Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Imperialism, Race, Disease, Victorian Women, and Edgar Allen Poe
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most prolific British writers at the the turn of the 20th century. He opened up new doors in the literature world by introducing his detective genre stories, with the Sherlock Holmes stories taking the helm. However, Doyle was more than just a master of the detective genre; he was a historical romantic, a connoisseur of the medical world, a letter writer, a spiritualist, and a stereotypical Victorian sexist. At the height of British imperialism in the 19th century, Doyle’s works reflected the racial clashes between the white dominion and the minority inferiors, the introduction to poisons, the influence of Edgar Allen Poe, and the symbiotic relationship between the female sex and crime.
There was a new imperialist movement that took place in late 19th century England. It became more political, searching to gain control of inferior nations for money, resources, and government establishment. The imperialistic mindset of the British made them superior above other European countries. Since they are the only ones dominating across the globe, they are in a sense, the “master race.” Britain’s imperial destiny is an important element in Doyle’s historical romances. The medieval novels construct a myth of a heroic past, and allude to England’s future imperial destiny from within their medieval setting. In The White Company (WC), a French aristocrat looks into the future and sees the British Empire:
“Whence come they, these peoples, these lordly nations, these mighty countries which rise up before me? I look beyond, and others rise, and yet others, far and farther to the shores of the uttermost waters. They crowd! They swarm! The world is given to them, and it resounds with the clang of their hammers and the ringing of their church bells. They call them many names, and they rule them this way or that, but they are all English…”(Doyle 327).
This vision of England’s “children” spreading across the earth, which is read forward in the narrative as a prophecy, is actually a history of the expansion of the British empire from the late 19th century. The empire is foretold not only as Britain’s imperial destiny, but its historical destiny as well.
Britain’s historical destiny is the story of heroic individuals. “For centuries,” H.F Wyatt writes in “The Ethics of Empire”, “our national character has been taking form under the impulse of some of the greatest spirits whom earth has known”(Wyatt 529). This view of history echoes Carlyle’s statements in On Heroes and Hero Worship that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here” (Carlyle 1) and “the History of the world is but the Biography of great men”(Carlyle 38), but places them in a specific imperial context, in which heroism and manliness are directly connected. Imperial destiny and individual heroism were the two structuring principles of popular imperialism’s concept of history. Doyle’s historical romances and adventure stories took various parts of the imperial ideology – myths of Britain’s imperial destiny, of the need to be ready to serve the empire, and possibly to sacrifice oneself for it, especially for middle-class boys and young men. These texts were popular because they were repeating myths that the readers wanted to hear: Britain had a heroic past that lived on in the present, foreigners were lesser beings, dying on a foreign battlefield was a good death, and being a man was specific, desirable, and definable. Individual heroism -which is part of both manliness and imperial history- are central to Victorian enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Authors like Doyle have re-invented medieval codes of chivalry to suit their own codes of honor for public schools. His characters reproduce Victorian discourses of manliness. The process of becoming a man is defined in terms of becoming a hero through fighting and experience in war. The adventures with English heroes all take place outside of England, an essential part of the imperial narrative.
Late Victorian social values were summed up into ‘sound character’, which was linked to the right lines of action to the commitment to the empire. This definition of ‘sound character’ is connected to the Victorian conceptions of manliness. The values that produced good character were the same as those which defined a real man. Manliness embraced the qualities of physical courage, chivalry, and virtuous fortitude with additional connotations of military and patriotic virtue. In Doyle’s The Lost World, the main character, a journalist named Edward D. Malone, is a young man who grows to full manhood during the course of his adventures. However, he has important faults. He is not a good rifleman, and connects this deficiency to his “Irish imagination”, and acts bravely only out of “a horror of cowardice” and “a terror of such a sigma”(Doyle 54). Despite this “Irish” defect in his character, he does act bravely when required, which is important to the code of chivalric manliness. He passes Lord John Roxton’s bravery test — to subdue a pistol-waving jockey with delirium tremens — and he never displays cowardice in South America. Most important is Malone’s ferocious and joyful behavior in battle, which marks his entry into manhood (Wilson 28).
