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

Abstract

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.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was firmly part of a male-dominated scientific and medical establishment, yet the spiritualist themes within his writings reveal an engagement with alternative forms of knowledge production—an engagement that, despite its masculinist undertones, converges unexpectedly with the proto-feminist ghost stories of contemporary female writers such as Lettice Galbraith (1859–1932). Doyle trained as a doctor, and from that training, he derived his most famous creation, the “heartless thinking machine,” Sherlock Holmes (Conroy 1992, p. 36). “And you,” Holmes challenges Doctor Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), “a trained man of science, believe [the hound] to be supernatural?” (Doyle 2003, p. 24). While Sherlock may be dismissive, however, his case histories are written for him by Watson, another doctor who is (like Mortimer) altogether more susceptible to suggestions of the unknown. Moreover, it is Watson’s narrative that (in stories such as these) constructs for the reader an almost palpable sense of menacing Gothic otherness.

That sense of otherness was not simply a matter of conjuring up a gripping (and saleable) story, adept as Doyle became at the writing of them. Despite his own medical credentials—and Sherlock’s scientific pretensions—Doyle had (like Mortimer in The Hound) “quite gone over to the supernaturalists” (Doyle 2003, p. 25). Here, I focus on four stories, all more or less neglected, in which Doyle draws on and dramatizes his own spiritualist concerns, and gives them Gothic form.1 Like the writing of ghost stories, spiritualism was then closely associated with women (Basham 1992, pp. vii–viii; Lycett 2007, p. 125; Edmundson 2018, pp. 5–6). As Vanessa Dickerson points out, “participation in the revival of supernaturalism, whether as mesmeric subjects, as mediums, or as writers of ghost stories, constituted both expression and exploration of their own spirituality and their ambiguous status as the ‘other’” (Dickerson 1996, p. 8), and itself constituted a kind of “feminine rebellion” (p. 47); at a time when the lives of women were still sharply proscribed by the dominant domestic ideology of “Separate Spheres,” these roles allowed women to be “seen, heard, and studied” (p. 47). Doyle’s interest in spiritualism—at once personal and literary—is, therefore, striking, but what makes his stories particularly notable is that they too engage with the status of women in Victorian society. As I argue in this article, each of these stories shines a light on the contemporary exploitation of women by men within a segregated and sexist society, a narrative of male ascendancy that speaks to the continuing position of women today: “in so many places women learn, earn, influence and govern less and suffer more,” writes Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, in an apparent reversal of the slow but positive transformation that Victorian women helped to initiate (Chakrabarti 2017, p. xi) and Doyle’s stories reflect.

Three of these tales concern mesmerism, the occult power of controlling others. “The Winning Shot” is one of Doyle’s earliest stories, published anonymously in 1883. Doyle’s narrators are typically male; unusually, this story is presented as the first-person narrative of a well-to-do woman, Charlotte, who is menaced by the predatory Octavius Gaster. Gaster is also a doctor, but one who has discovered how to channel supernatural (?) power. When Charlotte spurns him, he uses that power to murder her fiancée and bewitch her: the story concludes with their disappearance. In this thoroughly Gothic tale, mesmerism is the means by which (sexual) influence may be exercised over women; in “John Barrington Cowles,” published a year later, it is the beautiful Miss Northcott who has that power and uses it (for reasons never fully explained) to destroy her suitors. The trope of the femme fatale was then popular; it reflected, in part, the anxieties stirred up by the “New Woman,” who sought to assert her own independence, free of male control or coercion (Richardson 2002, pp. xxxiii–xxxvi). In The Parasite, first serialized in 1894, Doyle offered another, more conventional version of those anxieties; once again, a woman (this time named Mrs. Penclosa) has mesmeric powers, and the determination to win over a man with it. In both narratives, the femme fatales are set up in opposition to establishment figures, medical men who are themselves drawn to and fascinated by the two women. However, the wickedness of these women is not as starkly obvious as bald summary suggests; as I discuss, the narratives leave key questions unanswered. What revelation does Miss Northcott make that so unmans her suitors? Is Mrs. Penclosa really so ruthless in her pursuit of a partner, or is she simply using her powers to counter the cruel way in which she has been dismissed by a masculinist society? And how one-sided is the relationship between her and the male narrator, so intent on presenting himself as her victim?

Finally, I explore a story published in 1900, a year before The Hound. In “Playing with Fire,” a group at a séance conjures up a unicorn, with disastrous results. While it is a woman whose power has made possible this terrifying manifestation, she is inveigled into doing so by one of the story’s several male protagonists—all of whom (incidentally) abandon her to her fate when they flee. The story’s point is not that spiritualism is nonsense, but that those (men) who recklessly pursue the possibilities and power it offers may well be “playing with fire”.

Doyle’s stories do not, therefore, reject the alternative forms of knowledge production suggested by spiritualism; nor do they offer any straightforward admonishment of its female practitioners, even in those stories where the female characters are presented by the narrators as “femme fatales.” As these stories suggest, spiritualist powers of mediumship and mesmerism may in fact be the means by which gendered oppression is extended and reinforced, as mesmerism is itself used to exploit women, or as men appropriate spiritualist power from women; these possibilities translate readily into the Gothic narrative of female victimhood (Wolff 1983, p. 211). However, patriarchal authority itself is a form of mystification, of “mesmeric” influence, internalized and naturalized by society; it operates through a masculinist discourse that privileges particular ways of knowing; and spiritualism was also a threat to the language of masculinist “common sense”. In and of itself, it opposed scientized logic, thereby disclosing new ways of being that brought with them strange and inexplicable results. Thus, rather than confirm patriarchal power, forms of spiritualism could and sometimes did challenge it, with disconcerting results.

