Natural and supernatural; truth and fantasy
As soon as Dr. Mortimer arrives to unveil the mysterious curse of the Baskervilles, Hound wrestles with questions of natural and supernatural occurrences. The doctor himself decides that the marauding hound in question is a supernatural beast, and all he wants to ask Sherlock Holmes is what to do with the next of kin.
From Holmes point of view, every set of clues points toward a logical, real- world solution. Considering the supernatural explanation, Holmes decides to consider all other options before falling back on that one. Sherlock Holmes personifies the intellectuals faith in logic, and on examining facts to find the answers.
In this sense, the story takes on the Gothic tradition, a brand of storytelling that highlights the bizarre and unexplained. Doyles mysterious hound, an ancient family curse, even the ominous Baskerville Hall all set up a Gothic- style mystery that, in the end, will fall victim to Holmes powerful logic.
Doyles own faith in spiritualism, a doctrine of life after death and psychic powers, might at first seem to contradict a Sherlockian belief in logical solutions and real world answers. Holmes is probably based more on Doyles scientific training than his belief system. But the struggle for understanding, the search for a coherent conception of the world we live in, links the spiritualist Doyle with his fictional counterpart. Throughout the novel, Holmes is able to come up with far-flung if ultimately true accounts of the world around him, much as his author strove for understanding in fiction and in fact.
Hounds focus on the natural and supernatural spills over into other thematic territory—the rigid classism of Doyles milieu. Well-to-do intellectual that he was, Doyle translated many of the assumptions of turn-of- the-century English society into his fiction. The natural and supernatural is one example.
Throughout the story, the superstitions of the shapeless mass of common folk- everyone attributes an unbending faith in the curse to the commoners-are denigrated and, often, dismissed. If Mortimer and Sir Henry have their doubts, it is the gullible common folk who take the curse seriously. In the end, when Watsons reportage and Holmes insight have shed light on the situation, the curse and the commoners who believed it end up looking silly.
Baskerville Hall forms the gateway between the aristocratic, orderly world of the Baskerville family—who are far more at home in sleek, urban London—and the untamed, even dangerous world of the moor. Through this liminality, the unruliness of the moor comes to infest the tidy world of the hall with its primitive ideas about ghostly, cursed hounds and the crude greed that drives the murder plot. That is, the moor contributes nothing good to life at…
Victorian society prescribed a strict role for women as “angels of the home” (indeed, “The Angel in the House” was a popular poem of the Victorian era). To be an angel of the home was to take care of that home, attend to one’s children, ensure the comfort of one’s husband…and little else. Doyle’s female characters fit this mold, but only marginally. When the situation demands it, they find themselves able to break free of…
Dr. Mortimer, the young man who first introduces Watson and Holmes to the Baskerville case, is a proponent of a school of quasi-medical thought known as phrenology. Phrenology is the belief that characteristics about a person can be determined through exacting measurement and observation of their skull. The central tenet of such a belief is that there exists a biological basis for all behavior that predetermines the way that one acts (as opposed to…
Perhaps no character in the history of literature is so endowed with pure reason as is Sherlock Holmes. His fictional prowess is such that both his first and last name have been turned into adjectives (Sherlockian, Holmesian) used to describe people of unusual perceptiveness and reasoning. While Holmes is a character with a real-life inspiration—Arthur Conan Doyle’s college professor Joseph Bell—he is also a product of the optimism of Doyle’s time, which had an…
It’s impossible to discuss The Hound of the Baskervilles without engaging, in some way, with a debate between the natural world and a possibly unseen, supernatural one. The titular hound, after all, is believed to have come from Hell in pursuit of a Baskerville who sold his soul to the Devil. Furthermore, Doyle himself, both a devoted spiritualist (someone who believes that the human soul lives on after death and can be communicated with through…
Essays for The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Hound of the Baskervilles essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Top 10 Notes: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Part of the appeal of the Holmes mystery series is that the forces of good and evil are clear-cut and in opposition. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a perfect example.
The hound itself is “from hell.” Sir Hugo was “one possessed by a devil.” The moor is a place of evil and darkness; Baskerville Hall is a place of gloom and despair, haunted by ghosts of generations past.
The villain, Stapleton, will stop at nothing to achieve his goals. He is willing to murder by the cruelest means: using a gigantic attack dog on a victim walking alone in the middle of the night. He is not beneath making a woman fall in love with him and then using her charms to entrap another man. He is cold-blooded and cruel; even his profession centers around death.