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The Old Weird 3: Occult Detectives 2: Dr. Martin Hesselius
Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her many reviews and her excellent blog series Automata 101 and Outside the Norm. Ronda is an Associate Professor of English at Coker College in Hartsville, SC. She teaches Medieval and Renaissance literature as well as composition courses.
Many sources will say that Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Martin Hesselius was the first occult detective. Yet, he was created retroactively. In other words, the three stories and two novellas that Le Fanu attributed to Dr. Hesselius were written earlier and published separately in different periodicals. When Le Fanu published them in the book In a Glass Darkly (1872), he created Dr. Hesselius as a way to suture these disparate stories together. Dr. Hesselius only appears as a character in the first story, and the framing lessens with each intervening text. In this analysis, I’m going to discuss the stories themselves first and then examine the frame and draw some conclusions about this occult detective.
The Stories
Each of the five stories represents some type of Gothic horror, containing demons, vampires, premature burials, doppelgängers, and haunted hotel rooms.
“Green Tea”
Le Fanu terms Hesselius “a medical philosopher” (Chapter 1). Early on in the story, Hesselius demonstrates Holmesian skills of character deduction. (Of course, I am applying this adjective to a character created before Sherlock Holmes, who first appeared in 1887. I also believe that Poe’s Lupin was the first detective to demonstrate these flashy deductive skills. Nevertheless, this characteristic has entered the literary unconscious as a trademark of Holmes.) From just a glance, Hesselius tells his hostess “two or three things” about Reverend Jennings: he is unmarried; he is writing a book on theology and he used to drink green tea, but gave it up” (Chapter 2). This fact about drinking green tea is the key to the Reverend’s case of “spectral illusion,” which I would love to discuss, but any discussion would give away too much about this story (Conclusion).
“The Familiar”
In this story, a returning Irish seaman, Captain Barton, is haunted by unexplained footsteps, which presumably belong to a strange dwarf who begins accosting the Captain. The dwarf’s appearance perpetuates other mysterious events in his life.
“Mr. Justice Harbottle”
In this story, the speaker’s aquaintance tells of seeing a ghost in the room he was renting. The narrator thinks he knows the story of the old house and writes a friend to confirm. The remainder of the story is the retelling of this letter, which tells of the long ago life and death of “Mr. Justice Harbottle, one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas,” otherwise known as “the wickedest man in England” (Chapter 1). Because of this, the reader almost enjoys his torment as fate catches up with his actions.
“The Room in the Dragon Volant”
While this is the least creepy of the five texts, it is the one that I enjoyed the most. This novelette contains more mystery elements than horror. However, the room in the inn, the Dragon Volant, is purported to be haunted because several men have disappeared from it. The story is told in the first person by Richard Beckett, a young Englishman traveling to Paris at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. As he journeys towards Paris, he makes the acquaintance of a young woman who is married to a miserly, suspicious old man. Beckett vows to investigate her situation and save her from this marriage. He also meets the mysterious Monsieur Droqville, who is clearly living a double life, and Colonel Gaillarde, a dangerous, eccentric army officer, who seems to be following Beckett. This is an intriguing tale in which no-one is exactly what he seems.
“Carmilla”
This last story is one of Le Fanu’s most famous, as it predates and was one of the influences of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Carmilla is set in Styria (a province in Austria). Laura, a young English girl whose father is in the Austrian service, tells the story of Carmilla, who comes to live with them for a time. Carmilla’s mother’s coach crashes at the gates of Laura’s estate. Because her mother must travel quickly to an unknown destination, she leaves the teen-aged Carmilla in the care of Laura’s household. Once she is recovered, Carmilla’s actions become stranger and stranger. She keeps strange hours, never leaving her bedroom before 1 o’clock in the afternoon. She also forms an “unnatural” attachment to Laura, embracing her, kissing her with “hot lips,” and declaring “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever” (Chapter 4). Of course, female peasants in the surrounding area begin dying of a “wasting sickness.” Soon, Laura begins to demonstrate the same symptoms. Nowadays, we have enough knowledge to see where this will go. I can’t even imagine the pleasure that Le Fanu’s readers would have gotten from the story’s conclusion.
The Frame Narrative
The frame is written by the medical secretary of Dr. Hesselius, who–after the doctor’s death–collects and publishes some of his most famous cases. Sometimes a story is framed by Hesselius’ notes; other times the unnamed medical secretary sets up the case.
The medical secretary tells the reader that the first story, “Green Tea,” is based upon a series of letters between Hesselius and his friend Professor Van Loo. He says, “They are written, some in English, some in French, but in the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by not means a graceful translator, and although here and there, I omit some passages, and shorten others and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing” (Prologue). It is disappointing after all this careful set up the most of “Green Tea” reads like a story, with chapters, chapter titles and dialogue instead of reading like the series of letters the introduction promises.
