THE MIRRORING FRAME:

NARRATIVE DEVICE AND REFLECTED VICTORIANISM

IN IN A GLASS DARKLY 

By Valentina Gabusi 

University of Bologna 

(ISSN 1932-9598) 

            It is commonly acknowledged that one of Le Fanu’s last literary works, the collection of five ghost stories in In a Glass Darkly (1872), can be considered as a milestone in the development of the literary Gothic.  Even though much criticism of the single stories is from a psychological perspective, much of the “Gothic allure” can be traced back to another element of the collection:  the frame.

            What I argue here is that this frame, crafted around the five stories comprising In a Glass Darkly, is more than just a simple structural element. With its complexity, overabundance of details and, most of all, the sovereign figure of the metaphysical doctor Martin Hesselius, it can be regarded as a symbolical representation of the troubled Victorian spirit, and, therefore, one of the key elements in the building of the Gothic and ghastly atmosphere pervading In a Glass Darkly.

            Creating rather elaborate frames was a common nineteenth century technique, both for novels, such as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and for linking together previously published short stories.  For example, Elizabeth Gaskell published short stories as Round the Sofa (1859) and Wilkie Collins’s tales in After Dark (1856) and The Queen of Hearts (1859).  Collins’s frames are told at night for a ghostly atmosphere.  However, Le Fanu’s work is, in many ways, different from other Gothic short story collections.

            As is commonly known, the five stories collected in In a Glass Darkly had been published between 1869 and 1872 in magazines (with the exception of “The Familiar” originally published in The Dublin University Magazine in 1847 in a slightly different version as “The Watcher”).  The figure of Doctor Martin Hesselius, who appears in this work only, is the literary device used that unifies the tales.   The final effect is very persuasive:  the stories, all dealing with obsessions, haunting and haunted presences in the slippery liminal area between natural and supernatural, are all presented as medical cases taken from the records of the psychical doctor.

            The first story, the widely known “Green Tea,” opens with a prologue which can be considered, by extension, a prelude to the whole work.  An introductory note by an anonymous doctor, surgeon and secretary working with Hesselius functions in the narrative to select, edit and present the most unusual and spectacular cases found in his master’s private correspondence with Professor Van Loo of Leyden.

            Le Fanu presents two facets of Hesselius. There are the enthusiastic comments of those who knew Hesselius, especially his medical secretary: 

In Dr. Martin Hesselius I found my master.  His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition.  He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight.  My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death.  I am sure it was well founded (Le Fanu 243). 

            Then there are Hesselius’s scientific writings, such as The Cardinal Functions of the Brain and Essays on Metaphysical Medicine that show his experience in these esoteric disciplines that merge science and religion.  In this sense, In a Glass Darkly reflects much of the controversial debate over religion and science in the Victorian era.            Moving from eighteenth century Enlightenment rationality and the Higher Criticism, which took a rational empirical interpretation of the Bible, together with Lyell’s famous treatise Principals of Geology, questions about God and the accepted ideas man’s place in the universe emerged.  Darwin’s ideas on natural selection, evolution, and casual differentiation threatened the creationist ideas of the centuries before.

            But still, from an anthropological perspective, disbelief and uncertainty did not simply erode the code of spiritual convictions;  they modified the schemes through which the world was understood. On one side, these new perspectives can be hailed as an undisputed progress.  On the other, this modernizing process created a reaction as well.  As a result of this religious crisis and the consequent ascent of science as the nineteenth century “new religion,” man’s psyche was left disoriented.

            The massive spread of alternative faiths, philosophies and creative religions such as the Golden Dawn, together with a pervasive interest in spiritualism, the supernatural and the occult can be considered as reflecting a deep, serious and rather subconscious unease.  Moreover, one of the most interesting aspects of this coexistence of science and the occult is that many of these societies adopted a pseudo-scientific language and approach.  The famous scientist William Crookes (1832-1919) devoted himself to these interests as role of the President of the Society for Psychical Research from 1896-1897.

            Turning to Le Fanu, in the absence of correspondence or other external evidence it is difficult to establish his position on these key issues.  Nevertheless, his treatment of the narrative of Dr. Hesselius suggests an interest in them and a desire to bring them into his work.  Conforming with the religious instability which marked late nineteenth century Europe, Hesselius’s approach to the mind and its altered states goes beyond exact science and orthodox medicine by welcoming various metaphysical and spiritualist ideas.  In “Green Tea,” the main character expresses an answer to this question.  Mr. Jennings clearly defines the distinctive feature that makes Hesselius  different from any other Victorian doctor when he says “You are a philosophic physician.  You give spirit its proper rank” (28).  He understands the Zeitgeist from which Hesselius came.

            Hesselius’ vision of the world, according to which the spiritual dimension “interpenetrates our world” (28), is in large part drawn from Swedenborg’s writings, that Le Fanu read (see McCormack).  However, being a representative of late nineteenth century trends, Hesselius does not favor the supersensible view.  He blends the physician’s rationalist attitude and the esoteric scholar’s metaphysical one, knowing that each apparition may have three different explanations: a psychological one, a supernatural one, and a hybrid one in which the perception of the spiritual dimension is bound up with specific medical and nervous pathologies.

