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... I apologise for more Holmes meta. After the previous two I realise I've been, ah, somewhat obsessed recently. It's just rereading the canon again, with specific things to look for and examine, has put me in the frame of mind.
I also apologise to fans of the BBC Sherlock adaptation, I realise I'm spending a lot of these pointing out my problems with that specific adaptation. Um. I just ... sort of have a lot of them, when I'm watching it with the ACD canon in mind (and some just watching it in general). So. My apologies.
This isn't really an essay (no, okay, it totally is), as such, it was just something I noticed while reading back through the canon for Holmes' views on morality, society and people, and with the BBC Sherlock version of Scandal in Bohemia in mind (and the Downey films' treatment of Irene too). The original canon, for something written in the 19th century by a male inhabitant of a very patriarchal and stratified society, has some surprising moments of grace regarding gender and race relations (mostly focused on gender, I'll admit in advance, just one tiny mention regarding race).
I also apologise to fans of the BBC Sherlock adaptation, I realise I'm spending a lot of these pointing out my problems with that specific adaptation. Um. I just ... sort of have a lot of them, when I'm watching it with the ACD canon in mind (and some just watching it in general). So. My apologies.
This isn't really an essay (no, okay, it totally is), as such, it was just something I noticed while reading back through the canon for Holmes' views on morality, society and people, and with the BBC Sherlock version of Scandal in Bohemia in mind (and the Downey films' treatment of Irene too). The original canon, for something written in the 19th century by a male inhabitant of a very patriarchal and stratified society, has some surprising moments of grace regarding gender and race relations (mostly focused on gender, I'll admit in advance, just one tiny mention regarding race).
ACD Holmes and Gender/Race
Um. First things first, though. The canon was written in the 19th century by a male doctor. There are ... several significant and continuous problems in the text. In particular, the whole 'woman are precious innocents who must be protected' thing wears on me, and there are several baseline assumptions on what roles people in society should have that are problematic to a modern audience. The whole 'must always save the girl' part of both Holmes' and Watson's makeup is very wearying after a while.
However. Reading back through it, there are several stories where Conan Doyle makes quiet little decisions about characterisation and narrative that are ... honestly, nearly better than a lot of the modern stories I've seen. I'm just ... Bear with me for a bit, yes?
I'm going to take these in chronological order, because it's possibly more enlightening than just taking them individually. The stories I want to focus on are Scandal in Bohemia, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, The Adventure of the Yellow Face, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (AKA Master Blackmailer), and The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.
(Yes, these particular stories have come up a lot for me, but really they're very illustrative. If I was picking a list of must-reads from canon, I think they would definitely be on it, since you've got Holmes & People, Holmes & Morality/Legality, Holmes & Gender, Holmes & Race ... They hit most of the notes, actually).
[Note: for this essay, I'm not putting the links to the stories at the bottom, but up in the main text. Some of them really need to be read for context before we get to my possibly questionable interpretation, yes?]
A Scandal in Bohemia:
Right. We'll start out with the meaty one. And the story order for this one is actually quite important. Scandal is actually the first of the short stories written, with only the two novels Study in Scarlet and Sign of Four preceding it. Which, when you see the way the story goes and the shapes the stories that follow it take, is quite an important decision, I think.
So. Irene Adler. Everyone's favourite love interest for Holmes in adaptations, the criminal he admires that he can safely also lust after, since she's female and not too morally repugnant. Throw in a century or so of femme fatale narratives and the whole Batman/Catwoman thing, and it seems a solid recipe, yes?
It also has exactly nothing to do with the original canon or the original Irene. I really think this cannot be stated enough. Though ACD Irene does have the distinction of being the only woman Holmes really took notice of (though Watson nurses some hope for his friend and Violet Hunter in Copper Beeches, only to be disappointed), and Holmes does keep her photograph as a reward from the King, his excitement was at her skill more than anything, and that aside, she had no interest in him at all. Holmes was never anything more than a potential threat to her, something to be dealt with to live safely, not a man she had any interest in. The entirety of her desire in the original story was to be married to the man she truly loved (Godfrey Norton), and free of the shadows of her previous relationships.
