An essay assignment I had to do for my English seminar :)

I had to write about The Hound of the Baskervilles as a Gothic novel, and include how that relates to Victorian concerns... there are a few typos, but I was so tired when I finished writing it that I didn't get to edit it. So this was my final draft :)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is a detective story starring the famous Sherlock Holmes in a Gothic-styled novel. As it progresses, the novel appears constantly to reaffirm the idea of the supernatural by using exotic settings and an obsession with the past, among other things. These elements, along with the image of a terrifying beast, all create a sense of terror in the mind of the reader, which terror encapsulates the purpose of Gothic as a genre. This essay will discuss The Hound of the Baskervilles as a Gothic text, with reference to the text itself, and the ways in which Doyle has used the above-mentioned features of that genre to create a Gothic novel, despite the obvious difficulties with an intersection of that and the Detective novel. I shall also briefly discuss how this crossing of genres is managed, before finally addressing how The Hound of the Baskervilles, as a Gothic text, addresses the fears of Victorian society.

I shall begin by discussing how exotic settings are used in the novel to create a sense of terror. The majority of this story takes place on the moor at Baskerville Hall. A moor, according to a dictionary, is “a tract of wild open land, especially if overgrown with heather” (Cassel Concise Dictionary). The first time that Sir Henry Baskerville and Dr John Watson see the moor, it is described as follows:

Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a grey, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. … If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it (Doyle 251-252) (Italics added).

The immediate impressions that one formulates in one’s mind as they read this are those of isolation, wildness and the unknown. The descriptions that are particularly pertinent to the production of these impressions have been italicised. The words “grey, melancholy hill” produce the image of a lifeless place, filled with gloom and sadness. When one reads these words, one imagines a place that is set apart from the rest of the world, and a certain sense of foreboding is carried with that gloomy and lonely image. The “strange jagged summit” also carries with it a sense of danger. When imagining something to be jagged, it is most likely to have sharp areas that can hurt one. This, then, is also a somewhat intimidating image. A summit, the highest point on a hill or mountain, is already often pictured as being a dangerous place due to its height; add to that the jagged nature of it, and it is an unappealing image indeed!

It is no wonder that this scene is described as “some fantastic landscape in a dream”, considering these features included in it. The dreamscape is the place where one’s imagination is allowed to run free. This is the place where monsters, ghosts and other terrifying figures are created and kept alive with the fear that goes along with them. Some of the scariest images we can see are those seen in dreams. Therefore, the landscape described here fits perfectly with what is seen in dreams. With all of this taken into account, the description of the moor as “forbidding” is very apt.

However, according to Punter and Byron, the Victorian Gothic novel, at the same time as using exotic and remote scenes, “is marked primarily by the domestication of Gothic figures, spaces and themes: horrors become explicitly located within the world of the contemporary reader” (Punter 26). This technique is also apparent in The Hound of the Baskervilles, in the way that Doyle begins the story in London, a scene well known to most of the readership of his novels at that time, and then takes is to a country setting, which, though remote, is likely to be familiar to many of the readers.

The next feature of The Hound of the Baskervilles as a Gothic novel I wish to address is the evident obsession with the past that runs throughout the entire story. Punter and Byron say about families and their pasts in connection with Gothic: “Gothic sensation fiction focuses on family secrets and the immediate past of its transgressive protagonists” (Punter 29). This trend is followed in The Hound of the Baskervilles; one may even say that this particular story would not have been possible without the belief of a family curse, which is brought about by an ancestor, Hugo Baskerville, who “[rendered] his body and soul to the Powers of Evil” (Doyle 212). There is a long thread of family secrets, all tied in with the past, that runs through this novel. There are four families who take important roles in the story, and two of them, namely the Baskervilles and the Stapletons, are later discovered to be one and the same. Each of these families has a past that has resulted in a secret. The Barrymores are discovered to be attempting to smuggle food to Selden, Mrs Barrymore’s younger brother, “the Notting Hill murderer” (Doyle 253) who has escaped. Mr Frankland’s daughter, Laura Lyons, eloped many years before, and is now divorced but not accepted back into her father’s life. Then, there are the Stapletons who are from South America, have changed their names twice, and have concealed the fact that they are in fact married, and not siblings, so that Mr Stapleton can claim his inheritance as the last Baskerville once Sir Henry dies.

