by Jiang Yuchen
Gothic fiction is well-known for its day-dreaming expressions and mysterious narrative structure. Though this storytelling set can create a thrilling atmosphere and bring supernatural fantasies to life, it also blurs our eyes as if we are staring unconsciously into fog. Written by Mary Wilkins Freeman, “Luella Miller” is such a victim of misty language. The story is about a “rosy and pliant” woman (256), Luella, who lets those attracted to her work so hard that they die, while she doesn’t do anything herself. In the end, people in the town are afraid of helping her and she falls sick and dies. But the story is rather hard to make sense of. The reason for Luella’s attraction is unknown, and her followers’ deaths are difficult to explain. The narrator, Lydia, seems to be one of the few survivors from Luella, but Lydia still dies mysteriously. After all, what’s the meaning behind all the nonsense? The answers to these questions turn out to be vague to readers. But by adopting the thermodynamic perspective, we can string the beads and acquire a better understanding of the story. In this essay, I’m going to argue that Luella and her followers consist of an integrated creature in a thermodynamic manner; furthermore, the story is a prophecy indicating that the attempt of building a self-organized creature will eventually fail.
The fundamental concept in thermodynamics is entropy, which is essential for establishing further insight. Entropy stands for the number of possible ways to achieve a certain state, and it measures the degree of chaos. A higher entropy state implies a less-ordered state, where energy tends to spread and become even. There are several corollaries developed from the fact that entropy is increasing: The universe always follows the fastest way of increasing entropy. Also, lifeforms are the most efficient way known of increasing entropy. To be specific, lifeforms temporarily decrease entropy in themselves to survive by absorbing energy from the surroundings, but eventually they die and result in a larger increase in entropy.
The behavior of Luella’s followers is hard to understand if we treat them as scattered individuals. This is because we can barely imagine the feeling of being so lost in someone’s glamour that one can actually sacrifice oneself. In fact, that feeling is against our self-recognition of being a creature. But with our new thermodynamic hermeneutics, the system of Luella together with her followers combined as a whole starts to make sense: the system absorbs energy from the surroundings to reduce entropy at the cost of the partial destruction of itself. The followers once had their lives, but they all abandoned their own life for the “dreadful particular” Luella (258). This explains their deaths, as the increase in energy density requires entropy to rise in the surroundings, and the increase also leads to the inevitable tendency of interior entropy increase.
It follows that Luella Miller and every “zealot” of hers constitute a larger lifeform. Together they form a better energy system that can be more clearly described by thermodynamics than those scattered individuals. In this system, Luella’s followers give her as much energy as they have, which defines a lifeform from the thermodynamic point of view. They act as if they are an integrated giant creature. Erastus Miller “worked terrible hard trying to save up a little to leave Luella” (257); Lily did the sewing “to suit Luella” (258) even though her back wasn’t strong; and Aunt Abby “just tended out on Luella as if she had been a baby” without caring about her own health (259). During this process, Luella Miller plays the role of an ignorant and innocent core while the others are merely spare parts or limbs of the giant creature. Together they decrease the entropy of Luella: she continues to gain energy, “grew as fat and rosy as ever” (259), with little cost to herself but at the consumption of the rest of the creature – her followers.
There is also rich evidence that supports the theory of a giant creature: characters around Luella share the same self-recognition with Luella. Aunt Abby’s role is the most significant: she thought Luella needed her more than her daughter did. Even when Abby’s daughter came, Abby refused to leave Luella though Abby herself was in poor condition. On the other hand, Luella was “aggrieved and injured” when she knew of Aunt Abby’s death, as if Luella herself was hurt (261). Therefore, it’s more convincing to consider Luella and her followers as a whole since they actually share the same identity.
Keeping the concept of integrated creature in mind, we can tell that Lydia is a subtle character because she falls on the edge of the system. Her life is greatly influenced by Luella Miller. Gradually Lydia turned herself into part of the creature by the process of assimilation. At first, she was fond of Erastus, who was lost in Luella’s charm; then she cured Luella’s hysterics and scolded Luella for her laziness, with a bit of hostility. In this stage Lydia was foreign to this system with her own will, which implies relatively lower entropy. But she still couldn’t bear to see Luella suffer and tried to help her; in the end Abby suddenly died in front of Luella’s house. By then Lydia felt that she belonged to the giant creature and joined it by offering her help, or even her own death. During the process Lydia’s entropy increases greatly as she lost herself bit by bit, which reduced diversity and caused more chaotic result.
Now that we’ve analyzed the character structure in “Luella Miller” with the tool of entropy, we can see what the story is trying to convey. It tells us that the attempt of building a self-organized structure is doomed to end in failure. The ghost scene in the story serves as a metaphor, implying the death of the integrated creature (267). If we try to picture the scene of ghosts helping Luella’s ghost flying high towards the sky, the shapeless ghosts are blended into one another. When their boundaries vanish and their diversity is reduced to affinity, they become chaotic and achieve a higher state of entropy, or alternatively, we can say the creature is dead. No matter what effort gathers Luella and her followers, it fails to keep them together any longer. However, no “one” in the organized system is to blame for the bad ending, not even Luella herself. Her laziness is caused by the system’s tendency to increase entropy in the fastest possible way, and she’s just a puppet of the law. The story tells us that the problem actually lies in the system itself, leading us to the conclusion that the self-organized structure won’t last long by nature.
While it’s hard to quantify the relationship between characters or within a group of people, thermodynamics really finds its unique way to measure the relationship by checking energy distribution and summarizing it with entropy. By putting forward the idea “Luella Miller and her followers are thermodynamically an integrated creature,” the major questions are answered in a consistent and reasonable manner, naturally giving the topic and the story’s opinion: the attempt of building a self-organized structure can never succeed. It’s surprising to find out that Luella Miller’s seemingly strange behavior is merely the result of trying to build a thermodynamically-impossible creature, and that her laziness is not a reason to blame her but a reason to pity her, as she falls victim to the curse of the creature.
Works Cited
Freeman, Mary Wilkins. “Luella Miller.” American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps. Boone, IA: Library of America, 2009: 255-268.
Lehninger, Albert L, David L. Nelson, and Michael M. Cox. Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry. New York: Worth Publishers, 2000.