As these stories illustrate, spiritualist forms of empowerment may transgress the logic of male domination in several ways. At its simplest, they may enable women to test the limits of patriarchal authority, and invert its terms: women can and do take control. But within this changed and charged dynamic, other effects are visible. These stories feature women who are powerfully aware of their own sexuality, with unsettling consequences for Doyle’s repressed male protagonists, who are no longer in control, even of themselves. As this gendered hierarchy is turned upside down, so it is turned inside out: no longer supportable as such, gendered identities start to become fluid. Men become womanly, women manly, and sexualities shift, as heteronormativity comes into question. And as masculine authority—as masculinity itself—comes under threat, so the victimizers become the victims, transforming the conventional Gothic motif of female victimhood into one in which threatened men lose their hold over themselves and over women.

This is not, of course, the only way in which these stories may be read. They bring together several contemporary concerns, including imperialist anxieties about the threat of an insidious and invasive “foreignness,” here embodied in figures such as the mesmerist Gaster. Nevertheless, Doyle’s neglected narratives are particularly notable—and more than ever relevant—because of their response to the shifting sexual politics of late-Victorian society. At a time when society marked out women as the supposedly better but invariably lesser halves of men, these stories illustrate the potential of spiritualist beliefs, whether to confirm, reinforce, but also expose patriarchal power, or undermine it, and whether to make possible the further abjection of women, or their empowerment. Thus, spiritualism intersects with gendered discussions about the right role of women, which Doyle’s (outwardly conventional) stories variously problematize. In spite of their often intrusive imperialistic and masculinist overtones, as I discuss in this article, Doyle’s narratives function to complement (rather than simply contradict) feminist counter-narratives such as Galbraith’s “In the Séance Room” (1893).

Before turning to those stories, my next step in this article is to discuss in more detail the world of Victorian spiritualism, its association with women, and Doyle’s own interest in that world. Doyle saw spiritualism as a benign practice, but recognized its darker, Gothic potential. Spiritualism included mediumship, but also mesmerism, and several other contemporary writers reflected on its potential as a malign means of control, particularly (although not exclusively) over women. As I highlight, narratives such as George MacDonald’s The Portent (1860/1864), George du Maurier’s Trilby (1893–1894), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) all reflect on the harmful possibilities of mind-control, which Doyle takes up in “The Winning Shot”; what these stories do not consider, as Doyle then does in “John Barrington Cowles” and The Parasite, is the possibility that mesmeric powers might empower women, disrupt the gendered hierarchy of contemporary society, and destabilize the rigid binaries on which that hierarchy depends; indeed, the need to challenge patriarchal power is brought home in “Playing with Fire.”

Victorians were intrigued by ghost stories, but they were equally fascinated by spiritualism as a means of exchange between this world and the next—and both ghost stories and spiritualism were strongly associated with women. As “Angels” of hearth and home, women were thought to be more naturally susceptible—more intuitively open—to psychic and spiritual phenomena (Freeman 2012, p. 100; Galvin 2025, p. 328). Through their good offices, the spirit world might be brought into the home. “It was in the domestic séance,” as Richard Noakes adds, “typically in the presence of a spiritualist medium, where most people gained their experiences of spiritualistic manifestations” (Noakes 2004, p. 27).

Thus, and as Catherine Wynne observes, we might fairly argue for “the centrality of female engagement in mesmerism and mediumship” (Wynne 2006, p. 224). Yet there were a number of famous male spiritualists, including Daniel Douglas Home, just as there were numerous male writers of the ghost story, most notably Charles Dickens (Auerbach 2004, p. 280). Furthermore, spiritualism was not then automatically seen as opposed to scientific and scientized forms of knowledge production, such as the increasingly professionalized practice of medicine. The creation in 1882 of the British Society for Psychical Research (which numbered Doyle among its more prominent members) was, in fact, part of a systematic attempt to put spiritualism on a scientific footing (Auerbach 2004, p. 282).

Nevertheless, spiritualism held a powerful appeal for contemporary women (Lycett 2007, p. 125), as ghost stories did for women writers (Edmundson 2018, pp. 5–6). Spirits spoke of women’s own spectrality, as themselves a form of ghostly presence within a society that limited their legal, political, and economic visibility, and sought to confine their social agency to the domestic sphere. As mediums or mesmerists, the channeling of spirits or spiritual power gave (otherwise marginalized) women status and importance: it confounded and contradicted the male-dominated domains of scientific and scientized medical knowledge, which threatened to dissolve these alternative forms of belief in skepticism; it also challenged a narrowly materialist vision of life that insisted on death as the last word in human existence. Furthermore, spiritualism offered an appealing alternative to conventional (and themselves male-dominated) forms of religion, whose promise of an eternal afterlife lay beyond the reach of the mortal world. Spiritualism, by contrast, opened a way of reaching out to the recently dead.2 For many women, in consequence, spiritualist practices offered a way of empowering themselves within the home, while finding a consolation for what was (through childbirth and motherhood) their own unique experience of and exposure to mortality.

For some, at least, spiritualism was therefore seen as a benign activity; spirits were welcome. These spirits were, furthermore, thoroughly ordinary, unremarkable, and “often more prosaically present than the living” (Auerbach 2004, p. 277). Earth-bound and real, they were very far distant from the fantastical and threatening world of the Gothic, as “one pole of the fictional imagination the other of which is the domestic or contemporary fiction of (often middle-class) sensibility” (Bloom 1998, p. 2). “Spiritualism,” wrote one Victorian convert, “is no longer an airy, floating phenomenon, half seen, half believed, much feared and rarely welcomed; it is domesticated” (Theobald 1887, p. 5).

