Sherlock Holmes and Gothic
Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Hound of the Baskevilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle, shows the great scientific detective Sherlock Holmes in a novel with distinctly Gothic tendencies.
Sherlock Holmes is usually regarded as the great scientific detective, who applies intellectual methods and relentless logic. However, Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous novel about Holmes is The Hound of the Baskervilles, which has all the trappings of the Gothic novel.
The Hound of the Baskervilles begins like any regular case, with Holmes and Watson being consulted by a prospective client in Holmes’ lodgings at 221B Baker Street. The scene is soon shifted, however, to Baskerville Hall on Dartmoor, a far cry from the urban and suburban settings in which Holmes solved cases such as the Bruce-Pardington Plans and The Red-Headed League. Instead of a missing person, or a puzzling detail, the case begins with a full-blown family curse involving a supernatural hound.
In fact, the novel is very different from the cerebral world of the Holmes short stories. In plot as well as setting The Hound of the Baskervilles tends towards the Gothic, with warningd of “the powers of darkness”, the sound of a woman sobbing in an old house at night and an old local legend which is disbelieved by the bluff American Sir Henry. This is an obvious contrast to the eccentric details which Holmes usually deals in, such as the dust on someone’s trousers, or the positioning of a rug.
The denouement continues the Gothic tone, with a chase through the Great Grimpen Mire and the apparition of the giant dog. When all is revealed, the crime is traced to a member of the old family in disguise, paralleling the obsession with descent and family trees in novels such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Castle of Otranto. One of Holmes’s major clues was recognising the family resemblance between Stapleton and an old portrait in Baskerville Hall: he speaks of “a throwback...both physical and spiritual...The man is a Baskerville, all right”. There is even a whiff of the incest theme which appears in many Gothic stories, amongst them The Monk and The Fall of the House of Usher, when Stapleton’s “sister” turns out to have been his wife.
When the case is cleared up, and the appearance of the family “phantom” explained, the images that really stick in the reader’s mind from The Hound of the Baskervilles are not the detection or the logic with which Holmes unravelled the problem. Instead, we remember the spectral hound, the wild moors and the old mansion. It is probably for this reason that The Hound of the Baskervilles has been filmed at least six times – it provides a gripping mystery with spookily picturesque Gothic elements.
