Proto-Spiritualist Masculinities in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’

This paper examines Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 story The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ in light of his later intersecting interests in spiritualism and masculinity. Conan Doyle uses the Arctic as a space where scientific and spiritual ways of viewing the world struggle to co-exist, comparing ship doctor Ray’s official journal with the ‘superstition’ of the crew, examining the role of spiritual belief in an increasingly scientific age. The paper examines how the story focuses these themes through the lens of masculinity. By reading Ray and Craigie as embodiments of possible British futures—that of scientific rationality and Romantic spirituality, Ray’s rationality is ultimately confounded and unsettled by the spectral events of the story, leaving him haunted by the events on board the ship, unable to resolve them or prevent Craigie’s death. Meanwhile, Craigie’s Romanticism leads him to embrace the spectral, but at the cost of his own life. As a result, Conan Doyle depicts both definitive worldviews as ultimately cold and desolate, neither wholly sustaining on their own terms. The ghost, as a result, becomes key to determining what sort of man ought to usher in the future—whether we recognize it as having a rational explanation or a sublime supernatural one.