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

Abstract

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.

Although Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1883 The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ has been little-studied, the short story foreshadows his interest in spiritualism in intriguing ways. The tale of a spectral figure that appears to be haunting a ship stuck in the Arctic, 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’ (in other words, folkloric beliefs) of the crew, the story examines the role of spiritual belief in an increasingly scientific age. Additionally, the story explores these themes through the lens of masculinity, pitting the rational Dr. Ray against the erratically Romantic Captain Craigie, who pines after the Arctic ghost like a grieving lover, struggling to rationalize away his haunting in the same way Ray does through his crisp, empirical journaling. By reading these men 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 being envisioned by the spiritualists—and whether spiritualist masculinity ought to view itself as primarily rational, or primarily spiritual.

This paper will therefore propose that The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ be read in light of Conan Doyle’s earlier, more anxious interest in spiritualism, and responds to similar debates within spiritualism about the compatibility of science and spirituality. By focusing on the role masculinity plays in this debate, it will consider how scientific masculinity and spiritual masculinity are contrasted through Dr. Ray and Captain Craigie, with the Arctic ghost serving as an unsettling and disruptive force to both extremes. As such, the story ultimately suggests that British masculinity is ineffective when it fails to meaningfully incorporate both the rational and the spiritual, providing a model for ideal masculine spiritualism.

1. Conan Doyle and Spiritualism

Spiritualism gained popularity in England in the early 1850s, during a period when science and religion were increasingly coming into conversation with one another to such a degree that “[i]t was argued that scientific methods could be used to examine the claims of religion” (Nelson 1969, p. 136). Conceptions of the physical world were changing rapidly: geologists had been making discoveries that conflicted with Creationism for years, and by the end of the decade, Darwin would publish his seminal On the Origin of Species; indeed, “[b]y the middle of the nineteenth century…[s]cience had become a widely accepted belief system” (Nelson 1969, p. 136), and the scientific rationalization of the world was a growing reality. As Jolly (2006) writes, “[s]piritualism rose in parallel to the explosion of scientific discovery and invention in the late nineteenth century, when advances in physics and chemistry were fundamentally reconfiguring accepted notions of energy, time, space and reality itself” (20). As a result of “the rise of evolutionary theories, physiology, and other biological sciences” (Boehm 2012, p. 3), the role of—and indeed, very nature of—the soul was undergoing reinvention throughout English society. In particular, Richard Noakes (2012) writes that Victorians had a keen sense of science’s untapped potential to address what they perceived to be the vast mysteries of the universe:

Rapid developments in astronomy, chemistry, geology, natural philosophy, physiology and zoology, and the application of the sciences in an astonishing number of new inventions, had inspired confidence that the extension of scientific knowledge into unexplored territories and the discovery of new natural facts and laws would continue at an ever increasing pace.

(Noakes 2012, p. 29)

As such, spiritualism was a movement that responded to Victorians’ own perceptions of an increasingly scientific world, and their anxieties about the role of the spiritual within that world. Critics such as Kontou and Willburn (2012), Christine Ferguson (2012), and Elena Gomel (2007) have examined these connections thoroughly across their work.

Conan Doyle wrote more actively about spiritualism later in life, which might make 1883’s The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ easy to overlook in terms of its relevance to his later spiritualist beliefs. Notably, ‘Pole-Star’ was composed before Conan Doyle had fully convinced himself of spiritualism’s tenets, when he was actively developing his position on the intersection of science and spirituality that would characterize much of his later spiritualist work. However, we can trace his interest in the subject at least back to 1880, three years before Pole-Star’s publication, when Conan Doyle attended a Birmingham lecture entitled, “Does Death End All?” (Jones 1987, p. 37). Conan Doyle wrote of his beliefs during this time in Memories and Adventures, describing himself as having “the usual contempt which the young educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of spiritualism” and that he “had heard of phenomena which were opposed to every known scientific law, and I had deplored the simplicity and credulity which could deceive good, earnest people into believing that such bogus happenings were signs of intelligence outside our own existence” (Conan Doyle 1924, p. 78). As Daniel Stashower writes, “[Conan Doyle] could not fail to be impressed, however, by the number of prominent scientists who admitted their belief publicly. Earlier, the views of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s staunchest supporter, helped to shape Conan Doyle’s agnosticism. Now, the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s fellow theorist of natural selection, suggested that science and spiritualism could be reconciled” (Stashower 1999, p. 92). Notably, Wallace’s Miracles and Modern Spiritualism was published in 1874, well before Pole-Star, placing it well within the scope of Conan Doyle’s intellectual radar. Jones agrees, writing on Pole-Star, that “even at this early stage in Conan Doyle’s literary career we see the major theme that was to preoccupy him later as a spiritualist: the conquest of death” (Jones 1987, p. 40).

Conan Doyle describes his “own position” at this time as a complicated one, “that of a respectful materialist who entirely admitted a great central intelligent cause, without being able to distinguish what that cause was, or why it should work in so mysterious and terrible a way in bringing its designs to fulfilment” (Conan Doyle 1924, p. 77). He writes of his reluctance to embrace traditional religious belief, describing “all Christianity… had alienated my mind and driven me to agnosticism” (p. 40); as such, the kind of spirituality Conan Doyle was interested in exploring through his fiction might be best described as an interest in the unknown and the intangible rather than traditional religious belief. His time aboard an Arctic whaler prompted further reflection. As Jones writes, “if anything was destined to convince him of some higher orders in the affair of man then this was surely it” (Jones 1987, p. 39). All of this contextualizes Conan Doyle’s position at the time of writing as one of an uncommitted but nevertheless curious examiner of spiritualism’s ideas, eager to explore complex and non-traditional definitions of ‘the spiritual’ through the lens of the modern age. It places Pole-Star in a curious position, one before Conan Doyle’s full spiritualist conviction, and possibly one of his earliest engagements with the enduring question that spiritualism posed: what was the role of the spiritual in a scientific world? And what role did men have to play in answering that question?

2. Spiritualism and Masculinity

Significantly, in comparison to the omni-present role of female mediums in spiritualist writings (Houghton, Hardinge Britten, Woodhull), Pole-Star attempts to capture anxieties over spiritual and scientific dichotomies through an exclusively male cast of characters. The role of masculinity in this debate thus represents a particularly significant gendering of the spiritualist question, seemingly implying that men and masculinity have an important role to play in answering it—and, perhaps, must be prepared to answer it. The existential nature of spiritualism certainly had ramifications for evolving attitudes towards gender roles, which were also being renegotiated in the late 19th Century through marriage reform and the New Woman discourse. Mosse (1998) writes that

the years roughly from the 1870s to the Great War gave a new impetus to both masculinity and its countertype… The enemies of modern, normative masculinity seemed everywhere on the attack: women were attempting to break out of their traditional role; “unmanly” men and “unwomanly” women… were becoming ever more visible. They and the movement for women’s rights threatened that gender division so crucial to the construction of modern masculinity.

(p. 78)

As a result of this context, much of the scholarship on spiritualism has focused on the role of female mediums negotiating Victorian power structures through ‘spiritualized’ domestic spaces, such as Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Owen 2004), Beth Robertson’s Science of the Seance: Transnational Networks and Gendered Bodies in the Study of Psychic Phenomena (Robertson 2016), and Amy Lehman’s Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance (Lehman 2009). Diana Barsham notes that, by the 1910s, the association between spiritualism and the feminine was still so significant, and men’s roles within it still so ambiguous, that Conan-Doyle’s own masculinity was threatened by his public participation in the movement. She writes, “In making public his conversion to Spiritualism in 1916, Doyle appeared to have surrendered his ‘masculine’ reason,” noting that “Doyle was effectively renouncing all that had previously identified him as a model for masculinity” (Barsham 2000, p. 242). Studies focusing specifically on spiritualism and masculinity are less conclusive, as a result, when it comes to examining how men engaged with spiritualism. Robertson’s most masculinity-focused chapter in Science of the Séance (2016), titled “The ‘Scientific Self’: Performative Masculinity in the Physical Laboratory,” reads spiritualist masculinity as an effort to reaffirm, via ghostly science, the ultimate rationality of men. Roberston writes that, in male-dominated spiritualist writing, we see “[a]n assumption of a rational, masculine identity” that “required investigators to assert binaries between spiritual and secular perspectives by minimizing their own religious identities” (p. 21). Meanwhile, Carroll examines the role of grief and masculinity in “‘A Higher Power to Feel’: Spiritualism, Grief, and Victorian Manhood,” outlining a sub-genre of spiritualist writing that focused on redemption: “almost always written by men, Spiritualist redemption narratives were emotional and stylized dramas of the authors’ grief-induced regeneration and reconstruction of selfhood at the hands of departed spirits” (Carroll 2000, p. 4). Compared to Georgiana Houghton’s 1881 memoir Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (Houghton 1881), which frames spiritual communication as akin to hosting friends for tea (what Williams describes as the “unfazed, everyday experience of Spiritualism which domesticates and makes accessible the esoteric and the divine” (Williams 2013, p. 8)) this comparison emphasizes how spiritualism’s trends were themselves deeply gendered, reflective of men’s and women’s different spheres and social values. In masculine spiritualism, then, thematic trends may be summarized into two camps: masculine spiritualism that emphasizes necessary male rationality, and masculine spiritualism that emphasizes the emotional processes inherent in grief.