In what sense, then, is it possible to refer to “Gothic spiritualism,” if spiritualism had tamed the Gothic, neutralizing it as a source of horror and sensation? At its simplest, the Gothic may be defined as a literary mode concerned with the return of the repressed (Punter and Byron 2004, p. xviii), whatever the form it might take. As such, the Gothic does indeed converge with spiritualist beliefs. But the benign nature of spirits was by no means a given: for writers as for believers, the more thrilling and terrifying possibility was that, rather than domesticating the Gothic otherness of the spirit domain, spiritualism might give these alien and potentially hostile presences a foothold in this world, while also providing its practitioners with hitherto undreamt-of powers. What might come of that open door into another world?

These are possibilities Doyle set out to explore. Famously, Doyle was a convert; he “endured decades of derision for his crusading Spiritualist faith” (Auerbach 2004, p. 277; see, for example, Raymond [1920] 1992). Like many of his contemporaries, Doyle saw spiritualism not as something sinister, but as something positive, bridging the world of life and death, and reconnecting the living with lost loved ones. Yet Doyle was alert to the alternative possibility: that the realms accessed by spiritualism might themselves be dark and dangerous. As I discuss, his literary explorations of this possibility are all the more interesting because of their gendered dimension: women feature heavily in his Gothicized tales of spiritualist mystery, as both victims and villainesses.

Doyle wrote a number of spiritualist stories, of which the most substantial and didactic is The Land of Mist (1926), in which the skeptical Professor Challenger is finally persuaded of the reality of psychic phenomena. Although fascinating as a portrait of the post-war spiritualist community, with its séances, institutes, and backbiting, the novel amounts to a straightforward “investigation into the strange world of the paranormal” (Lycett 2007, p. 407); there is nothing Gothic about it. Doyle’s more interesting—and much darker—spiritualist tales are the four with which I am concerned here: “The Winning Shot” (1883), “John Barrington Cowles” (1894), The Parasite (1894), and “Playing with Fire” (1900). Three of these stories focus on the power of mediums to draw on spirit energy and use that power to nefarious ends; the last focuses on the séance itself, as a means of accessing the benign—or not so benign—spirit world.

As Nina Auerbach points out, the Victorian experience of the occult encompassed trance and séance, but also extended to other, older forms of spiritualist activity, such as mesmerism (Auerbach 2004, p. 279) or animal magnetism. Mesmerism was named after Franz Mesmer (1734–1815) (Winter 1998, pp. 1–2), and his theories “about the manipulation of magnetic fluid” (Ifill 2015, p. 129). As Alison Winter explains, “[i]t was commonly claimed that communication consisted in the transfer of vital fluids between two bodies, that people’s minds and souls touched each other (immaterially) in mysterious ways” (Winter 1998, p. 119). “If mesmerism could transform a conscious individual into a living marionette, still more extraordinary were the active powers it gave to the mesmeric subject … Subjects might claim to see events occurring in the future, inside the body, in distant lands, and even in the heavens” (Winter 1998, p. 3). Such was the power, Winter notes, of the “mesmeric séance” (Winter 1998, p. 1). As Daniel Pick underlines, Mesmer’s “‘discovery’ of a superfine fluid that enters into and surrounds all bodies had cosmic as well as human implications” (Pick 2000, p. 46).

Mesmerism was very much in vogue on both sides of the Channel—and Atlantic—in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see also Fulford 2004, pp. 62–63), but while it “made for wonderful theater” (Winter 1998, p. 117), it also opened up worrying questions about the unprincipled uses to which mesmerists might use their power, a possibility on which writers quickly seized. In her farce, Animal Magnetism (1788), Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) portrays a desperate and dispossessed doctor who tries to use mesmerism to command the affection of his ward, Constance. Instead, she falls in love with the French Marquis whose valet is supposed to be teaching the doctor how to win her over (Inchbald 1826, p. 14). As the Marquis tells the hapless doctor, “there is no magnetism, like the powerful magnetism of love” (Inchbald 1826, p. 33). Inchbald’s farce was highly successful, returning to the London stage in 1826. It was also much performed in the United States, where it was revived in 2023 by the Red Bull Theater: “[a]s a drama about consent,” the Theater’s website explains, “a drama about the male refusal to let women possess their own bodies and their own desires, Animal Magnetism is a play that speaks to the 21st century—and to the US after the overturning of Roe v. Wade—in powerful ways” (Taylor 2023).

As Tim Fulford underlines, Inchbald’s farce reflected serious concerns about bodily and sexual autonomy, and the risk that might be posed by the misuse of mesmeric powers (Fulford 2004, p. 69). Similar concerns carried over into much later Victorian stories, such as George MacDonald’s The Portent, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine from May–July 1860, then expanded and republished in 1864 (Ifill 2015, p. 118). As Helena Ifill explains, the male protagonist, Duncan, inadvertently exerts mesmeric influence over the young Lady Alice and commands that she come to him in the night (Ifill 2015, p. 126). “I trembled at the sense of a new power which sprang into conscious being within me” (MacDonald 1895, pp. 105–6). “I shuddered from head to foot at what I had done” (MacDonald 1895, p. 106). Duncan is too honorable to act on that “operative volition” (MacDonald 1895, p. 105). However, what if this power of (sexual) attraction was commanded by the less scrupulous?

