Title: Dr. Immortelle
Author: Kathleen Ludwick
Date of First Publication: 1930
Place of Publication: Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930
Type: Short story
Characters: No Character
Themes: BYRONIC HERO; MAD SCIENTIST/MONSTER; RACE/POLITICS; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; WOMEN WRITING MONSTERS
Critical Summary: Kathleen Ludwick’s Dr. Immortelle is a short story which is written in a similar style of narration to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, featuring two separate narrators recounting the tale to the reader. The story revolves around the science of immortality accomplished through the use of blood transfusions.
The story opens with a narrator who informs us of his attempts to record this story to the best of his ability, despite the large amount of medical jargon used therein. He informs us of his small involvement in the story as a whole before recording down the story of Mr. Victor De Lyle. Victor recounts that he was born a black slave in 1745 and was sold to serve as an assistant to young Dr. Immortelle, the son of a wealthy North Carolina plantation owner. Throughout the years Victor assists Dr. Immortelle in gruesome experimental surgeries in an attempt to learn the secrets of aging. Despite the moral quandaries Victor has with this, he is eventually won over by a promise of having the ability to change his race from black to Caucasian, and cease aging through the process of blood transfusions, specifically from the blood of small children. They travel throughout America as pseudo-vampires, draining small children of near all their blood to extend their lifespan. Eventually Victor’s conscience can take no more of their heinous crimes when Dr. Immortelle decides to dispose of a nurse they employed named Linnie who had learned too much about their dark practices and appeared ready to expose them. Victor drives off a cliff with Dr. Immortelle tranquilized inside in attempt to kill them both and make it look like an accident so as to not implicate the innocent Linnie with their many crimes. While he is successful in killing Dr. Immortelle, Victor survives the crash to recount the tale to the narrator before dying in his hospital bed. Before the story ends the narrator reveals that Linnie was the purest of women, and his wife, before she was tragically killed during World War II in a Red Cross tent by a German bomb.
In Kathleen Ludwick’s work, Victor, is reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein though the comparison does not extend much further beyond that. The main comparison between hers and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would be how their mad scientists behave. Both Dr. Immortelle and Victor Frankenstein are Byronic Heroes turned mad scientist, experimenting in the taboo and visceral sciences of anatomy and life.
The story also has a heavy focus on race/racism. While Mary Shelley elects to use allegory in her monster to show the unfair conditions of racism, Kathleen Ludwick hides behind no such veil as the monsters in the story are the people themselves and only themselves. Victor De Lyle goes into great detail about the “inferiority” of black genetics and race, however it is never quite clear whether he believes these statements about his original race or not, but makes it clear that he was glad to be free of the oppression that racism placed upon him by becoming a Caucasian.
Administrative Notes: Aaron Broek, CSUF; Yesenia Rodriguez (editing)