Reason, Unreason, and Setting: Gothic Elements "The Hound of Baskervilles" Anonymous College

“And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?”

The mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles puts both the readers and characters (except the detective and the culprits) in an ambiguous position as the boundaries between science and superstition or rather rational and irrational world have dissolved. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle’s most successful Sherlock Holmes novel is described by himself as ‘a real creeper’. Doyle serialized this in 1901-1902 when Holmes was neither alive nor dead from ‘The final problem’ at Reichenbach falls. Though set before the fall, for contemporary readers it was the ‘ghost’ of their favorite consulting detective that confronted the equally absurd Hound in this mystery. Holmes, as James and John M Kissane notes is a Beowulf-like hero, not by strength but by scientific deductions who have ‘brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world’( A Study in Scarlet ), with the “ability of reason to reduce even the most baffling mystery to a common-place”. Whereas the hound, “a huge creature, luminous, ghastly and spectral” that brings dread to the people put itself in a realm of supernatural. Doyle brings together Holmes and Hound,...