ENGL 1616 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Arthur Conan Doyle, Wrought Iron, Gothic Architecture
Maria Cabrera A Lethal Locale 11/7/16
In his 1983 detective fiction novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
raises the bar for the entire murder mystery genre. In his novel featuring the genius investigator,
Sherlock Holmes, Doyle uses an array of literary devices, flawlessly marrying the gothic genre to
the murder mystery in an equally macabre and gothic-traditional adventure. The gothic genre,
which stems from the eighteenth century, features death, supernaturality and an array of grim
imagery; Doyle creates the ultimate scary story by exploiting our intrinsic phobias of darkness
and isolation. Doyle is able to generate a progressively creepy setting with his use of dark
imagery and gothic features, successfully creating a setting bolstered with the ability to kill.
Doyle is able to create a truly lethal setting that provides context for the murderous plot
and instills fear in the reader. Watson is sent alone alongside Sir Henry Baskerville to
Devonshire, stripping the reader of any comfort in knowing that the noted Sherlock Holmes is on
the case. Arthur Conan Doyle pushes the story from the comfortingly modern city of London to
the wild, unpredictable and isolated Baskerville Hall in Devonshire. Doyle fabricates a beautiful
yet grim setting describing, “there role in the distance and gray, melancholy hill, with a strange
jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream” (39).
Upon their arrival, Watson and Sir Henry are confronted not only by the death of Sir Charles and
the legend of the hound but an unforgiving moor that manifested its own virulence by harboring
Selden, the Notting Hill murderer. Selden makes the land even more precarious and poses as yet
another imminent threat as Watson deliberates, “somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was
lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy
against the whole race that had cast him out” (41). The moor itself is a tremendous threat in
possibly the “most God-forsaken corner of the world” (55), as Watson described in one of his
many letters to Holmes. He also noted that “the longer one stays here the more does the spirit of
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Document Summary
In his 1983 detective fiction novel, the hound of the baskervilles, arthur conan doyle raises the bar for the entire murder mystery genre. Sherlock holmes, doyle uses an array of literary devices, flawlessly marrying the gothic genre to the murder mystery in an equally macabre and gothic-traditional adventure. The gothic genre, which stems from the eighteenth century, features death, supernaturality and an array of grim imagery; doyle creates the ultimate scary story by exploiting our intrinsic phobias of darkness and isolation. Doyle is able to generate a progressively creepy setting with his use of dark imagery and gothic features, successfully creating a setting bolstered with the ability to kill. Doyle is able to create a truly lethal setting that provides context for the murderous plot and instills fear in the reader. Watson is sent alone alongside sir henry baskerville to. Devonshire, stripping the reader of any comfort in knowing that the noted sherlock holmes is on the case.