The most important element of the past that continues to come up in the novel, however, is the story of the family curse. Before any of the Baskervilles are introduced into the story, the readers are already made privy to the history of the Baskerville family (Doyle 210-214), because this is what carries the story through:

They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt.  And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak, but at last he said that he had indeed seen the unhappy maiden, with the hounds upon her track.  'But I have seen more than that,' said he, 'for Hugo Baskerville passed me upon his black mare, and there ran mute behind him such a hound of hell as God forbid should ever be at my heels.' 

… The moon was shining bright upon the clearing, and there in the centre lay the unhappy maid where she had fallen, dead of fear and of fatigue.  But it was not the sight of her body, nor yet was it that of the body of Hugo Baskerville lying near her, which raised the hair upon the heads of these three dare-devil roysterers, but it was that, standing over Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon. And even as they looked the thing  tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor. 

… Such is the tale, my sons, of the coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since. (Doyle 212-214)

 Whether this history is true, we do not know. However, all of the deaths in the Baskerville family are believed at first to be related to the curse of the Baskervilles, and the fear of this spectral hound is, indeed, a large influence in the way that Sir Charles Baskerville dies, and Sir Henry comes close to death. The past comes back to haunt them in an unforgettable way, resulting in death to Sir Charles as well as Selden, the convict.

It is here, however, that we are faced with the intersection of Gothic and the detective novel. Everything up until this point has firmly placed The Hound of the Baskervilles in the Gothic genre, and the majority of the book does in fact reflect that. Nevertheless, it is primarily a detective novel. In fact, what the story does is to rationalise the Gothic fears. Sherlock Holmes, in his method of solving the mystery, uncovers the fact that the idea of the curse of the Baskervilles is merely being played upon by Mr Stapleton, in order to kill the heirs of Baskerville Hall and Sir Charles’s fortune, so that he may inherit them.

Finally, I would like to discuss how The Hound of the Baskervilles addresses the concerns of a Victorian society. According to Botting, the Victorian society experienced “anxieties about the stability of the social and domestic order and the effects of economic and scientific rationality” (Botting 136). The majority of the concerns mentioned by Botting are present in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The social order in the Victorian society was being overturned: the lower class were beginning to move up to the middle class, and the upper class, not receiving money from the lower class any longer, began moving down to the middle class. The economic focuses turned to the acquisition of money through work rather than inheritance. This theme is followed closely within the novel: Sir Charles earned his money when we went to South Africa. However, it is the issue of the inheritance of money that arouses Stapleton's jealousy and turns him to murder. Therefore, the story illustrates how the upper class traditions of inheriting family money were not as wise as working for the money yourself. This is in association with the only upper class family that is represented in the novel is the Baskerville family, who are all “cursed”. Since the majority of the market for Gothic literature at the time was within the lower and middle classes, this would have spoken to them to a large degree.

Another element of the classes that is brought up in the novel is the way that the lower classes are associated with criminal acts, and are therefore expected to be the villains. The convict was placed in the story to create a contrast between himself, a representative of the lower classes, and Mr Stapleton, a member of the middle class, who turns out to be the real villain.

In addition, the trend of Gothic novels is to reinforce stereotypes. Throughout the text, as one reads about the women in the story, they are all secondary characters and do not play a large role. In fact, they are usually under the influence of a male. Mrs Barrymore is under the influence of her brother, Laura Lyons is led on my Mr Stapleton, and Mrs Stapleton, though she attempts to stand up to her husband, normally finds herself relenting, or in the cases when she doesn’t she is punished (for example, when she is tied up at the end of the text because she does not want her husband to hurt Sir Henry). The reinforcement of this stereotype would have been particularly comforting to males, as it was around this time that women were beginning to seek independence and rights.

In conclusion, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has used Gothic elements such as exotic settings and obsessions with the past and familial secrets to create a Gothic feel in the novel, although the ultimate purpose of The Hound of the Baskervilles is an anti-Gothic one. The Gothic elements in the novel can be related to the Victorian concerns toward social class, money and women. I feel that this work is a very effective one, in accomplishing its design of replacing the supernatural with the rational, and I believe that the readers of the time could relate to this in a positive way.

Works Cited

Botting, Fred. "Gothic Returns in the 1890s." Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. 135-143.

"moor." Cassel Concise Dictionary, The. London: Cassel, 1997. 945.

Doyle, Arthur. "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Novels. London: Chancellor Press, 1987. 201-352.

Punter, David and Byron, Glennis. "Victorian Gothic." The Gothic. Malden: Blackwell Pub, 2004. 26-31.