Several stories of the period respond to that possibility. George du Maurier’s Trilby (1893–1894) is an instance. The novel is best known for its tale of Svengali’s influence over the model Trilby, whom he transforms into a great opera singer by placing her in a trance.3 It is a state that at least one character in the novel attributes to mesmerism: “that’s what it is,” declares the Laird; “mesmerism!” (Maurier 2006, p. 48). Even after Svengali’s death, Trilby is possessed by his influence; she does not long survive him. Mention might also be made of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), another late-Victorian Gothic novel, in which the Count possesses supernatural powers and exercises his malign influence over men (Harker) and women (Lucy and Mina).4 However, mesmerism (as a power that draws from the occult world) is not mentioned as such. Harker believes he is being hypnotized (Stoker 2003, p. 53), and Van Helsing later hypnotizes Mina; there is no suggestion that, in this conduct, he is drawing on spiritual energies.5

In contrast with Dracula, mesmerism is an explicit feature of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), another recognizably Gothic narrative. Marsh’s once popular novel tells the story of an ancient occult entity that makes its way to London to take revenge on a British politician; as recent critics have highlighted, the story is notable for its interrogation of gender, and, in particular, masculinity (Allin 2015). But, like Dracula, the novel’s denouement hinges on a race to save the heroine from the monster. Having apparently been mesmerized, and with her hair cut short, Marjorie is forced to wear men’s clothing as the two flee, further highlighting the porosity—or “leakiness”—of the bounded male British body (Allin 2015, p. 113; Harris and Vernooy 2012). Marsh sketches the conclusion, leaving the Beetle’s motives unclear; it is possible that the creature captures Marjorie in a challenge to masculine British control over her, further violating the terms of a dominant culture (at once heterosexual, white/British, and male) (Harris and Vernooy 2012). Yet the most obvious reading of the novel is, once again, of a predatory male using mesmerism to take possession of an otherwise notably independent young woman (Davies 2007, p. ix).6

This becomes the theme of Doyle’s “The Winning Shot” (1883) (Lycett 2007, p. 89), written several years before his interest in spiritualism developed into a firm conviction (Lycett 2007, pp. 124–31). In the story, a sinister Swede ingratiates himself into the lives of a well-to-do Devonshire family and becomes obsessed with the story’s narrator, Lottie (for Charlotte). The interest is not reciprocated: she is engaged to Charley, the eldest son of Colonel Pillar, in whose home she is holidaying (Doyle 2021, p. 40). Gaster’s attraction has fatal consequences. Gaster boasts of the power of mind over matter, and in the story’s denouement, engineers a terrible accident at a shooting competition in which Charley is participating: “my beautiful, brave Charley [was left] lying cold and dead upon the ground, with the rifle still clenched in his stiffening fingers” (Doyle 2021, p. 77). For Gaster, that fatal shot is the means of winning Lottie herself, herself now a victim of his mesmeric mastery over the minds of others. Her narrative abruptly ends; her mother adds a final paragraph.

Within a fortnight after writing this narrative, my poor daughter disappeared. All search has failed to find her. A porter at the railway station has deposed to having seen a young lady resembling her description get into a first-class carriage with a tall, thin gentleman. It is, however, too ridiculous to suppose that she can have eloped after her recent grief, and without my having had any suspicions. The detectives are, however, working out the clue.

(Doyle 2021, p. 78)

With its homely setting and matter-of-fact approach to the subject of mesmerism, “The Winning Shot” outwardly appears to offer a remarkably domesticated form of Gothic. Yet the world of Doyle’s construction is, in fact, closely aligned with a more traditional, dark, and dramatic form of Gothic, as Gaster’s appearance on the scene underlines, and the story’s original illustration emphasizes.7 Out walking late one evening, Lottie and her beau, Charley, stray onto Dartmoor, “a most desolate part of the country” (Doyle 2021, p. 44). Charley’s intention is to fish, and together they follow a stream down into “a precipitous glen” (Doyle 2021, p. 44), overshadowed by giant, castle-like rock pillars. It is, she writes, “a pretty cheerful place by day; but now, with the rising moon reflected upon its glassy waters, and throwing dark shadows from the overhanging rocks, it seemed anything rather than the haunt of a pleasure-seeker” (Doyle 2021, pp. 44–45). Lottie shivers; even the robust Charley is discombobulated; to both, the place takes on the dismal air of a charnel-house, where the very sound of the stream “is like the gurgling in the throat of a dying man” (Doyle 2021, p. 45). The (Gothic) stage suitably set, Gaster suddenly appears high up above them.

As Lottie continues, “[t]he moon was just topping the ridge behind, and the gaunt, angular outlines of the stranger stood out hard and clear against its silvery radiance. There was something ghastly in the sudden and silent appearance of this solitary wanderer, especially when coupled with the weird nature of the scene” (Doyle 2021, p. 45). Charley staggers back, “gazing upwards with a pallid face” (Doyle 2021, p. 45); she clings to him “in speechless terror” (p. 46). But “[w]eird as [Gaster’s] appearance had been when we first caught sight of him, the impression was intensified rather than removed by a closer acquaintance” (Doyle 2021, p. 46).

The moon shining full upon him revealed a long, thin face of ghastly pallor, the effect being increased by its contrast with the flaring green necktie which he wore. A scar upon his cheek had healed badly and caused a nasty pucker at the side of his mouth, which gave his whole countenance a most distorted expression, more particularly when he smiled.

(Doyle 2021, p. 46)

The distorted smile is a suggestive detail: for all his urbanity—his suavity—Gaster is a menacing and evil figure, as Lottie quickly intuits. She is “irresistibly reminded … of a bloodsucking species of bat” (Doyle 2021, p. 46); to her, he is predatory, a “vampire-like figure” (p. 55). The vampiric allusion is notable, and not only because it anticipates Stoker’s Dracula by over a decade: the Gothic mode threatens the supernatural, and it is towards the supernatural—the more than natural world, operating outside natural laws—that Lottie’s first-person narrative initially gestures. “I know that many people will always ridicule the supernatural, or what our poor intellects choose to regard as supernatural, and that the fact of my being a woman will be thought to weaken my evidence,” she writes by way of self-deprecating (and consciously gendered) introduction to her tale (Doyle 2021, p. 40). Nevertheless, that tale is, as she insists, carefully assembled from the evidence, in an effort to remain “perfectly unbiased and free from prejudice” (Doyle 2021, p. 55); indeed, her narrative stance anticipates the incipit of many of Doyle’s weird tales, whose (typically male) narrators explicitly present their stories as fact-based, evidence-driven, and scientific in their emphasis. There are forces at work in Lottie’s encounter with Gaster that defy easy explanation, and may even defeat (masculinist) common sense. Yet those forces are no less natural for defying everyday understanding, as she is sufficiently open-minded to recognize. As Gaster emerges from that dark and rocky (but also bewitching and unsettling) landscape, it is immediately clear that he is not beyond nature, but of a piece with it, as both its expression and embodiment.8

