Every month or so here at the Corner Bookcase we will be taking an in-depth look into some of the literature found in our personal corner bookcases. There are so many books out there to talk about so we’re just going to close our eyes and choose one at random, read it, and then discuss it.
This month we’ve selected Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. It actually works out wonderfully because a new blockbuster movie starring Robert Downy Jr is coming out soon based on the character of Sherlock Holmes. The movie version won’t be much like the novel I’m sure, but its certainly worth a look.
Anyway, on with the discussion:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his novel The Hound of the Baskervilles sets up the protagonist of the story, Sherlock Holmes as the ideal personality for modern Victorian men. The ideology Holmes was created to represent is a simple one: science is good. Doyle achieves this representation through not only the characterization and attitude of Holmes the character himself but also through contrasting characters and ideas found in the work.
Holmes first and foremost is represented as a man of science. Within the very first fifteen or so pages of the story Doyle is careful to place Holmes into circumstances that display his scientific prominence. “I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such a well-marked supra-orbital development”(Doyle, 16) Doyle uses the scientific language of the period to boast Holme’s expertise.
Aside from the depiction of Holme’s character Doyle also employs another technique to cement Sherlock as the ideal modern man; he contrasts him with a lesser mindset. The entire novel is set up to compare and contrast the modern world against the feudal world. Holmes, a modern man by all accounts, is sent into a dark and mystical Moor to solve a crime.
Every character lacking modernity gives in to the fallacy that the murder was caused by a magical hound of lore. However, in contrast to them, Holmes is able to use tools of modernity (scientific deduction and observation) to solve the crime and save the people of the uncivilized society.
Holmes is a clear representation of the modern ideology. Use science as much as possible, it is the superior mode of thinking and can be used to aid those who have fallen behind the times.
Doyle’s novel is full of binaries. However, all of them are linked by one major belief system of the Victorian era. This belief is in the redemptive power of the imperialist. The major symbolic contrast in The Hound of the Baskervilles is held between the imperialist and the savage, modern thought against the mystic. The idea that the colonizer is actually helping a colonized people by jumping into their culture and attempting to fast forward their civilizations into the future can be found in almost every element of the novel.
. . . → Read More: What’s in our Corner Bookcase? Discussion: Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