Social Darwinism was a popular part of popular imperialism. It provided an intellectual rationale for the exploitation(sometimes the extermination) of “inferior” peoples. Imperialism relied on the definition of “natives” as inherently inferior. Closely connected to this idea of Social Darwinism are the the late-Victorian and Edwardian ideologies of race. Nationalities were defined in racial terms. The central adventure of The Lost World involves helping a group of Indians defeat a tribe of ape-men. The Indians are described as small, wiry, active, and well-built men with good-humored, hairless faces. The ape-men, on the other hand, are referred to as “devils” and “brutes”. The behavior of both groups is also significant. The Indians look to the adventurers for refuge and assistance; the ape-men try to slaughter them. The English are at the highest point on the evolutionary scale, while the ape-men reside at the lower end of the spectrum.
Games were central to the definition of the English gentleman. They were considered by the Victorians to be central in the development of proper character in men. Other European nations that did not play games — especially those that did not hunt, an activity that played an important roles in game-playing — were marked as effeminate. They were also central to both popular imperialism and manliness. War was discussed as a game in much of the literature of popular imperialism. In Doyle’s medieval romances, war and games merge: the tournaments and jousts of the knights and the archery contests of archers are a type of practice of play warfare. Along with games, sport is very important in the definition of imperial manliness offered in Doyle’s adventure fiction and historical romances. In the Gerard stories, however, sport works quite differently; it functions to mark Gerard as other. Gerard simply does not understand how to play the proper games. A comical example of his dumbfoundedness for games is Gerard’s fox-hunting experience . Although Gerard breaks every rule of the hunt, the humor of this tale is entirely at Gerard’s expense, because he does not understand how to play the game. His athletic inability and the way he unknowingly breaks the rules would mark him as effeminate and reinforce the definition of Frenchness (Wilson 36).
At the turn of the century, especially after the Boer War, there was a sense of uneasiness in Britain about the nation’s ability to defend itself. This was one of Doyle’s own preoccupations: he worried about England’s lack of trained riflemen, and tried to organize rifle clubs as a solution. lack of martial skill is criticized more explicitly in The Lost World, where Lord Roxton complains about Malone’s shooting ability: “It’s the last thing you young fellahs think of learnin’. You’re all bees without stings, so far as lookin’ after the hive goes. You’ll look silly, some o’ these days, when someone comes along an’ sneaks the honey” (Doyle 55). This ending is also connected to the contemporary sense of England’s unpreparedness for war.
Without race, England would have no in effort in their imperial expansion. This recognition of racial superiority brought the British people together. In popular imperialism, “racism” is composed of national stereotypes and expressed through military prowess, chivalry, and manliness. Englishness as a racial, and therefore inherent, quality to be privileged. The non-English are named and controlled by the images in the archive of popular imperialism.
Within many British adventure novels, the discourse of racial type is blatantly unreal. It glorified racial stereotypes and abused crude hyperbole about inferior minorities. Race provided a concrete national self-definition: to be English was to belong to a specific and superior race of people.
The 19th century British mindset on secondary criminal societies was heavily inspired by the concept of the criminal type. This concept was created by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. In his book Criminal Man, he defined the criminal type as “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animal” (Lombroso xxiv-xxv). Doyle’s embodiment of the criminal type in his Holmes stories uses Lombroso’s work. This is highlighted in when Dr. Mortimer and Holmes meet and he covets a cast of his skull in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The doctor’s dissertation on “Some Freaks of Atavism” establishes the rhetoric of criminal reversion that flows throughout the novel. The concept of the criminal type is also seen in The Sign of Four. Outside of the story, the Andamanese were not thought of as a criminal tribe. However, the idea of the criminal tribe became associated in the popular imagination with the primitive tribes of India, including the Andamanese. The identification of specific societies as criminal served to generate “factualized statements” that conflicted with what was on paper and reality. The views on criminal tribes tended to ignore the behavioral issues that might reside beyond the persecution of the criminal association. In The Sign of Four, the measurement of the killer’s footprint suggests the anthropometry of Lombroso and his work. The full portrayal of the Andaman Islander also mirrors the criminologist’s critical analysis to facial defects. In the story, Tonga’s misshapen head and thick lips are sharp indicators of Lombroso’s criminal type (McBratney 159).
Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle had many things in common. It is possible that the Scottish doctor identified himself with the American writer. Both had difficult childhoods, born of artist parents, raised without fathers, managed to write fiction that people took for truth, had detective qualities, attracted by scientific experiments of the day, and had diverse interests. Doyle was a deep admirer of Poe, the “American blood-curdler,” and he has acknowledged his literary credit to him numerous times. Once Conan Doyle established his own medical practice at Portsmouth, England in 1882, he went on writing stories and dividing himself between literature and his medical practice. In one of his short stories, “The Ghosts of Gorsethorpe Grange”, Conan Doyle pays homage to Poe by invoking him as a spectre to haunt a house. Poe’s Dupin trilogy was a great influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes and many of the motifs that surrounded the character. Further influence of Poe can be traced in Doyle’s “The Captain of the ‘Polestar’”. He had written this tale from his personal experience on board the whaleship Hope, where he served as a surgeon. His experience in the Arctic fuses closely with Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon. The parallels between the stories include: an introduction of a young man aboard a whaling ship; the narration opens as a realistic adventure which contrasts to its strange atmosphere; the ice is one of the main characters; a trace of autobiographical elements; and both narrations end with the appearance of a mysterious figure. In Doyle’s literary biography Through the Magic Door, he made it clear that Poe was the original creator of the detective story, and he was the world’s best short story writer (Doyle 54-57).
By the time “The Adventure of the Dying Detective “ appeared in 1913, disease had slipped out of the realm of medicine and into the province of the “medico-criminal” expert (Harris 447). Britain’s expansion into the East has introduced it to “pathological possibilities “ that cannot be shut down through the operations of ordinary medical science and which must instead be contained by Holmes’ own special “powers”(Doyle 388). “The Dying Detective” shows how the concept of disease was brought about in Doyle’s fiction. Mrs. Hudson first describes Holmes’ illness as a typical contagion he brought back from an unhealthy part of town. However, Watson discovers the tool used to infect Holmes, created by Culverton Smith as a poison and a weapon. Smith personifies his disease weapon and its pathological possibilities as criminals. Culverton Smith’s imagery of diseases as criminals offers some comfort because it suggests that they can be apprehended and safely incarcerated like human criminals. However, the fact that he has already assassinated one victim and is now hunting down Holmes shows that containment can’t be successful all the time. Doyle’s treatment of disease in the Holmes’ stories is an effort at containment- an attempt to reduce disease to a form where Holmes can practice his art.
Out of Holmes’ 60 cases, only five were involved with homicidal poisoning. This reflected the 19th century perception that criminal poisoning was relatively uncommon in England. However, these cases attracted a lot of attention from the public and the medical community. Doyle’s fiction suggests that this great attraction is derived from the perception that criminal poisoning was a crime unknown to the tropical regions. This meant that cases of homicidal poisoning in London provided Britain’s imperial expansion to allow this corruption to spread from the colonies to the urban metropolis. The Sign of Four proves to be the first example of a transmission pattern that is reproduced in Holmes’ cases. A British subject travels to a tropical culture, comes in contact with the culture to retrieve exoctic poisons, returns to England, and uses it to cause mayhem. The inclination to commit the crime and the manner of the crime are attributed to the criminal’s contact with a foreign culture.
