“Gothic Tales” by Arthur Conan Doyle (post 4): Oxford University Press’s Introduction calls Doyle “a divided figure” with “double consciousness”

“Arthur Conan Doyle is the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced” and he “was a major figure in the great period of the history of the Gothic tale.

“Dismissed for much of the twentieth century as a cheap brand of populist melodrama, over recent decades the Gothic has become understood as a major cultural mode for the articulation of uncertainty and anxiety. With its characteristic tensions between past and present, rational scientific naturalism and the irrational and supernatural, centre and periphery, the country and the city, the Gothic drew together many of Doyle’s concerns. It provided him with a vehicle to express his divided national identity and double consciousness…

“One of the most fascinating things about Doyle is that he was such a conflicted, or even, divided, figure. He was by training a doctor, completely aware of the significance of scientific naturalism and, in the figure of Sherlock Holmes, the creator of the foremost literary rationalist…And yet he was also increasingly drawn to spiritualism, for which he became a high-profile advocate…

“One of his very earliest stories, ‘The Winning Shot’ (1883), is set in Toynby Hall, on the very edge of ‘the great wilderness of Dartmoor…To this far-flung spot…comes the Swedish occultist and necromancer Dr Octavius Gaster…

“In a manner characteristic of much classic nineteenth-century Gothic, from Frankenstein to ‘William Wilson’ to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to The Picture of  Dorian Gray, ‘The Winning Shot’ is a tale of the divided self. [At a shooting match,] Gaster recites a spell…which enables him to split his rival Charley Pillar in two, causing Charley to shoot his own double, and thus to kill himself” (1).

Oxford University Press may or may not know that “double consciousness” means multiple personality (see previous post), but they certainly do know that Arthur Conan Doyle was a “divided” figure.

1. Darryl Jones (Editor). “Introduction,” in Gothic Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.