A similar sort of masculine binary exists in Pole-Star through the contrast of the erratic, grieving Captain Craigie and the rational, journalling narrator, Dr. Ray. Craigie, in this paper’s reading, is drawn irrevocably towards a religious and spiritual embrace of the world out of his grief for his dead lover. Ray, by contrast, clings to empirical definition and scientific method. Crucially, Pole-Star places both men in a space utterly devoid of known comforts or signs of civilization, be they scientific or religious in nature. As Shane McCorristine writes in The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, “we might think of Arctic exploration less as a stable, visible and slowly moving ship on the horizon—solid, manly and upright in its appearance. Rather… it was more like a mutable, unpredictable and opaque force” (McCorristine 2018, p. 18). Appropriately, Conan Doyle depicts the Arctic as defined by “the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas,” indicating that it represents a void space, an empty page onto which the men may project and explore their own definitions of truth. Ray notes the absence of any “faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of the trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground.” Ray’s depiction of the “stark, unfathomable stillness” is also described as a “gruesome reality” (Conan Doyle), indicating that, in Ray’s estimation of the land, the Arctic represents the purest iteration of reality, one defined by silence and stillness and the apparent absence of any signs of God’s presence or creation. As a result, both Ray and Craigie’s attempts to define this desolate and gruesome space of “reality” differ greatly in a way that invites the reader to contrast their respective belief systems. Considering McCorristine’s note that the Arctic “reveals its hidden presence through the sound of repressed and ghostly voices,” we can consider Craigie and Ray’s ghostly Arctic encounters as the spectral ground upon which an emerging definition of fin de siècle spiritualist masculinity, or a proto-spiritualist masculinity, can be located. As Barsham states, “Doyle’s overt aim in his Spiritualist mission was to reclaim the church for masculinity,” (Barsham 2000, p. 257) and this story perhaps represents his earliest stratagem for doing so. This model for spiritualist masculinity is one that views the question of the supernatural as the ultimate manly test, one that highlights the necessity of bringing rationality and romanticism into ideal alignment for men to meet it fully. As both Craigie and Ray fail this test, the story asserts that their individual expressions of masculinity alone are not sufficient to lead to the spiritualist cause, and that a new balance of science and spirituality must be sought through masculine confrontation with the unknown.

3. Ray’s Empirical Masculinity vs. Craigie’s Romantic Masculinity

Doctor Ray serves as the narrator of the tale, charting his experiences aboard a whaling ship stuck in ice in the Arctic, and the devolution of its captain’s sanity. To situate Ray as the embodiment of scientific masculinity, we can draw profitably from the more substantial scholarship on Conan Doyle’s most popular creation, Sherlock Holmes. Kestner writes particularly that Holmes embodies Conan Doyle’s own “masculine script” that “confirmed qualities which were radically gendered as masculine in Victorian culture: observation, rationalism, factuality, logic, comradeship, daring and pluck” (Kestner 1997, p. 2). Bonar makes a similar point, citing Mosse, that “Intellect and Victorian masculinity are inextricably bound, with the three chief virtues of manhood during this period, namely ‘will power, honor, and courage’ (Mosse 1998, pp. 3–4), all referring to strength of character and mind, rather than physicality” (Bonar 2018, p. 139). This aligns with Ray’s father describing him as “a strong-nerved and unimaginative man, with the strictest regard for veracity” (Conan Doyle 1883). Ray represents a similar archetype to Holmes, wherein his particular iteration of masculinity is defined by his investment in British logic, reason, and empirical evidence. His journals compose the majority of the story, and many entries begin with data, aligning his voice with fact, order, definition and linearity: “September 11th. Lat. 81 degrees 40′ N; long. 2 degrees E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county” (ibid.). Here, Ray depicts the land with English frames of reference, mentally replacing the unknowable and uncontrollable landscape that has trapped them with counties—parcels of land designated, controlled, and named by mankind. Ray’s references to nature itself reveals his empirical core, associating rationality and logic with control over nature and, by association, the unknown. The comparison of the Arctic ice to an English county implies that its grand size and shifting nature is no more trouble to define and conquer than pockets of English land back home. Similarly, Ray frames his observations of Craigie not in terms of emotional concern for his wellbeing, but as a “psychological study” (ibid.), again employing scientific language to assess the Captain’s increasingly erratic moods. Both the landscape and Craigie, then, fall equally under Ray’s scope as subjects to be understood specifically through order, organization, and definition, defining Ray’s ideal and instinctive worldview as one wherein the ideal British man views the world, and its subjects, as a well-ordered series of categories.