The medical secretary next presents a case, “The Familiar,” sent to Hesselius in a letter by a member of the Irish clergy. The secretary attaches Hesselius’ notes which conclude: “Had I seen Mr. Barton, and examined him upon the points . . . I should have without difficulty referred those phenomena to their proper disease. My diagnosis is now, necessarily, conjectural” (Prologue). At the end of the clergyman’s letter, the secretary adds a note assuring that “the Editor has not altered one letter of the original text” (Chapter 9). I mention this specifically because this second story is the last story that has a beginning and an ending frame.
Upon “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” according to the medical secretary, is inscribed “Harmon’s Report.” A note also contains a reference to one of Hesselius’ essays “The Interior Sense, and the Conditions, of the opening thereof.” The medical secretary prints in full this note, which says that there are two written accounts of Mr. Justice Harbottle, one by Mrs. Trimmer of Tunbridge Wells and the other by Anthony Harmon, Esq. Hesselius says that he prefers the first one; however, the medical secretary is unable to find it, so he prints the one by Harmon. Thus, Harmon’s report begins with a story of a man, presumably Harmon, who is telling a tale he heard thirty years before.
The framing for “The Room in the Dragon Volant” is less detailed than the previous cases. We are told that the case is one that Hesselius refers to many times in his essay “Mortis Imago” [Image of Death]. “Carmilla” appears in Hesselius’ collection with a note attached referencing another essay he has written on “the strange subject” (Prologue). The medical secretary writes “I shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and, after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from presenting any précis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning…” (Prologue).
In the Introduction to The Occult Files of Francis Chard, Jack Adrian characterizes Dr. Hesselius as “one of the most hopelessly, indeed disastrously, ineffective characters in nineteenth-century fiction.” While this might be a bit overstated, as I have shown, by the end of the collection, Le Fanu has basically erased the occult detective from his own narrative. Hesselius “appears” only in the first story. Next, the ending frames with Hesselius’ conclusions disappear. Then, the secretary relates the cases to essays that the readers cannot read. Finally, he refuses to publish Hesselius’ interpretation of the last case. The Le Fanu scholar Valentina Gabusi believes that the frame serves an important purpose, “reflect[ing] the incongruities of the Victorian era and influenc[ing] the perception of each story.” However, I’m not as forgiving. I think Le Fanu was disinterested in Hesselius as a character, and therefore was not interested in creating a workable frame for these texts.
Conclusion
The failure of the frame narrative, however, is not a good reason to avoid the tales it contains. Each one is a good example of the weird. Le Fanu writes with an archaic vocabulary that achieves two separate goals. First, the language separates his contemporary readers (late 1800s) from the events in the stories often fifty or more years in past. Second, this vocabulary makes his writing feel lush and his settings, atmospheric. Le Fanu’s writing makes me think—“yes, a good, old fashioned ghost story.” I’ve already added several of his other books to my iBooks.
In a Glass Darkly may be found at Project Gutenberg in three volumes for free. The Kindle edition is 99 cents. There doesn’t seem to be a full Nook edition although there are several 99-cent versions of “Carmilla.” There are many print editions available.
Up Next: I move away from Occult Detectives for a while to discuss Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow.
3 Comments
I’ve read a lot of pre-20th century fantastic literature over the last few years, and one thing that stands out is the near ubiquity of framing devices. Today, they seem often to be artificial and ultimately pointless, but there must have been a reason writers felt the need to include them. Edgar Rice Burroughs was still using them in his early novels. The fact that Le Fanu let the frame slowly fall away, in a sense, may be because he was using a device that he didn’t particularly like, but thought was expected of him as a writer of the supernatural.
Le Fanu’s novel Uncle Silas (1864) is still worth reading as well — a weird Gothic locked-room mystery.
I agree with you about the failure of the framing device,and the Doctor is barely a character.I am glad you explained that the tales predated the frame.
I very much enjoyed rereading Green Tea,I still found it most enjoyable.The Familiar was rather humdrum,but I got a frisson in Judge Harbottle,when the ghosts traipsed through the bedroom!.
I wasn’t so keen on the Dragon Volant,as I thought it overlong,and the mystery slight and too obvious.But the scenes where our gormless hero is paralysed and put in the coffin was genuinely tense and eerie,and I enjoyed his finding the keyhole,and creeping through the passages to get out of the room unseen.
Carmilla was fascinating,lesbian vampires were thought to be a sort of trendy take on vampire films for shock value a century after this was written.Excellent
All in all,I enjoyed this book enormously.I have Uncle Silas on my list for later in the year.
@Scott, Yes, I think you are correct. I also think it has something to do with the fact that “a novel” was expected to be a complete entity. So, a frame narrative was an easy way to fix up a bunch of short stories into a novel–therefore, about “one thing” rather than “five things.”
@Dusty, I liked the “in disguise” character in “Dragon Volant.” I was hoping he would be more like the Pimpernel. You can certainly see a connection.
And Uncle Silas is on my iBooks for later reading.
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