Despite the title, “The Parasite” is not a story about tape worms or anything of that nature. It is one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s horror stories. The title actually refers to the villain of the piece, Miss Penclosa, a medium who attaches herself (figuratively) to a young man. The Victorian world was fascinated with the idea of Mesmerism being used for evil purposes.
“The Parasite” was not Doyle’s first try at the idea. He wrote “John Barrington Coyles” eight years earlier. That story has a young man fall in love with Kate Northcott, a woman of strange rumors and habits. In the end he falls off a cliff, perhaps controlled by another?
This second tale is similar in that Doyle has another woman who can control people’s minds. This time the victim is Austin Gilroy. He takes his fiancee, Agatha, to see a display of hypnotism. The experiment on Agatha works and Gilroy is pulled into the spider’s web. Miss Penclosa wants Austin for herself and brings him to the point of almost using sulfuric acid on Agatha (shades of Sherlock’s “Illustrious Client”). Gilroy notices the time once he snaps out of the trance: half-past three. When he rushes over to the medium’s house he finds out she died at that very minute.
“The Parasite” appeared in Harper’s Weekly in four segments from November 10 to December 1, 1894. each piece received a Howard Pyle illustration.
The idea of mind control did not originate with Doyle. The classic of the type was Trilby by George Du Maurier, that appeared the same year as “The Parasite”. The idea certainly was used after Doyle and Du Maurier well into the Pulps. Thorp McClusky specialized in strange tales in which mind control was the focus, sometimes supernatural, sometimes science Fiction.
The concept of “loss of self” is a recurrent theme in horror. From Lovecraft’s Deep Ones, who begin as normal if unattractive humans, who mutate into fish-frogs (loss of identity to genetics) to The Stepford Wives (loss of identity through robotics) to having aliens attach themselves to us like in Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Horror writers have long been drawn to the loss of control or self in scenarios where the protagonist may be changing into a werewolf, or falling under the spell of a witch, or having your soul removed and replaced by another.
What made the parasite idea more fascinating was that through the powers of pseudo science, readers (especially in 1894) could say to themselves: “This is possible.” The frisson of terror is amplified by that knowledge that someone could do such terrible things. Doyle uses a ghost story chestnut (a man is woken at midnight, sees his brother who lives in Australia, then hears later his brother died at that exact hour) about the time to add to the punch. If the parasite had not died just then, his wife’s face would have been destroyed by acid, by his own hand!
Now today our ideas on hypnotism are more sophisticated (or at least diffused). We see therapists use hypnosis to assist in remembering trauma. We know it is used en masse to stop smoking. (Remember Romane?) We think: hypnosis can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do. This lessens our enjoyment of Doyle’s tale a little. To really get the right thrill you have to try and think like a Victorian. There is a reason why the villains are named Svengali and Penclosa.
There is an innate racism implied here. Such terrifying powers are not English but from foreign places. English society at this time was terrified of invasion (as it ironically invaded other countries for its own profit.) The count in Dracula is perhaps the most famous symbol of this fear: handsome, foreign, sexy, powerful. There is also a reason why four English men dispatch him at the end of the book. This is the mind-set that made “The Parasite” work.