Ray’s utterly scientific version of masculinity is, however, devoid of respect for, or interest in, the supernatural. The doctor’s journal reveals his instinct to impose order and logic over all ambiguities, whether his subject be the Arctic itself to his ‘superstitious’ shipmates. When confronted with the spiritual beliefs of the crew, Ray denigrates such perspectives: “The superstition of these poor fellows, and the circumstantial accounts which they give, with the utmost earnestness and self-conviction, would horrify any man not accustomed to their ways” (ibid.). He adds, “It is strange that superstition should have obtained such mastery over this hard-headed and practical race. I could not have believed to what an extent it is carried had I not observed it for myself” (ibid.). His comments reveal, firstly, his mental association of “practical[ity]” with the rejection of “superstition” (ibid.), or non-empirical beliefs. Secondly, this quote demonstrates Ray’s dismissal of spiritual belief in the same stroke as it emphasizes the importance of observation. Belief, his final point implies, is obtained through the collection of empirical evidence rather than via more instinctual or emotional engagements with the unseen. Importantly, subsequent sightings of the ghost result in Ray tackling the mystery through Holmes-like deduction and investigation, disparaging personal anecdotes in favour of cross-comparing the information of “three witnesses” that “can make a better case of it than the second mate did” (ibid.). This last line specifically emphasizes that Ray views these methods as preferable to the superstitious first mate’s assessment specifically because they reject emotional impressions in favour of objective data collection. He continually describes his investigation explicitly in the language of reason, expressing disdain for one officer, Milne, for failing to counter the men’s superstition: “I spoke to Milne after breakfast, and told him that he should be above such nonsense, and that as an officer he ought to set the men a better example” (ibid.). Here, Ray associates authority with hierarchical reason, indicating that Milne is a proxy for Britain’s value system as a higher-ranked figure aboard the ship. In this phrasing, we see Ray’s implication that Milne’s proximity to British power ought to align him exclusively with rational, empirical views. Ray laments that “it was hopeless to reason with him” and intends to impose his own views to right things, asking Milne “to call me up the next time the spectre appeared” (ibid.). Not only is Ray associated with empiricism and rationality throughout the story in this way, his investigations and data-collecting demonstrate his conviction in a scientific worldview’s ability to definitively dismiss the veracity of the unknown, the mystic, and the spiritual. Ray’s faith in his ability to disprove the men’s beliefs in the ghost, and his implication that the high-ranking Milne ought to be the one doing it, further associate this faith with a sense that Ray is correcting a lamentable failure of reason that the British hierarchy ought not permit. This impulse recurs later in the story when Ray, clearly anxious over the Captain’s wavering mental fortitude, even takes it upon himself to “conceal the absurd story” (ibid.) of the ghost from him lest it excite his emotions, once more appointing himself as the guardian of masculine rationality aboard the ship.

As he begins chronicling both the crew’s reports of a spectral figure haunting the ship, and Craigie’s parallel emotional dissolution (eventually understood as Craigie’s belief that the ghost is his lost lover trying to make contact), Ray increasingly takes on the role of scientific spirit researcher. In this way, unconsciously, he aligns himself with male spiritualists attempting to ‘rationalize’ the more emotional, feminine work of summoning spirits via the séance table. Robertson describes this intrusion of male spiritualists into spiritualism as necessitating a transformation from domestic séance-table to laboratory:

