Citation

Xiaoli M, Xiangjian H. Forum for World Literature Studies 2019; 11(3): 499-508.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Green Tea presents an ethical issue of Reverend Mr. Jennings who commits suicide because of a black monkey ghost. The death of Jennings is a tragedy caused by double predicaments in which a man strives for the meaning of human existence both in natural and social dimensions. Jennings' excessive intake of green tea indicates that his ethical identity required by the Victorian society is undermined; his interest in paganism and knowledge of the black monkey constitutes a doubt about his existence as a human in the context of Darwinian evolutionism. Jennings gradually loses the rational will and ethical consciousness in the chaos of ethical identities. Dominated by the irrational will, he thus makes an ethical selection prone to the beast factor which is represented by the black monkey. Sheridan Le Fanu depicts a process towards an unbearable passion for death when the rational will vanishes in the face of challenges from the spiritual world. During this process, green tea, the exotic which enters the human body, becomes the embodiment of the conceptual evolutionism that intrudes into human mind, and hence the entity green tea involves ethical considerations. © 2019 Shanghai Normal University. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Death; Identity; Green Tea; Sheridan Le Fanu