Notes - The Speckled Band - Key Facts, Theme Analysis, Main Characters PDF

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The Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle

Contains: Key Facts, Theme Analysis, Main Characters...

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The events that Watson recounts start early one morning in April of 1883, when he and Holmes were living as roommates in an apartment on Baker Street in London. Watson wakes up to find Holmes, normally a late riser, standing over him to let him know that they have a distressed young lady waiting for them in their sitting room. -

The fact that Holmes and Watson live together as roommates gives readers a sense of their deep working relationship, in which Watson is able to closely understand Holmes’s unique skill set as a solver of crimes and narrate their developments for the reader.

Not long after, Helen’s mother died in a train accident, leaving a sizable inheritance to Roylott, with a stipulation that should Helen or her twin sister Julia get married, they would receive an annual income from it. -

The rule governing the inheritance that Mrs. Stoner leaves to both Roylott and to the twins will become a clue in the murder. By making marriage the way that Julia and Helen can escape the confines of Stoke Moran, it is immediately clear that Roylott would want to retain his portion of his ex-wife’s funds by any means necessary.

Exoticism - Theme Analysis Many of the story’s sinister elements have ties to India. For example, after living and working in India for a long stint, Dr. Roylott develops a violent temper. Although he was an angry figure before living in India, Helen Stoner believes that his temper was “intensified by his long residence in the tropics.” Dr. Roylott also has a fondness for many Indian exports. He smokes Indian cigars and, most importantly, collects exotic animals. Roylott’s wandering baboon and cheetah are an ambient threat that can be felt throughout the manor, and the swamp adder, “the deadliest snake in India,” is proven to be the murder weapon in the case. At the end of the story, Holmes claims that he deduced that the snake was used in the killing because the idea of using such a venomous animal would obviously “occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern training,” thus giving non-Western medicine and science a tinge of danger or evil. The “wandering gipsies” that are living in encampments on the forested land around the Stoke Moran Manor are another element of the sinister exotic. While the gipsies are European, Roma people are ancestrally from the Indian subcontinent, and their nomadic lifestyle has always made them outsiders in Europe. Just like the dangerous foreign animals, then, the reader is led to believe that the exotic gipsies could easily be responsible for the death of Julia Stoner. The story’s titular “speckled band,” a phrase which Julia utters as she dies in Helen’s arms, is first presumed to refer to the band of gipsies. This confusion of the word “band,” and the general unspoken racial prejudice among the characters in the story, causes Sherlock Holmes to mistakenly follow it as a lead early in the case.

Doyle is trying to create a setting that is both strange and sinister. In doing this, he is largely playing off of the racial and cultural anxieties that the average white British reader of the time would likely have been feeling in relation to the country’s expanding reach around the world and the potential consequences that this new globalization might have at home.

Fate and Justice Doyle’s stories depict a straightforward division between good and evil, in which characters are generally not nuanced blends of both characteristics, but rather embodiments of either extreme. Through the triumph of the eminently good Holmes and Watson over the evil Dr. Roylott, Doyle suggests that justice is a natural condition of human life and that goodness or fairness will always prevail in the end. Unlike many detectives, who are trying to use their deductive skills in an objective way so that they can catch a criminal, Holmes is clearly concerned with the moral balance in the universe and what he can do to preserve it. Although he is known for his scientific observational skills, Holmes frequently infuses his detective work with emotional and moral weight, as when he is clearly pained by the dark bruises that Roylott left on Helen’s wrist. In Doyle’s telling, there is almost a cautionary element to how the story ends, as though the moral of the story is that those who do wrong will inevitably have wrong done to them. Helen Stoner

● is the twin sister of Julia Stoner (who died two years prior) ● Lives in the Stoke Moran Manor in rural Surrey ● both of them in the care of their villainous stepfather, Dr. Roylott. ● engaged to be married the night before she decides to visit Holmes and Watson, she hears the same low whistling sound that her sister claimed to have heard in the room shortly before she died, which is the catalyst for Helen deciding to seek the detectives’ help. Julia: “Tell me, Helen,” said she, “have you ever heard anyone whistle in the dead of the night?”

Julia Stoner ● The murder victim in this story ●

killed in the middle of the night in her bedroom at the Stoke Moran Manor by a poisonous swamp adder snake.

● The snake was trained by her stepfather, Dr. Roylott, ● Was engaged to be married to a major of the marines, ● her marriage would have meant that she would receive a portion of the recurring annual

inheritance that was set up to go to Roylott before her mother’s death. Her final words—“It was the band! The speckled band!”—are what give the story both its title and its central mystery.

Roylott ● earned a medical degree and moved to India to set up a medical practice. ● married Mrs. Stoner, the widow of a major in the Bengal Army with two twin daughters. ● provoked by a robbery in his house, beat his butler to death and somehow managed to escape a capital sentence. With his new family, he returned to England in disgrace. ● Helen’s mother died in a train accident, leaving a sizable inheritance to Roylott, with a stipulation that should Helen or her twin sister Julia get married, they would receive an annual income from it.

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