That point is particularly relevant because it gives us an insight into the apparent paradox of Doyle’s own engagement with spiritualism and its attendant mysteries, such as mesmerism. Far from seeing spiritualism as something outside the natural, he saw it as a hitherto unexplored aspect of the natural, awaiting only careful examination and exegesis, as his protagonist (another doctor) sets out to do “The Story of the Brown Hand” (1899). As Peter Lamont has argued in relation to the Victorian experience of the séance, the controversy surrounding it had less to do with a “rejection of supernatural agency,” and more to do with “a crisis of evidence, the implications of which were deemed scientific rather than religious” (Lamont 2004, p. 897). Gaster is himself a doctor (or so he claims) and the depth and breadth of his learning is prodigious: one could say, with a glance at Stoker’s later creation, that it is the product of many lifetimes. And, like Dracula, Gaster is not some spectral apparition or ghostly relic, but a flesh-and-blood figure, with fleshly desires; he exists in the here and now, and exerts his influence over it. Indeed, he is particularly threatening because, like Count Dracula, he is thoroughly modern, and perhaps more so than Charley and his circle. If Lottie’s male protectors could but accept the evidence of their own eyes, they might see that Gaster’s influence is out of the ordinary, and his motives questionable, as he himself gives early proof: in a pivotal scene, Gaster demonstrates his ability not only to curb the will of “a remarkably savage bulldog” but turn that will against its owner, Charley’s “bosom friend,” Trevor (Doyle 2021, p. 41).

“Confound the beast!” he [Trevor] said. “I don’t know what can have come over him. I’ve had him three years, and he never bit me before.”

I fancy—I cannot say it for certain—but I fancy that there was a spasmodic twitching of the cicatrix upon our visitor’s face, which betokened an inclination to laugh.

Looking back, I think that it was from that moment that I began to have a strange indefinable fear and dislike of the man.

(Doyle 2021, pp. 52–53)

Gaster, then, succeeds in winning over the family, or at least the men in it; it is Lottie’s mother who recognizes his growing obsession with her (Doyle 2021, pp. 54–55), and Lottie herself who, as we have seen, grasps his true nature and senses his malevolence. Yet Charley will not be his only victim, as the story’s chilling coda reveals; Lottie is herself somehow persuaded to submit to Gaster.

In making her Gaster’s prey, Doyle invokes another, familiar aspect of the Gothic. Ellen Moers famously described a female Gothic, meaning forms of Gothic written by women writers (Moers 1978, p. 90), but Gothic fiction repeatedly features (often virginal) women, threatened by sinister and more or less supernatural forces: their victimhood is assumed. As Cynthia Wolff points out, “[t]heir business is to experience difficulty, not to get out of it” (Wolff 1983, p. 211). In this respect, Doyle’s spiritualist reworking of the Gothic (in which mesmerism drives the action) is conventional—but only up to a point. Lottie is made to suffer, and in the end, we infer, succumbs. Yet she does so only after she has resisted and then testified very powerfully to a villainy she at first alone suspected, and after she has, through her own representations, ensured that a piece is put in the press cautioning the world against him: “[t]his man is beyond the reach of the law, but is more dangerous than a mad dog. Shun him as you would shun the pestilence that walketh at noonday” (Doyle 2021, p. 39).

What makes Doyle’s representation of Lottie still more interesting, and indeed Gothic, is the way that her first-person narrative encodes a distinctly unladylike response to Gaster’s attempts at seduction. As Nina da Vinci Nichols has pointed out, the Gothic mode frequently imperils its virginal women by confronting them with their own burgeoning desire: for the female protagonist, “her most sinister enemy is her own awakening sexuality” (Nichols 1983, p. 188). So, on the night that her mother points out how enamored—or obsessed—Gaster has become with her, Lottie retires to bed, only to be woken by a thrill that runs through her; it is, she writes, “a thrill which I had come to know well” (Doyle 2021, p. 55). Walking to the window, she spies Gaster’s vampire-like figure, “apparently gazing up at my window” (Doyle 2021, p. 55). What is the reader to make of this? What strange thrill is it that she has come to “know well”? Is it a thrill that somehow Gaster has aroused in her, against her wishes or inclination, or is it, perhaps, the thrill of recognition, of a reciprocated desire? Amid all the challenges to the patriarchal establishment (at once white, male, and nationalistic) that Gaster poses—as the alien imposter who defeats his bluff, manly English rival by turning him into his own target—this is perhaps the most threatening possibility of all: that Gaster’s hold over Lottie extends to a sexual arousal (or sexual awakening) that the proper, well-bred English gentlewoman was never supposed to experience. An ethereal, passionless “Angel” of house and hearth she must be, and always remain. Yet Gaster has the means, it may be, of unlocking Lottie’s sexual being.

This is a possibility from which Lottie recoils, as she recoils—violently—from Gaster, when he engineers a tête-à-tête with her, and insinuates that she sought it unsolicited (Doyle 2021, pp. 63–66): once again, we return to the trope of Gaster as predatory, vampiric figure, possessing others against their will. Nevertheless, Lottie’s earlier and cryptic aside does open up an alternative explanation for her disappearance; that she has absconded with Gaster not because powerless before the control of his mind over hers, but because he has sparked in her a desire she did not know she could feel, has never felt when with her beau, and resents precisely because it cannot be suppressed. What is at stake is no longer her victimization, but her complicity, a possibility that plays upon the anxieties of a heteronormative society that saw female desire as threatening (and would, no doubt, have been equally disconcerted by the cosmopolitan but also effete Gaster, with his penchant for “bright colours—green neckties, and the like;” Doyle 2021, p. 39).

