Arthur Conan Doyle's Through the Veil, Explained: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
Edwardian writers of speculative fiction found a pet topic in reincarnation. Whether through progressive, linear cycles of rebirth, supernatural possession, or visions of past lives, the concept of a long-dead personality finding a foot-hold in the present – allowing them to voice their undying passions – was a recurring theme of the age. This concept haunted the oeuvre of almost every notable literati of the ‘aughts and ‘teens, including Oliver Onions (“Io,” “The Rosewood Door,” “Phantas,” “The Painted Face,” etc.), M. R. James (“The Rose Garden,” “The Ash Tree,” “Number 13,” etc.), E. F. Benson (“Between the Lights,” “The Temple,” “The Outcast,” etc.), H. P. Lovecraft (“The Tomb,” Charles Dexter Ward, “Rats in the Wall,” etc.), and Algernon Blackwood (“The Insanity of Jones,” “Ancient Sorceries,” The Wave, etc.).
The genre addressed several universal anxieties which were particular to that period – a feeling of disconnection with their fading Victorian past and its stable-but-unfashionable values; a loss of heroic idealism; the progress of science and the subsequent relativism of morality; the romanticizing of past cultures; and the simultaneous tiresomeness of what seemed to be a dull, overly-simplified, unchallenging modern society.
In the 21st century we find ourselves at a similar crossroads, and historical dramas have been tremendously popular as a result, especially those with a romantic bent which focus on the brutal sexuality of “simpler times.” The romantic and ravenous lives of the Spartans, Romans, Gladiators, Vikings, Borgias, Tudors, Jacobites, Victorians, and – ironically but predictably – Edwardians (e.g. Downton Abbey, Titanic, Anne with an E, When Calls the Heart, Finding Neverland, etc.) have consumed imaginations and given an odd comfort to the undersexed and overworked saddled as they are by the despiriting weight of modern malaise.
Somehow it seems -- to some, especially those diving deep into saucy online communities like those on BookTok and Reddit -- that it would be grand to be a wife of Henry VIII, a slave to a Roman libertine, or a prostitute in a Whitechapel brothel. These are ludicrous fantasies, of course, but to Doyle’s Mr. and Mrs. Brown there is no fantasy in the centuries’ old trauma they are about to relive.
SUMMARY
The story centers on John and Maggie Brown, a married Scottish couple whose ordinary life is disrupted by a mysterious encounter with the remains of an ancient Roman fort at Newstead. John is a large, practical, respectable man: a town councillor, church elder, and successful grocer. Maggie, by contrast, is small, dark, nervous, and unusually sensitive.
Although both come from old Border families, their temperaments are markedly different. Their visit to the Roman ruins on the first anniversary of their marriage becomes the beginning of a strange experience that seems to connect their present lives with a forgotten ancient past.
While examining the excavations with a local farmer, Mr. Cunningham, Maggie becomes increasingly pale and unsettled. She speaks as though she can vividly imagine the destruction of the Roman fort centuries earlier.
When Cunningham explains that the local inhabitants eventually attacked and burned the fort, Maggie describes the scene almost as though she had witnessed it: “The sky must have been red that night — and these grey stones, they may have been red also.”
Her husband soon begins experiencing the same strange sensation. When Maggie mentions smoke and violence, John remarks that he can “see that business aboot as clear as ever I saw anything in my life.”
The most striking moment occurs when Maggie unexpectedly identifies the inscription “VV” on an ancient altar as “Valeria Victrix,” the name of a Roman legion. She immediately denies knowing how she could have supplied the answer, but admits that the place gives her “the queerest feeling,” as though she were “not myself, but someone else.”
John, normally confident and practical, is disturbed enough to insist that they leave before dark.
That night John has an extraordinarily vivid dream that seems to be a memory rather than an ordinary dream. He finds himself among a large group of ancient warriors preparing to attack a Roman fort.
He describes crawling silently through the darkness, carrying a spiked club, before joining a violent assault across a bridge. The attackers storm the fort, kill Roman soldiers, and set buildings ablaze. John experiences the violence from inside the scene, even feeling that his hands are “sticky with blood.”
The dream becomes more disturbing when John encounters a woman fleeing through the burning settlement. He grabs her, intending to carry her away with him. When he turns her face toward the firelight, he realizes that she is Maggie—not merely someone resembling her, but “you yourself.” He explains that he felt an overwhelming desire to take her away and keep her for himself.
Before he can finish recounting the dream, John describes a Roman man named Marcus who attacks him with a sword. At the name, Maggie suddenly recognizes him. She cries, “Marcus! My beautiful Marcus!” and collapses. Her reaction strongly suggests that she, too, has recovered a fragment of a forgotten life in which she was connected to Marcus and John was her enemy.
The couple never discuss the incident again. The narrator suggests that they have briefly experienced reincarnation or a glimpse into a previous existence: “the curtain of the past had swung aside.”
Although the vision disappears, it leaves a permanent, unexplained change in their lives. They continue their ordinary existence, but “new and wider horizons” have formed around them, suggesting that their mundane present now contains the mysterious shadow of an ancient past.
ANALYSIS
As mentioned earlier, E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, H. P. Lovecraft, and many other writers who flourished during the Edwardian Era dabbled liberally in reincarnation literature – with varying levels of belief. Blackwood, for instance, genuinely believed in the philosophy, claiming to be the reborn spirit of a Native American medicine man, Onions was fascinated by and open-minded to the “far subtler terrors” of mysticism, while Lovecraft was a devout materialist.
The concept spoke comfort to a dark and vulnerable part of the souls of those who had lived through the vainglorious years of the Victorian empire and had watched the moral confidence of their grandfathers melt into squishy relativism. Perhaps simply being British wasn’t the end all be all. Perhaps the 19th century wasn’t the grandest era in history. Perhaps sexual self-control and self-discipline weren’t the only means of becoming a great person.
The Decadent Movement had been squelched after the fallouts of the Oscar Wilde trial and Cleveland Street Scandal, but it was a pyrrhic victory for priggish Victorians: a reckless era of self-indulgence, romanticism, and libertinism followed, questioning everything from theological orthodoxies to gender roles and the heretofore unquestioned status of Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
Doyle rejects the trend of so many of the Edwardian reincarnation writers, who typically imagined their modern, English characters as being the reborn souls of passionate lovers, brave warriors, exalted royals, and the like. In his version of the trope, a polite, Presbyterian couple are revealed to be the reincarnations of a barbaric rapist and his married, Roman victim. More grim than grand, his story speaks to a truth that the Victorians knew well but refrained from voicing: within us all there lurk ancient evils and unspoken appetites for sin.
Indeed, for all the guff that they get for their prudeness, Victorians were arguably much more attuned the dark, destructive and selfish side of libertinism. Their repressed conformity was in part a strategy to prevent abuses and to preserve the order of law, self-control, and charity. Their bourgeois respectability – represented in the modern-day Browns – is contrasted with Mr. Brown’s Pictish incarnation, who lusts after, covets, and rapes his wife’s Roman counterpart during the unrepressed passions which overtake him during the ecstasy of massacring the defenders.
And – Doyle warns – his devout, community-minded, Edwardian incarnation harbors these same appetites deep in his guilty soul. However melodramatic this tale is, it remains an disquieting parable for the dark corners that exist in every human soul – regardless of how prim and put together they may seem on the outside.