The Foreign and the Female in Arthur Conan Doyle: Beneath the Candy Coating

The Foreign and the Female in Arthur Conan Doyle: Beneath the Candy Coating Lesli J. Favor The Higher Research Organization IMPERIALISM AND THE WOMAN QUESTION, key elements in the cultural construct of late-Victorian England, intersect in the fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Routinely, Conan Doyle depicts subjects from nations other than England, subjects who are female, dangerous, undesirable , even murderous. Knighted for his patriotic polemics on the Boer War, Conan Doyle believed in the relevance of politics to fiction. He said that "the age of fiction is coming—the age when religious and social and political changes will all be effected by means of the novelist___To get an idea to penetrate to the masses of the people, you must put fiction around it, like sugar round a pill."1 In his fiction Conan Doyle's "othering " of the foreign and the female is evident in his construction of character traits and placement of subjects in plot positions. He presents heroes and villains in ways that assert the eminence of the English over the Other-than-English and the Male over the Other-than-male. In "The Speckled Band," Conan Doyle traits a murderer with trappings of the Far East, creating a villain from afar who preys on innocent English citizens. In The Parasite he constructs a mesmerist as female, West Indian, and spiritually parasitic; she preys on English men in a small college town. In Lot No. 249 he creates a deadly confrontation between "a scientific student" and a neighbor who, being expert in Eastern languages and Egyptian artifacts, has brought a mummy back to life. In various Sherlock Holmes stories featuring female subjects, Conan Doyle devises plots that depend upon women who, despite being vital to the narrative, are nevertheless silent and, except for occasional scenes, are physically absent. Like colonized foreign subjects, females are controlled , contained, and marginalized. In these stories, the villains' out398 Favor : conan Doyle comes are death, the females' fate are containment, and the English male heroes reassert the power of reason, patriarchy, and Empire. Conan Doyle's own favorite Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Speckled Band,"2 vividly demonstrates fiction's powers of vilifying the foreign. Holmes investigates threats to the life of his client Helen Stoner3 and decides on two suspects, each characterized as foreign and threatening. The first is a band of gypsies living on the property of Helen 's family manor, where she lives with her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott. Roylott himself is Holmes's other suspect, and the evil in him stems from his connection with the East. He lived for some time in Calcutta ; he keeps dangerous Indian animals as pets; he uses a murder weapon that originates in India; and he is wearing Turkish slippers when he attempts the murder of Helen and afterwards dies. These details of "The Speckled Band" form a network of imperialist ideas and assumptions that infiltrates the construction of Holmes as hero and Roylott as villain. And while readers enjoy this "grim snake story," to use Conan Doyle's own phrase,4 they are at the same time availing themselves of the author's imperialist views. Conan Doyle believed that "in time.... the Anglo-Saxon will swing the sword of justice over the whole world,"5 and he demonstrates his vision in "The Speckled Band" and other stories. Holmes is the hero while Roylott is the villain, and Holmes is pure English while Roylott is tainted by the East. The strongest evidence in "The Speckled Band" of Conan Doyle's imperialist views is his characterization of Roylott. While certain traits are classically villainesque, such as the quick, hot temper and the brutal strength, other elements are clearly Eastern, and while these Eastern elements are not inherently evil, they take on an aura of evil when combined with Roylott's temper and violence. Holmes states that "the idea of using a form of poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical test was just such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern training."6 Additionally, Roylott's murder weapon is found only in India: the Indian swamp adder.7 Besides...