This brings us, neatly, to two stories in which Doyle appears to reverse his narrative of female Gothic victimhood. As Helena Ifill points out, “much of the concern over mesmerism and propriety centered on licentious men exerting their influence over ‘nervous and impressionable females’” (as an anonymous correspondent suggested in the medical journal, The Lancet) (Ifill 2015, p. 127); but what if mesmerism gave women an opportunity to express and act on their own desires? This was a still more subversive possibility, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that women experienced little or no such thing as sexual desire.

The first of these stories is “John Barrington Cowles,” a story in which a beautiful young woman has the power to command men’s minds. Having first wooed them, however, she drives them to their deaths. Her motivation is unclear, and so is the exact mechanism by which she breaks the spirits of her suitors, but her mental powers are clearly extraordinary. Here, once again, the narrator takes for granted the reality of mesmerism. Yet the narrator, Armitage, is himself a medical student, who (we might expect) would approach the subject of spiritualism in general and mesmerism in particular with a great deal of skepticism. By contrast, he is skeptical about Miss Kate Northcott, her hold over men, her motives, and her cruelty (of which he hears word, glimpses, but can never finally claim to have witnessed).

This introduces another unusual aspect of the gendered conflict at work within the story. If Miss Northcott represents a threat to Armitage, it is in part because she unsettles his close and intimate relationship with Barrington Cowles, “a tall, slim young fellow, with an olive, Velasquez-like face, and dark, tender eyes” (Doyle 2021, p. 80). “I have seldom seen a man who was more likely to excite a woman’s interest,” Armitage writes, but “[i]n spite of these natural advantages he led a solitary life, avoiding female society” (Doyle 2021, p. 80); instead, he concentrated “all his affection upon me” (p. 80). The homoerotic undercurrent is plain, as a later paean to Cowles’ magnificent beauty underlines (Doyle 2021, p. 82). What is equally clear is the manly forcefulness—the “unusual strength of character”—of Miss Northcott herself, a Greek beauty whose appearances oscillate between “steely hardness” and “womanly weakness” (Doyle 2021, p. 81). Gendered boundaries are constantly being crossed here: Barrington Cowles is a great beauty, and his relationship with Armitage plainly intense if not intimate, while the steely Miss Northcott may simply be playing the part required of her by society when she appears before it as polite and passive; this is the gendered identity which she performs in everyday society, but discards in private. Indeed, each of the three men whose lives she destroys refers to some great but terrible revelation, which she makes in confidence only after they have given their hearts to her. Is that revelation the fact that she is more of a man than they are? And is that manliness—that overt masculinity—just a matter of her masterful character, and her “power of command” (Doyle 2021, p. 81), or might we also infer that she is not a (biological) woman at all?

At once unanswered and unanswerable, these questions reflect the curiously evasive nature of the narrative, which (it may be argued) consciously exploits the limitations of the short story format, then newly popular, to pose troubling questions without offering definitive answers to them. As Angelique Richardson has argued, the short story format enabled writers—and, in particular, women writers—to offer a new generation of readers (many of them women) stories that deliberately opened up the question of gendered boundaries (Richardson 2002, pp. lxv–lxvii).9 As Richardson adds, “[t]he unknowability of women is reclaimed, and embraced” (Richardson 2002, p. lxvi), as here, in the character of Miss Northcott. The more general point is that the reader is left with the distinct impression that the rigid boundaries of a gendered and hierarchical framework are beginning to give way, with all this might mean for a more open, fluid understanding of identity.

One thing does seem certain: Miss Northcott has a hold over these men that cannot be explained away by her great beauty or her powerful personality. Fleeing her influence, Armitage takes Barrington Cowles to the Isle of May to recuperate (Doyle 2021, p. 103), only for her spirit to seek him out there, “a shimmering form which eluded his grasp and led him onwards” to his death (p. 105), perhaps by forcing him over the cliff-edge (p. 106). Despite his best efforts, Armitage cannot save his friend: Miss Northcott has both the will and the wherewithal to defeat him. In The Parasite, by contrast, a similar plot plays out in a rather different way.

The Parasite centers on another medical man, the skeptical physiologist, Austin Gilroy, and his encounter with a mesmerist named Helen Penclosa. Infatuated, Mrs. Penclosa sets out to command Gilroy’s mind and force him into love with her. Gilroy is “a man of four-and-thirty” (Doyle 1895, p. 3), a professor with a university chair and a devoted fiancée; he is firmly a part of the (male, medical) establishment. Penclosa, by contrast, is an outsider, recently arrived from Trinidad, “a small, frail creature, well over forty … with a pale, peaky face” (Doyle 1895, p. 12) and a crippled leg (p. 13). “Her presence was insignificant and her manner retiring,” Gilroy notes with the dismissive certainty of a personable and young(ish) man in a man’s world. “In any group of ten women she would have been the last whom one would have picked out” (Doyle 1895, p. 12). But is the look in her eye furtive, Gilroy finds himself wondering, or fierce (Doyle 1895, p. 13)? He quickly finds out. At first, she seems interested only in challenging his skepticism (Doyle 1895, p. 29), but soon, she uses her “terrible power” (p. 39) to command his love: “I was her slave, body and soul” (p. 88).