As an integral part of their scientific practice, psychical researchers created a laboratorial stage that marginalized the stereotypically feminine elements of communing with the spirits. Emptying the space of all its domestic, familial characteristics, psychical scientists restructured the room so that it reflected empirical standards. The seance-turned-laboratory reinforced their claims to scientific authority (Robertson 2016, p. 21). Ray’s journal resembles this iteration of male spiritualist writing, setting science against the unknown, and thereby bringing the ‘unknown’ under empirical masculine control and containment. Robertson characterizes male spiritualists as similarly “[d]edicated to objectivity and rationality” who “presented themselves as the perfect individuals to conduct a science of spirits. Through such performances, they asserted their authority and thus upheld the same patriarchal hierarchies that existed in a much broader range of scientific enterprises” (ibid.). We see this particularly in Ray’s characterization of himself as “the only really sane man aboard the vessel—except perhaps the second engineer, who is a kind of ruminant, and would care nothing for all the fiends in the Red Sea so long as they would leave him alone and not disarrange his tools” (Conan Doyle 1883). Convinced of his exceptional rationality, Ray here makes allowances only for the sort of man who prioritizes organization in the same way he does. The prospect of “disarrang[ing] his tools” is framed as the only real concern of rational men, with ‘tools’ being practical items that exist to allow their users to operate with authority upon their subjects of knowledge. Similarly, the second engineer being solely concerned with his tools and his duty aboard the ship fits neatly into Ray’s appreciation for hierarchies, implying that the second engineer is “sane” specifically because he keeps to his particular role aboard the ship. In this way, the second engineer conforms to Ray’s sense that rationality and hierarchy are interconnected forces, in ways that Milne and, later, Craigie fail to do.

In this way, Ray’s unconscious definition of masculinity animates his interaction with the ‘ghost’ and the Arctic alike. His perspective emphasizes knowledge and rationality as singular keys to masculine authority, with the only true danger being ‘disarrangement’ of rational thought through emotionality and spirituality. Despite his stalwart rationality, however, Ray fails to resolve the problem of the ghost, suggesting that empiric rationality alone is not equipped to tackle the larger spiritual questions embodied by the supernatural. We therefore see in Ray merely one half of the unfulfilled vision of proto-spiritualist masculinity: that of the rational scientist capable of confronting ghosts with the same acumen as the laboratory.

If Ray advocates for Robertson’s description of masculine spiritualism as a tool to reassert male rationality, Craigie is closer, thematically, to Carroll’s description of masculine spiritualism that emphasizes reckoning with the emotional processes inherent in grief. In this case, Craigie’s grief and potential guilt for his lover’s terrible death animate his interactions with the ghost, irrepressible feelings that speak to his potential desire for redemption or—at least—regeneration. In comparison to Ray, Craigie is described as having “a sensitive mind” prone to “imagination and delusion” (Conan Doyle 1883). The chief engineer, himself known “among the Celtic portion of our crew as a seer and expounder of omens,” describes him as “fey” and “wild” and, later, “demented” (ibid.). As Berger notes, “A striking aspect of [imperial] manliness was its rigorous rejection of emotionalism as a supposedly feminine character trait. The ideal was influenced by the British Empire insofar as it stressed qualities needed for combat and service like strength, psychological toughness and a will to win” (Berger 2022, p. 3). Using this definition, we can begin to outline where Craigie fails to fulfil social expectations of men as totally rational beings of unassailable psychological control. Craigie’s emotionality is best displayed when the ghost appears, described by Ray as a “wreath of mist, blown swiftly in a line with the ship,” (Conan Doyle 1883). Craigie reacts to its presence less as a commanding officer and more like a pining lover yearning for reunion. Ray notes that reports of the ghost “have a very bad effect upon the Captain” which he describes as “[bringing] out all his latent lunacy in an exaggerated form” (ibid.). Indeed, Ray describes Craigie calling to his lost love repeatedly, “stopping now and again to throw out his hands with a yearning gesture, and stare impatiently out over the ice” (ibid.). Certainly, Craigie’s moments of dramatic romantic excess, unfulfilled longing and intense grief mirror “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth and Coleridge 2005, p. 196) described by Wordsworth in the preface for Lyrical Ballads, a state prized by Romantic poets and often referred to as ‘the sublime.’ Similarly, Craigie recalls Romantic Byronic characters like Rochester or Heathcliff, as noted by Barbara Roden (1992) and Catherine Wynne (2002), whose emotional pleas to lost or unattainable loves are often echoed symbolically in nature itself. Terry Thompson reads Craigie as closer to Victor Frankenstein, describing them both as “Byronic men who have been irreparably broken by their assorted transgressions” (Thompson 2016, p. 122). One passage from Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights uses strikingly similar imagery of cold, snow, and ghosts to convey Heathcliff’s dramatic yearning for Cathy:

You know I was wild after she died; and eternally, from dawn to dawn, praying her to return to me her spirit! I have a strong faith in ghosts: I have a conviction that they can, and do, exist among us! The day she was buried, there came a fall of snow. In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as winter—all round was solitary… I said to myself ‘I’ll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I’ll think it is this north wind that chills me.

