Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stories of Gothic Spiritualism and/as Feminist Counter-Narratives

Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, is a determined rationalist, yet Doyle was himself a convert to spiritualism. Doyle’s interest in spiritualism informs four, somewhat neglected Gothic tales written during the last decades of the century: “The Winning Shot” (1883); “John Barrington Cowles” (1884); the short novel The Parasite (1894); and “Playing with Fire” (1900). These narratives are notable not only because they respond to the contemporary fascination with spiritualism, but because, in doing so, they explore (sometimes explode) the gendered assumptions of a heteronormative and patriarchal society, which carried over into the close, if erroneous, association of women with the powers of mediumship and mesmerism. Doyle complicates this binary: in his own stories, he presents women as victims of spiritualist power as well as manipulators of it. And while his fictional women do sometimes use that power for their own, self-serving ends, they also use it as a means of taking control back in a male-dominated world. While fascinating in itself, I argue, Doyle’s creation of a Gothicized spiritualism reflects a nuanced engagement with the gendered politics of his historical moment, as the “New Woman” sought to assert herself over the domestic ideology of the day.