Fortunately for him, Penclosa has been weakened by illness; regaining his sense of self, he rejects her as loathsome, monstrous, repulsive (Doyle 1895, pp. 92–93), a dismissal that (nevertheless) seems to have quite as much to do with her age and appearance as it does the abuse of her powers. She faints, but her command over him remains complete, and her intentions are now vengeful: putting into his mouth “the most outrageous and unscientific heresies” (Doyle 1895, p. 110), she costs him his professorship (p. 112). (Ironically, the very fact that these words are put there by Penclosa proves that those “heresies” may contain an unwelcome truth.) When, under her influence, he tries to rob a bank (Doyle 1895, pp. 118–20), assaults a colleague (p. 128), and later visits his fiancée with a bottle of acid to “mar [her] beauty” (pp. 137–38), Gilroy at last overcomes her control and sets out to kill her. Penclosa dies before he can do so, for reasons that are never given (Doyle 1895, p. 143). The story precipitously ends. At last, Gilroy is free of this “loathsome parasite” (Doyle 1895, p. 104).

It is a deeply disturbing situation, and doubly so because Gilroy cannot prove that his behavior is entirely her doing. His murderous intentions are all his own. Indeed, one cannot help wondering whether, at the end, Doyle ducks the plot’s obvious denouement because it would simply be too unsettling—too morally disruptive—for his upstanding protagonist to kill an outwardly helpless woman. Then again, it is possible that Gilroy has achieved just that: as he early on admits, his thorough-going materialism is the result of careful schooling, “for by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man” (Doyle 1895, p. 5). Is this the reason why he was so susceptible to her influence? And is it not also possible that he has (unwittingly, the reader may hope) exerted his own psychic power over her, and commanded her death?

Readers might well have felt that she deserved it. Certainly, Penclosa has revealed herself to be a controlling, manipulative schemer whose passion for Gilroy knows no bounds. But is she (no more than) a Gothic villainess, the “devil woman” of his construction (Doyle 1895, p. 89)? Or is she also, at the same, a somewhat tragic outsider, marginalized by her age, her disability, her gender, and her race (although Gilroy allows that “[a]ny one less like my idea of a West Indian could not be imagined;” Doyle 1895, p. 12), but fiercely unwilling to be defined only in these terms? And how “monstrous, odious” (Doyle 1895, p. 57) is the attraction Gilroy is made to feel—or feels—when with her? By his own admission, the years fall from her as she talks about her abilities, but then, she is only a few years older than he; perhaps he is simply bewitched by her remarkable gaze (Doyle 1895, p. 12), caught up in an attraction that is not quite as perverse as he pleads it to be. And what, for that matter, is the true nature of the “evil” (or so he conceives of it) that she rouses in him (Doyle 1895, pp. 61, 67)? To an upright (and uptight) specimen of English manhood, the truly dismaying possibility is that his attraction to her is not entirely of her own invention—that the attraction is, as George MacDonald suggested in his own tale, mutual (Ifill 2015, p. 129)—a possibility that only compounds Gilroy’s disgust and reinforces his murderous intentions. Questions multiply, despite the longer format of Doyle’s story. In common with “John Barrington Cowles,” a narrative in which Miss Northcott is a powerful yet also somehow spectral presence, The Parasite leaves the reader unsure what to think of Penclosa, whom we see more or less entirely from Gilroy’s perspective; while her unknowability may well be part of what makes her powerful, in a story about male attempts to understand, counter, and potentially control her spiritual abilities, the fact also remains that, in the end, she is categorically silenced.

As Andrew Lycett points out, in his biography of Doyle, the decision to write The Parasite was a sudden one, perhaps suggested by the desire to “cash in on the phenomenal success of Trilby” (Lycett 2007, p. 201); however, Doyle’s title may have been a more or less conscious reference to the disease “which had invaded [Doyle’s] wife’s body” (p. 202), tuberculosis; it was a disease with which Louise had only recently been diagnosed, but which would eventually kill her (pp. 194–96). When he came to write “Playing with Fire,” Doyle had a very different invader in mind (Lycett 2007, p. 239). As Noakes points out, science was then being “actively defined” in opposition to spiritualism (Noakes 2004, p. 24), and that also meant uncovering the truth about the séance, which seemed to follow no known laws of nature. If the séance was lawless, what might that also mean? What might it conjure up? As Doyle’s title suggests, to meddle with the forces that a medium could raise was nothing if not unwise; yet this is exactly what the four men—Moir, Harvey, Markham, and Le Duc—do in this tale.

Their means of inquiry is, however, Mrs. Delaware, a medium whose abilities they draw upon as they might use any other tool: “to work on these subjects without a medium was as futile as for an astronomer to make observations without a telescope” (Doyle 2021, p. 192). Her secondary status is assumed; the men are in charge, and no good will come of it. The trigger for the (near) disaster is, in fact, Harvey’s painting, in the foreground of which is a unicorn, a subject that has cost him a great deal of time and trouble. “All day I have painting him in and painting him out, and trying to imagine what a real live, ramping unicorn would look like” (Doyle 2021, p. 194). The problem, insists the final member of their party, is that “thoughts are things,” and to imagine them is to make them (Doyle 2021, p. 196). This is, at least, the view of Monsieur Paul Le Duc, the “famous student of occultism, a seer, a medium, and a mystic,” and a somewhat unwelcome addition to the group (Doyle 2021, p. 195). And since those thoughts of unicorns are everywhere about them, Le Duc decides, it will be nothing if not amusing to see whether the séance can conjure one up. “What a fun is such a séance!” he declares (Doyle 2021, p. 197).

The narrator, Markham, is dubious; “[a] sense of fear and cold struck into my heart. It seemed to me that lightly and flippantly we had approached the most real and august of sacraments, that communion with the dead of which the fathers of the Church had spoken” (Doyle 2021, p. 199). He is overruled by the others: “[i]f we can do this, we should do this,” declares Harvey (emphasis in the original; Doyle 2021, p. 199). The female medium is, of course, not party to the discussion: as the narrative is careful to explain, her spirit has been abstracted to another plane, to make room for the voice they now hear (Doyle 2021, pp. 198–99), a voice that Markham finds as fascinating as do the others. And it is that voice—a perhaps female voice—that reminds the men of the risks of pursuing these powers in the spirit of “[c]uriosity and levity” (Doyle 2021, p. 201).