(Brontë 2014, p. 275)

The combination of ghosts, grieving, and snow in this scene from Wuthering Heights seems recontextualized in Pole-Star to characterize Craigie as a similarly Byronic hero, a Romantic figure at his core, despite the rationality his position aboard the ship ought to align him with (in Ray’s view). Craigie, too, is described as “wild” and believes staunchly in ghosts. Ray describes Craigie pacing with the determination of a “caged tiger,” who “[calls] out, ‘But a little time, love—but a little time!’” (Conan Doyle 1883). Here we see yet another thematic echo to Heathcliff begging Cathy’s ghost to haunt him in the opening chapters of Wuthering Heights, the use of ghosts to coalesce unfulfilled romantic yearning and regret through supernatural forces. Heathcliff’s desire to return to Cathy in death is a similar to Craigie’s eagerness to pursue the ghost to his own death, with both lovers attempting to achieve catharsis and regeneration through death. This reflects Carroll’s description of “grief-induced regeneration and reconstruction of selfhood at the hands of departed spirits” (Carroll 2000, p. 4) that so characterized more emotional masculine spiritualist writing. In Craigie, then, Conan Doyle presents a distinctly emotional and spiritual masculinity, one that recalls both emotional masculine spiritualism and Romantic masculinities of prior decades, placed within the hierarchies of modern British seafaring culture as though to test their mutual compatibility. If Ray aligns himself with a scientific future, then, Craigie seems aligned with a more emotional past, one that makes him more willing to confront spiritualist questions such as the existence of ghosts, but nevertheless incapable of surviving such confrontations.

Compared to Ray’s familiarizing descriptions of the Arctic as English counties, Craigie’s more Romantic confrontations with the landscape emphasize a more ambiguous yearning for the unknown. When the spectre appears, indistinguishable from Arctic winds to the rational Ray, Conan Doyle describes Craigie thusly: “He was staring with an eager questioning gaze at…a dim, nebulous body, devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it” (1883). The paradox of this description is unsettling to Ray, as Craigie’s “eager questioning” focuses on a nature that is “dim” and “nebulous” rather than one scientifically defined. In Craigie’s presence, ‘nature’ appears changeable and unknowable, resisting stable form and perhaps even appearing briefly more human. This description—wind as a body—explicitly troubles boundaries between humanity and nature, unsettling Ray’s hierarchical visions of humanity as the superior controlling force driven to bring nature into line. The contrast drawn here implies that what unnerves Ray—disarrangement and ambiguity—Craigie meets with “eager[ness]” and “yearning.” As Thompson puts it, Craigie is a “man of contradictions” (Thompson 2016, p. 122). This greater capacity for embracing ambiguity is emphasized by Craigie’s position on the supernatural. Importantly, Craigie defends spiritualism explicitly to Ray, who narrates: “In discussing [philosophy], we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to Slade,” a disgraced medium. Craigie responds by “warn[ing] me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty” (ibid.). As Jones writes, “The unwillingness of Craigie to condemn spiritualism outright gives us an insight into Conan Doyle’s perception of the movement which in the late 1970s and early 1880s” (Jones 1987, p. 41); similarly, Barsham writes that one of Conan Doyle’s particular gifts was the “ability graphically to image contestation of his own discourse” (Barsham 2000, p. 17). In this debate, Craigie challenges Ray’s self-important authority, implying that the difference between guilt and innocence is sometimes ambiguous, and that Ray’s rational mind is fallible in its own organization when it comes to ‘unknown’ sciences such as spiritual power. He similarly evokes religion in challenging Ray’s logic, stating, “that it would be as logical to brand Christianity as an error because Judas, who professed that religion, was a villain” (Conan Doyle 1883). Evidence of Ray being rattled by this exchange may be inferred from his swift return to empirical journalling, following this line almost immediately with facts and weather assessments that attempt to once more transform he unknowable into the knowable: “The wind is freshening up, and blows steadily from the north. The nights are as dark now as they are in England.” Here, Ray takes comfort once more in observable, but the comfort of familiarity here—another reference to the Arctic being as easily-understood as England—is, compellingly, now associated with darkness. Crucially, darkness more readily evokes the unknowable and challenges observation, suggesting that Ray’s faith in his own empiricism is perhaps less self-assured than it was at the beginning of the story. In Ray and Craigie’s debates, perhaps we see a necessary but unfulfilled vision of proto-spiritualist masculinity attempting to emerge: the rational side challenging the spiritual side, and visa versa, to produce a man better capable of confronting that darkness. That this debate ultimately fails to produce such a man before disaster strikes does not invalidate the hope that such a man might eventually emerge with time and thought.

