relationship between the unconscious and the supernatural. As in much gothic fiction, the narrative is even more indirect, for it is introduced by Dr. Hesselius's secretary, who is ostensibly reproducing the doctor's letters after she had translated them.

After a brief explanatory prologue, the rest of the tale is related in 11 brief chapters. Minor characters remain peripheral, for the focus is on two figures—the analytical Dr. Hesselius, through whose reactions we witness the events, and the disturbed Reverend Jennings, who in his desperation has turned to the doctor for help. Rev. Jennings is a well-to-do bachelor who functions only intermittently at his vicarage because of a mysterious illness that frequently afflicts him during services. As he confides to the doctor, the illness is seemingly not physical at all but rather involves his perturbation over a haunting "spectral illusion" of a monkey. Since Dr. Hesselius is professionally interested in such apparently supernatural manifestations and their connection with the human mind, he is eager to record the whole sequence of events, which are then transmitted to the reader in his letters to a friend. We learn of the monkey's first appearance in an omnibus in which the reverend was the sole rider and then of its increasingly ominous appearances as it attempts to interrupt his prayers and even to urge him to suicide.

The title of the story refers only obliquely to these apparitions. Rev. Jennings has developed a passion for green tea, which he sips while writing late at night. As Dr. Hesselius reveals to us, a sensitive fluid in the nervous system may be adversely affected by overindulgence in green tea, thereby disturbing what he calls the "interior vision" of the nerves.

Le Fanu handles the first-person narrations brilliantly. The voice of Dr. Hesselius is that of the objective, scientific observer, humane but dispassionate. He also is a subject in his own right, however, for he shares with the reader his personal philosophy, explaining that he believes the natural world to be an expression of the spiritual world. The essential human is a spirit; hence, "The material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death … simply his extrication from the natural body." Although his professional concern is to apply this belief to medicine, clearly his mental outlook is especially receptive to such phenomena as Rev. Jennings's spectral illusions.

Rev. Jennings also narrates his experiences with the monkey on a first-person basis to the doctor. His voice is one of fear, anxiety, and profound perturbation. The three chapters titled "The Journey: First Stage, Second Stage, and Third Stage" are all related in the first person. His growing sense of terror in knowing the monkey to be always present, even though unseen by others, is effectively captured in vivid language. In the last stage of the journey the monkey tries to persuade him to commit suicide by jumping into an empty mine shaft. Only the presence of his niece prevents him from doing so. This episode in particular suggests the close connection between the apparition and the reverend's perturbed state of mind. When he does ultimately take his own life, it seems inevitable, although the reader suspects that the monkey's malign presence caused him to act.

At once a symbol and a haunting presence, the monkey is an important factor in the story. In "Green Tea" Le Fanu is anticipating Jungian psychological theory. The monkey represents the archetypal shadow in the collective unconscious of Rev. Jennings. Much gothic fiction of the nineteenth century is concerned with projections of the shadow, or dark side, of an individual, onto a double, one of the most famous being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Le Fanu's shadow works more like the shadow figure in Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, in which the protagonist sees an actual shadow that pursues him until he learns to recognize it as part of himself. The unfortunate Reverend Jennings never reaches this recognition. The monkey represents the dark side of the personality in that it is a primate, not a human creature. The shy, courteous, and generous Reverend Jennings would never think of himself in such primitive terms, and so the shadow has been repressed all his life. This lonely bachelor has never learned to know himself.

—Charlotte Spivack