The nature of that danger quickly becomes clear, as Le Duc takes the lead. In another, wonderfully Gothic moment of suspense building, a “luminous fog” gathers and glows, “a strange, shifty, luminous, and yet non-illuminating patch of radiance” that turns to “a dusky sullen red” (Doyle 2021, p. 203). When it disappears, it leaves something behind in the room with them. “What is it?” demands one of their number. “Le Duc, what have you done?” “It is all right,” the Frenchman replies. “No harm will come” (Doyle 2021, p. 203). Yet harm does come. Le Duc has succeeded in bringing a unicorn to life, in all its violent reality.

Some huge thing hurtled against us in the darkness, rearing, stamping, smashing, springing, snorting. The table was splintered. We were scattered in every direction. It clattered and scrambled amongst us, rushing with horrible energy from one corner of the room to another. We were all screaming with fear, groveling upon our hands and knees to get away from it. Something trod upon my left hand, and I felt the bones splinter under the weight.

(Doyle 2021, p. 204)

The men flee—one is tempted to say that they scarper—only for them to realize, as the unicorn’s horn pierces the door, that they have left behind (the still unconscious) Mrs. Delamere.

Having rescued her, they take refuge in the dining room, where they variously faint (Moir), jerk and twitch “like an epileptic” (Harvey), sob “like a frightened child” (Le Duc), or simply rant at the Frenchman for an entirely unnecessary but dangerous experiment in which they were all complicit (Markham) (Doyle 2021, p. 205). Then, “[a] terrible scream” reminds the men that they have also forgotten about Harvey’s wife, who lies somewhere in the house, “struck down by the sight which she had seen” (Doyle 2021, p. 205). Mercifully for this thoroughly unheroic and heedless assembly, the unicorn has disappeared. Harvey’s wife is unharmed. And Le Duc, at least, is inclined to play down the folly of what has just been attempted. “‘What a fun!’ he [Le Duc] cried. ‘No one is hurt, and only the door broken, and the ladies frightened. But, my friends, we have done what has never been done before’” (Doyle 2021, p. 206).

Doyle’s story, itself written as a faithful account of the incredible, is rich in details of the spiritualist experience and the ways of thinking of those who were (like Doyle himself) involved in it. Still more notable is the more or less explicit admonishment it directs at the men within the party, who under the guise of systematic inquiry (“[e]very new departure of knowledge has been called unlawful in its inception,” Harvey opines; “[i]t is right and proper that we should inquire;” Doyle 2021, p. 199) are perfectly prepared to take great risks, even at the expense of their nearest and dearest, such as the medium who enables their experiments. Indeed, it is notable that those most imperiled by their experiment—Mrs. Delaware, Moir’s sister, and Mrs. Deacon, Harvey’s wife—are those who have no say in it.

In Doyle’s stories of spiritualism and the occult, therefore, this gendered dimension is as compelling as their Gothicized quality. The reality of spiritualism and spiritualist powers is assumed; the questions relate to the use that is made of them, and their potential for good or ill. Mesmerism offers the opportunity for unprecedented influence over others, an idea which lends itself readily to tales of the villainous seducer (Gaster) or dangerous temptress or femme fatale (Kate, Helen). But even on the small scale of the short story—or perhaps because the short story was so well suited to open and inconclusive endings—Doyle inflects these stereotypical setups with unexpected doubts, questions, and ambivalences. Is Lottie simply coerced into an elopement because she is no longer herself, or has Gaster allowed her to escape the rigid confines of bourgeois morality? Is she simply his victim? The same question may be asked of Gilroy, who is overpowered by Helen Penclosa, yet is nevertheless fascinated by her and by the powers she wields. Is she truly wicked, or does he simply resent the power she has, but he does not? After all, that reversal upsets his authority as a medical man, and indeed, the logic of a patriarchal society that virtually assumes that men will act as seducers, and women will perforce submit. The still more disturbing possibility is that these gendered divides are no longer tenable when challenged by the power of the mind; that these performative boundaries break down, perhaps even under their own weight. Armitage is already besotted with Barrington Cowles when Miss Northcott makes her appearance; in the narrative that he assembles so assiduously, is he really as objective and neutral an observer as he pretends, or is he simply maddened by jealousy and predisposed to read ill into her motives? And what is her true nature—a question that goes beyond any simple question of her moral compass to encompass her biological sex, as a manly woman whose great revelation simply unmans her suitors? Spiritualist powers—whether of the medium or the mesmerist—are the means of breaking down these divides, and withal, challenging the supremacy of a masculinist, scientized mindset, with its presumption of logical mastery. Holmes may be the hero, to return to my opening point, but his story is written for him by Watson, who recognizes in the world an agential reality that eludes easy explanation. In these stories, the cold, calm light of reason is constantly confounded and threatened by the Gothic fogs and darkness that creep in around the margins of respectable Victorian life. In the Gothic spiritualism of Doyle’s neglected tales, nothing is as it seems, and the masculinist, patriarchal center collapses, beaten into a state of terrified submission, like the unmanned men of Markham’s circle, whose values are exposed as so much schoolboy, egocentric nonsense. It is better, as this story suggests, that they not be allowed to “play with fire.”

It is in this sense, therefore, that these four largely overlooked stories may be seen as narratives centrally concerned with the emerging feminist counter-narrative of the “New Woman”. At a time when patriarchal power was in obvious ascendancy, they point out what that power may mean, in sometimes horrifying narratives of female victimhood. Yet in sometimes surprising ways, they also open alternative, and more egalitarian futures, in which the “New Woman” might at last be realizable, or perhaps even unnecessary, as the performative boundaries of gendered identities collapse under the provocations of an occult revival with the disturbing potential to confound patriarchal authority.