Throughout the story, Ray laments Craigie’s emotionalism anxiously, noting that “it is sad to see a gallant seaman and accomplished gentleman reduced to such a pass” when “the same man…discoursed philosophy last night with the most critical acumen and coolest judgment” (ibid.). Here, Ray’s anxiety over Craigie’s masculinity is, at least in part, due to Ray’s inability to properly categorize him. After all, Craigie sometimes impresses Ray with the empirical masculine qualities he advocates, such as good judgement and the rational, educated ability to debate philosophy and articulate flaws in Ray’s own empirical reasoning, as above. However, Craigie is not consistently the gallant gentleman competently debating philosophy in his cabin with his ship’s doctor—instead, his belief in the ghost “reduc[es]” him in Ray’s estimation, making his masculinity unnervingly erratic and changeable, like the Arctic itself. In this way Craigie, as the subject of Ray’s study, is confounding precisely because his (literal) embrace of the supernatural and the unknown makes him disassembling; his “fey” masculinity is difficult for Ray to define in a consistent way. Similarly, Ray characterizes emotionality and spiritual excess as Craigie’s ultimate flaw, one that infects otherwise functioning masculinity and prevents him from being the masculine ideal best capable of representing British interests. As Barsham writes, “Spiritualism signalled vulnerability and spoke from and to places to wound, breach and loss in a manner that threatened and opposed the guarded power systems which protected that masculinity” (Barsham 2000, p. 271). As such, although Craigie poses a meaningful challenge to Ray’s immobile rationality, his own excessive and uncontrollable emotionality remains insufficient to produce the kind of man needed to confront the questions of the spiritualist movement.

4. Resolving the Ghost

The context of the ships being ‘stuck’ in ice suggests that the story is centred around an impasse, one wherein a new direction must be struck to move forward. Initially, it appears as though one option is Ray’s empiricism and rationality. The other is Craigie’s emotionality and spirituality. As Berger writes, “while the colonial setting is used as a testing ground for the young and successful hero in adventure tales, it becomes the site of personal failure in imperial Gothic fiction” (Berger 2022, p. 2). Berger adds, “the foreign environment in the colonies is often used as a space for the negotiation of questions of masculinity and nationhood in imperial Gothic writing” (p. 4). If we read Ray as a would-be adventure hero and Craigie as a would-be Romantic Gothic hero, then both of these masculine associations are placed into intriguing conversation. Both men are effectively advocating for the story to culminate in the tropes of a different genre. Ray, as atypical adventure hero, expects to overcome and conquer the challenges, both physical and psychological, offered by the foreign environment. His goal, through his careful maintenance of the rationality of the men on board, is to ensure this outcome, and thereby reaffirm his own “sane[ness]” as ultimately superior (Conan Doyle 1883). In comparison, Craigie seems to be playing out his own private narrative, one that better reflects trends in Gothic Romanticism. In this narrative, expression of masculinity demands openness to the unknown, embraces of spiritual regeneration, and ultimate capitulation to nature rather than the conquering of nature.

