While doing some research for an article
about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s life in Southsea, I discovered that he had written
a short novel about occult forces called The Parasite:
“…his dark
tale of an evil woman possessed of such hypnotic powers that she is able
to induce by remote control not only murder, but passionate love as well, in
the mind of her chosen victim.”
From A Study in Southsea: The
Unrevealed Life of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle by Geoffrey Stavert.
Stavert’s summary
made the story sound very interesting indeed: I immediately thought of psychic
crime and psychological black magic.
I found The
Parasite on Project Gutenberg. The novella, which was first published in 1894,
is only four chapters long; the plot is simple and there are only a handful of
characters. The language is rather old-fashioned and melodramatic and the story
a bit contrived, but I found The Parasite worth reading as a source of
inspiration for an article or two. It contains some very familiar elements and provides
yet more independent confirmation of some of my ideas.
The
characters in summary
The two main
characters are Miss Helen Penclosa, the evil woman, and Austin Gilroy, the chosen
victim.
Miss Penclosa, who possesses strong hypnotic powers and can project herself into people’s bodies and take command of them, is middle-aged. She is small and frail; she has a pale, peaky face and light brown hair; she has a crippled leg. Her strange, grey-green eyes are both furtive and fierce.
She is silent and colourless,
retiring and lacking presence, except when she talks about and exercises her
powers. She is unscrupulous; she has no ethical sense at all; she is evil. Conan Doyle calls her a parasite and a devil
woman; I would call her an energy vampire and a witch.
Austin Gilroy
is a professor, although he is only 34 years old. Physiology is his field. He
is interested only in the material world, and has trained himself to deal only
with facts, truth, logic and proof. Yet while he operates on pure reason, he is
aware of his real self:
“…by nature I
am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man. I was a nervous, sensitive
boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions. My black
hair, my dark eyes, my thin, olive face, my tapering fingers, are all
characteristic of my real temperament…”
Austin Gilroy is the chosen victim of Miss Penclosa
because of his psychic temperament - attributed by Gilroy to his Celtic blood -
and his attractive appearance. He is dark and Spanish looking, and we can
deduce that he is handsome as he comes to wish that he had been splashed with acid
or had a bout of the smallpox as this might have saved him from Miss Penclosa’s
attentions.
Other characters
are Agatha Marden, who is Austin Gilroy’s fiancée, and Professor Wilson,
Austin’s friend and academic colleague.
Agatha is a
complement to Helen Penclosa in appearance and personality; Professor Wilson’s areas of
interest, belief and expertise complement those of Professor Gilroy.
Agatha is
young and sweet; she is bright, healthy, happy, beautiful and charming. She is
kind; she feels pity and tenderness when Austin seems ill. She has a well-balanced
mind.
Professor
Wilson’s field is psychology; he is obsessively interested in hypnotism - or
mesmerism as it was often called then – clairvoyance, spiritualism and other
occult powers of the mind. His entire life and soul are dedicated to research,
experiments and lecturing. His main fault is that he gets so carried away with
excitement when he hears about psychic crime that he ignores the human
connection: he doesn’t think about morality or the effects on the victims.
The plot in
summary
The story is
written in diary form; Austin Gilroy recounts the sequence of events and their
effects as he experiences them.
Austin Gilroy
and Agatha Marden first meet Miss Penclosa at Professor Wilson’s house. Mrs
Wilson is a friend of both women. She knows Helen Penclosa from the days when
they were growing up together in Trinidad in the West Indies.
Professor
Wilson has invited Austin and Agatha to visit because he wants Austin to
experience Miss Penclosa’s powers. He wants to remove Austin’s scepticism; he
hopes that Austin will come to accept that not all people who profess to have
certain powers are frauds, hysterics or deluded. He wants Austin to join him in
his researches.
After setting
eyes on Austin Gilroy and noting that he is a very good subject for hypnotism, Miss
Penclosa decides to use her powers to make him dispose of Agatha and fall in
love with her. She wants him for herself, and anyone standing in her way must
be destroyed.
Both Austin
and Agatha consent – very unwisely - to be hypnotised, which gives their enemy
the power to sabotage their relationship.
She starts by
making Agatha temporarily break off the engagement, just as a demonstration and
proof of her powers.
Austin Gilroy becomes
very interested in the experiment; he visits Helen Penclosa for several sessions, then
is horrified when he realises that she has conceived what he sees as a monstrous
passion for him.
He resists the
compulsion he feels to profess his love to her. He understands then that she has projected herself into his body and is controlling him. He is
determined to do whatever he can to fight her influence. He avoids her for a
while, until his willpower is no longer strong enough to resist her commands
and he loses the fight. He visits her and tells her how much he loves her.
Luckily for
Austin Gilroy, Miss Penclosa temporarily loses control and he gets his autonomy back. He tells
her that she is a vile, shameless creature and he loathes her. He expects that
some home truths will be enough to stop her from wanting to see him again.
How little he
knows! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that. Helen Penclosa is
desperately longing to have someone in her life and will not give up easily.
She visits Gilroy, and when he tells her that he still feels the same disgust
for her and meant everything he said, she becomes very angry. She says that if
he won’t feel love for her, he shall feel fear.
She takes her
revenge. She forces him to commit criminal actions such as robbing a bank and
viciously attacking someone, many of which actions he has no memory of; she sabotages
his academic work by making him say ridiculous things in his lectures. He becomes
a laughing-stock. He feels humiliated and degraded.
Austin Gilroy
feels that his life is no longer worth living.
He visits Miss
Penclosa again. He threatens her, but she is not daunted:
"I can
love, and I can hate. You had your choice. You chose to spurn the first; now
you must test the other. It will take a little more to break your spirit, I
see, but broken it shall be...”
The story ends
when Austin Gilroy comes to his senses after a blackout to find himself in
Agatha’s room with a bottle of sulphuric acid. Luckily, Agatha arrives only after
he has come to his senses, otherwise Miss Penclosa might have compelled him to throw it
in her rival’s face.
This is the
last straw. Gilroy sets off to kill Helen Penclosa, only to find that she has
died – at the exact time that he became himself again in Agatha’s room.
More to come
Geoffrey Stavert’s short summary made The
Parasite sound promising. I was not disappointed. It is full of useful
material. Just summarising the plot has made me think of several connections
and similar incidents.
The next part will cover the energy vampirism
and hypnotic control aspects in more detail.
First edition of The Parasite:
