The Hound of the Baskervilles Book Review Sample
The type and Psychology of Guilt in Doyle’s Book
With the growing popularity of the evolutionary theory, the fin-de-siècle literature strived to support the spiritual and paranormal within the domain of science and reason. At exactly the same time, the Victorian era was marked by the rising awareness of the foreign influence and its consequences. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle explores both subjects to depict guilt as a force that comes from within and is spurred from without.
So far as the family history goes, the Baskervilles are an old and cursed line haunted by the sins of their ancestor in the form of a hellish beast. However , Holmes rejects the metaphysical explanation and pursuit of a person to blame. That he solves the crime by tracing the physical similarities between the portrait and to blame, with his scientific method “blurring the line between the voluntarily or culturally influenced and the biologically programmed” (Jann, 1990). This way, the story follows the 19th-century fashion for the idea of genetic determinism claiming that Stapleton’s guilt is just a hereditary phenomenon, his inescapable legacy of sin engraved in the cells of his human anatomy.
Yet another strong element pertaining to the origins of guilt in the story comes from abroad. While the Baskervilles represent conventional English nobility on the outside, their standing is shaken, and they're forced to find wealth far away. Although Sir Charles’s death is related to pure terror, Simmons labels it as a “guilt death” and “the consequence of horror that one’s past imperial deeds are going to be revealed” (2002). In its turn, Stapleton’s substantial exposure to foreign contamination corrupts his conscience past the point of fear all the way to ultimate delinquency. Thus, the temptations of the foreign force the respectable English soul to betray its values and plunge in to the darkness of degradation and guilt.
On the one hand, The Hound of the Baskervilles advocates the heritable nature of human vices naming biology as the main source of the criminal’s guilt. On the other hand, Conan Doyle implies that genetic predisposition requires an impetus from the outside to completely develop, and also this impetus may be provided by the influence of foreign cultures. All in all, there are numerous forces, both inner and outer, that bring out the evil in a person, and the most abominable terrors occur when such forces act in unison.
REFERENCES
Jann, R. (1990). Sherlock Holmes сodes the social human anatomy. ELH, 57(3), 685. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2873238
Simmons, D. (2002). The curse of empire: Grandiosity and guilt in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The Psychoanalytic Review, 89(4), 533-556. https://doi.org/10.1521/prev.89.4.533.17723