How, then, to resolve these competing definitions of masculinity through the lens of Conan Doyle’s early interest in spiritualism? The ghost is perhaps the key, as Barsham writes that “Conan Doyle consistently defined masculinity… as the courageous encounter with a potentially annihilating otherness” (Barsham 2000, p. 5). The story ends with Craigie leaping from the ship and pursuing the ghost into the snow to his death. While Ray interprets the ghost as definable matter—“To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift”—the sailors claim that “it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe” (ibid.). Here, Conan Doyle frames the ghost as a problem of interpretation—Ray can only see it as scientific matter, the men see it as a purely spiritual force. Craigie’s final moments imply that he sees similarly to his crew, as his corpse is described as having a “bright smile” and hands “outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim world that lies beyond the grave” (ibid.). Therefore, while Ray interprets the ghost rationally, Craigie to the very end interprets it as an answering echo of his own passion and spiritual openness. While Dana Martin Batory describes this ending as a failure of masculine nerve, depicting Craigie as a “neurotic Captain” who “breaks under the tremendous strain, impelled by a will stronger than his own” (Batory 1985, p. 226), I argue that Craigie’s deathly embrace is his attempt at regeneration through death into a new, happier state, paradoxically satisfied but defeated by his desire. As Thompson puts it, Craigie “is equally destroyed by his passions and ambitions” (Thompson 2016, p. 122). Notably, Ray attempts to close the matter somewhat empirically, writing that “I entered his cabin to-night, as was my duty, to make a list of his effects in order that they might be entered in the official log,” (ibid.) returning once more to organization and order as emblems of “duty.” However, complicating Ray’s final attempt to “close [his] diary of the voyage of the Pole-Star” with his “strange chain of evidence” is one final note from Ray’s father, Dr. Ray Senior. Ray Senior claims to have new “independent testimony upon the subject which throws a new light upon it” (ibid.), employing his son’s rational methods and empirical language to relay the revelation that Craigie’s betrothed had, in his youth, died under horrific but unexplained circumstances. In this final note, the ghost remains unresolved—either we interpret it as the true ghost of Craigie’s lost lover, or the final delusion of a grief-addled mind. Curiously, Ray Senior employs rational language but makes no final conclusions, and Ray Junior adds nothing at all, surrendering his control of the narrative that was formerly so complete. As a result, the mystery remains unresolvable, but the final note invites the reader to consider which of the two approaches—the rational explanation or the spiritual one—is ultimately more valuable.

The inability of the story to fully resolve the ghost suggests that Conan Doyle wishes us to earnestly consider both possibilities; further, it suggests that both iterations of masculinity are insufficient to confront the supernatural alone. Barsham reads Conan Doyle’s 1930 alternative ending to Memories and Adventures as “[using] Spiritualism to reformulate the encounter with death as the essential signifier of the masculine life” (Barsham 2000, p. 18). Considering that his later writing found value in “the spiritual meaning that it could generate” (p. 18) to have such encounters, we can look to Pole-Star as Conan Doyle’s earliest proposition that confronting death was the ultimate masculine test. In their confrontations with death, embodied by the ghost, both Craigie and Ray are found wanting. This is somewhat acknowledged by Ray’s comment to himself after Craigie’s death: “I have learned never to ridicule any man’s opinion, however strange it may seem” (ibid.). Ray, seemingly acknowledging that his empirical outlook has failed to prevent Craigie’s death or explain the events aboard the ship, ends the story more open to the possibilities of other worldviews beyond his own. His prior dismissal of the supernatural is not replicated by his father’s note—instead, the language of evidence and witness testimony is repurposed to instead consider the relevance of the evidence to any interpretation, spiritual or rational, to be ultimately determined by the reader. In this way, we can note that Ray ends the story without answers, and Craigie ends the story without his life. Craigie’s death, while apparently desired, effectively removes him from the present and, as a result, his ability to usher in any kind of future. Ray, meanwhile, is removed as the narrative’s primary voice by the final note. If we interpret their characters as embodying two extremes—rational masculinity and spiritual masculinity—then neither appears to produce wholly satisfying and sustaining outcomes. If Ray is defeated by his own obstinacy and denied full understanding of the evidence, Craigie is defeated by his inability to repress his emotions or achieve regeneration in some way that does not conclude in his own destruction. Instead, the narrative’s final note suggests a blurrier worldview through the use of empirical evidence to re-consider the veracity of spiritual interpretation. In this note, both worldviews exist side-by-side without the text rendering didactic judgement, implying that men of authority must employ their rationality to meaningfully consider the unknown and the spiritual. As a result, if the story uses its central ‘ghost’ to highlight two extremes of masculinity—the pragmatic rational and the emotional spiritual—then the ghost’s ability to confound and/or destroy both suggests that both extremes are insufficient and benefit from the balancing force of the other. This debate can therefore be read as Conan Doyle ultimately playtesting an early formula for spiritualist masculinity, one that seeks alignment between Carroll’s definition of regenerative spiritualist masculinity and Robertson’s rational spiritualist masculinity. This proto-masculinity, as a result, urgently suggests that men must be prepared to confront the world-defining questions of the spiritualist movement through the mutual embrace of rationality and spiritual openness.