Hypnotizing women, between the femme fatale and the witch in Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary fiction

Abstract

The historiography on mesmerism and hypnosis shows that there were few women who put this knowledge into practice. In this sense, it is significant that there are few images of a woman hypnotizing a man and no images of a woman hypnotizing another woman. Thus, the woman who hypnotizes a man becomes a revolutionary, a subversive case that turns around not only a classic hypnotic relationship but also a social and historical situation of clear patriarchal domination. In this paper, I analyze two stories by Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) featuring female hypnotists: John Barrington Cowles (1884) and The Parasite (1894). In the case of John Barrington Cowles, the hypnotizing woman is based on the literary and filmic stereotype of the femme fatale, which will appear in many different narrative formats throughout the 20th century up to the present day. In the case of The Parasite, however, the hypnotizing woman is much closer to the literary and folkloric stereotype of the witch. In this sense, I point out the fundamental role that the stereotype of the hypnotizing woman has played in recent cultural gender studies.