            As I stated at the outset, it is important to emphasize how much the frame affects the way the reader perceives and experiences the story, with its medical case description and its likely or unlikely explanations, and the cultural atmosphere in which they are set.  Hesselius, then, has a dual role of being both the objective eyewitness narrator and the professional physician who makes the hypothesis and seeks the most probable solution.  The narrative of the editor of Hesselius’s papers says of him: 

His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters.  He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might and . . . in terms of his art, and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration (5-6). 

To be more precise, one must remember the important presence of the anonymous editor who, according to James Walton, “acts in effect as the principal narrator’s literary executor, and as a surrogate for the author he holds an indispensable place in the chain that links the haunted character’s subjectivity to the reader’s” (47).

            Thanks to this fragmentation and refraction that the frame makes the reader perceive the story from two different perspectives:  one focused on the possibly lunatic person, the victim of the psychic possession, and another one, more detached and rational, belonging to the physician, to Doctor Hesselius’ analytical knowledge.  Much of the charm pervading these stories depends on their ambiguity, on the impossibility of clearly answering the question “Was it real or imaginary?” (Briggs 22).  In a way, this question was one that haunted so many Victorian minds in relation to the supernatural issues so widespread at that time.  When one thinks about the troubled mind of Captain Barton in “The Familiar,” or Mr. Justice Harbottle’s homonymous character’s mysterious death, it is rather clear that the open-ended conclusions of the tales in In a Glass Darkly are deeply bound to this formal and stylistic strategy adopted by Le Fanu.

            It is also important to examine another aspect through which the frame can be considered an element reflecting and mirroring Victorianism and its contradictions.  As some critics have pointed out, the frame in In a Glass Darkly and the figure of Doctor Hesselius in particular, is permeated with a sort of subtle but constant irony.  This curious aspect in Le Fanu’s work depends both on the fact that, apart from “Green Tea,” all of Hesselius’s medical speculations are entirely based on second-hand information and on the discrepancy between his boasted knowledge and the fact that all the cases have no resolution.  “We never see Hesselius succeed in any of these stories (57) ,” says Jack Sullivan.  Once again “Green Tea” can be used as an example since Hesselius “finds no cure for the haunted clergyman’s malady: Jennings kills himself and becomes the subject of a posthumous diagnosis” Walton (30).

            This pervasive irony mirrors the Victorian period from various perspectives.  First of all, it evidently reflects the skeptical and dubious position of those who did not believe in the supernatural, were immune from any metaphysical trends, and saw the whole phenomenon rather fraudulent.

            Then, it can be seen as a sort of bitter criticism to all fideistic attitudes, a general questioning which was becoming more and more widespread at the time.  As Sullivan says, “Hesselius’ constant, belated references to the triumph of medical science strike us as ironic.  The overall effect is to undercut theology as well as science . . . both become associated in our minds with ineffectual orthodoxies and institutions” (57-58). 

           Moreover, according to James Walton: 

Hesselius’ theory of Jennings’s case, addressed to a literary and metaphysical chemist, seems a Shandyesque parody of the confusion of “spirit” and “matter”—the secularization or emptying of the concept of spirit—that characterizes a whole line of post-Cartesian discourse, extending to the jargon of Mesmerism” (30). 

            Finally, more connected with the present analysis, this irony  raises other doubts and casts further disorientation about the way the short stories can be interpreted, enhancing the indecision between rational and irrational which is at the very basis both of Le Fanu’s Gothic success and of the Victorian spirit and attitude towards the problem.

            In conclusion, according to what has been described until now, the frame in In a Glass Darkly should really be considered as a portion of highly literate text, with a deep functional purpose which is not limited to mere cohesion but, on the contrary, reflects the incongruities of the Victorian era and influences the perception of each short story.  Despite the fact that Hesselius’ active presence in the frame, as pointed out by Neil Cornwell, seems to reduce from the beginning of the collection to its end, from “Green Tea” to “Carmilla,” with his attitude, beliefs and way of approaching the natural and the alleged supernatural, he can really be considered a sort of ambivalent Victorian mirror, a deeply intense summoning of the whole set of conscious and unconscious reactions to the utmost scientific, cultural and religious uncertainties of the nineteenth century. 

WORKS CITED 

Briggs, Julia.  Night Visitors:  The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story.  London: Faber, 1977. 

Cornwell, Neil.  The Literary Fantastic:  From Gothic to Postmodernism. Hemel Hempstead:  Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. 

Le Fanu, J. Sheridan.  In a Glass Darkly.  Ed. and Intro. Robert Tracy.  Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. 

McCormack, W. J.  Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland.   Oxford: at the Clarendon P, 1980. 

Sullivan, Jack.  Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood.  Athens: Ohio UP, 1978.

Walton, James.  Vision and Vacancy:  The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu.  Dublin: University College Dublin P, 2007.