Doyle’s use of the medical metaphor is very complex and specific . He draws on the discourse of medicine because it allows him to represent the disturbances Holmes investigates as “alien contagions” introduced into British society through contact with other cultures. This becomes more apparent when Holmes investigates cases involving poison. The metaphors of poison and contagion are both used directly in the Holmes stories. Doyle uses the metaphor of contagion through his deployment of the 19th century concept of “poison”, in the hopes to show how and why the newly introduced science of deduction was more efficient and capable than ordinary medical science. The use of the poison metaphor indicates that 19th century Brits are connected to exotic toxins, a far more pervasive threat posed by the imperial empire. Poison affected not only the naïve victim of a clever killer, but the political body of Britain as well. It is because of Doyle’s poisoners represented these dangers in human forms so Holmes’ work would be useful. Poison in the Holmes tales is a metaphor for the physical, moral, and cultural contamination that Britain feared as its empire came in contact with Asian and African peoples, cultures, and climates.
Although Conan Doyle was well known for his published writings, he was also a prolific letter writer. In “Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life of Letters”, there are hundreds of unpublished letters written by Conan Doyle to his mother. The volume spans nearly his entire life, from his schoolboy childhood up to his mother’s death in 1920. The letters he wrote cover a variety of issues in his life. They all include allusions to his money problems, health, friends, and family. In the second through fourth chapters of the volume, financial trouble is a predominant subject.
In most of his works, Doyle’s prose is a bit stuffy. However, his methodology and his execution is flawless. Doyle invented Holmes for the purpose of making money through serializations in the The Strand magazine. he used real characters, events and his scholarly knowledge to entertain audiences, while at the same time featuring his personal tastes in sports, literature, science, and history. Doyle’s use of cause and effect, word echo, and analysis endear him to be a technical writer and demonstrate that entertainment can be carefully thought out and intelligently written.
In Victorian England, female sexuality was considered dangerous, and it lays out Arthur Conan Doyle’s treatment of women’s sexuality and transgressive behavior in his novels. The chief motivators of crime for women are sex and money. The Holmes stories reinforce the assumption that women present graver threats to sexual stability than men do. Mary Holder’s fate in “The Beryl Coronet” shows us how severely the genteel woman is punished when she allows sexual desire to override the domestic loyalties that were important in life. She is held responsible for undermining middle class values, but is also punished for challenging male control of female sexuality(her uncle’s assumption that she could have no desires beyond the family circle) (Jann 91). An independent income can also allow women to escape male subordination, and is also portrayed as criminally tempting in the eyes of men. Doyle demonstrates this in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”. There, Holmes describes the “drifting and friendless” woman as “one of the most dangerous classes in the world,” for the wealth that gives her mobility is also “the inevitable inciter of crime in others” when she forsakes male protection(LADY[“Lady Frances Carfax”], 2:401). Another form of male control over female sexuality is suggested by the middle and upper class woman’s vulnerability to blackmail. Whereas Holmes dismisses Irene Adler’s threat to blackmail the King of Bohemia as insignificant , he takes Charles August Milverton’s attempts because Milverton’s victims are seen mainly as women who cannot fight back without destroying their reputations (Jann 92).
The common thread in the Holmes stories is the assumption that women have less rational control over their emotions, behavior, and actions. For Holmes, this is frustrating for investigation because their actions are too unpredictable. Holmes’ generalizations about female nature include that all women are not created equally, and class and ethnicity foreshadow significant differences among them. When gender is an issue in the Holmes’ lore, it is presented in the form of a woman whose relationship to typically feminine roles/behavior is the source of disorder. These stories work to contain the threat of disruption by ultimately reinforcing gender role boundaries drawn to the woman’s economic and social status.
Conan Doyle’s stories have exploded into mainstream media, from films to fan clubs worldwide. Even people who have never read a Sherlock Holmes story know who Doyle’s titular character is. Some of his themes parallel the situations and conflicts that reside in our current generation, such as the blurred lines between race and crime and our portrayal of women in society. Although he was subject to higher criticism, his unorthodox writing style combined with stories filled with suspense, occasional supernatural horror, sporadic action, and moralistic perceptions of early 20th century London society have made him not only on the greatest British writers of the 20th century, but an influential being to the detective genre and its works around the world.
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