ACD Irene was, in essence, a woman of, ah, adventurous lifestyle (she was an actress, she regularly crossdressed just for the freedom it gave her, she had a number of relationships including one with an heir to a European throne, she kept documentation of those relationships as insurance against reprisals), who was apparently desired by everyone who met her, and who came into canon for one brief moment when someone hired Holmes to hunt her down, and she took steps to stay ahead of that so well that she beat Holmes at his own game.
However, that's not what I want to focus on. What I want to look at is what the story says about women, the choices they are allowed to make, and the roles they are allowed to play. And, also, what impact women are allowed to have on lead male characters.
In this story, Irene has had previous relationships with men of power. This has put her in a dangerous position. But she is not, in the story, punished for it. At the end of the story, Irene is married to the man she truly loves, and made clean her escape from reprisals. She is also not really decried for it, though the King's diatribe against her at the start is fairly damning (and not necessarily inaccurate - Irene was blackmailing the King. Mostly to hold him off long enough for her own marriage to come through, but still). She is described as resolute and honourable even by the King himself, who happily takes her word as inviolate despite everything she's done, and at the end is nearly more enamoured with her for her daring in defying him than he was before. At the end, he thinks she would have made a fabulous queen, had she only been on a level with him, and is rather snippily put down by Holmes for the musing ("From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your majesty," said Holmes, coldly), though admittedly it rather goes over the King's head.
That was how she had affected the King. As for how she affected Holmes, Watson had the following to say: "[...] the best plans of Mr Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late."
If we judge a narrative by what the characters are allowed to do, how the text reacts to those actions, and how they get their come-uppance at the end ... Scandal in Bohemia makes some interesting statements.
A woman is allowed to have had previous relationships before finding true love without textually being considered any less for it. A woman is allowed to choose for herself who she loves, no matter the relative stations of the suitors in question. A woman may refuse the advances of the most powerful men in her narrative, and by her own wit and capability justify that refusal.
A woman may inhabit the narrative in direct opposition to the main character, and neither lose to him nor soften towards him for reasons of her femininity. A woman may inhabit the same narrative as the male lead and genuinely consider him nothing more than a stumbling block in her own plans, and then be proven right. A woman may inhabit the same narrative as the male lead, have interests and goals that have absolutely nothing to do with him, and win through on those goals despite his interference.
A woman may be respected by the male leads for doing all of the above. She may have an impact on him, and possibly more of one than he had on her, since according to Watson, Irene Adler permanently changed Holmes' views of her entire gender, whereas we never see any evidence that she ever so much as thought of him again.
And the text thereafter actually does bear that out. Scandal was the third Holmes story ever published. Which means that, as soon as he had his detective set up and established, Conan Doyle set up a character to knock him out of his complacency, to teach him that he may be wrong, he may lose, he may consistently underestimate whole sections of the population and have the text prove him wrong for it.
A lot of the themes from Scandal are actually borne through the rest of the stories: that women may have more than one relationship or desire for relationships without being made to suffer for it (Milverton and Yellow Face show this, I'll get to them), that woman are perfectly capable of sorting out their own problems if they need to (Milverton), that a woman may be in the right and the main lead wrong (Yellow Face), that women are perfectly capable of deciding on their own goals and working towards them (Copper Beeches), that society shouldn't really have too much of a say in characters finding happiness (this isn't women specifically - it's a thread that runs through Holmes' interactions with society itself - he consistently chooses the safety and happiness of the individual over societal/legal concerns in the matter).
Essentially, in the third story of his series, Conan Doyle set out to prove that his main character could be wrong, that said character was better for it and for learning from it, and he did that by having a woman come in and knock the man on his arse while on her way to somewhere and someone else entirely. And then backed that choice up in the rest of the stories, continued the theme and the lesson throughout. All the myriad problems with the ACD canon and women acknowledged, I'm still rather happy about that.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches:
Copper Beeches is an interesting story on the heels of Scandal. It can, for example, be taken as a mild confirmation of the idea that Holmes was attracted to Irene, since the qualities he admires in Violet Hunter (and the ones that make Watson hopeful his friend might find a mate) are many of the same ones he admired in Irene: confidence, quiet capability, the forthright pursuit of her own goals, a degree of self-sufficiency. However, Holmes never really shows any more permanent interest in Violet than he does in, well, much of anyone really, so perhaps not so much.
I'm picking Copper Beeches because of what Violet Hunter came to Holmes to ask, and how he reacted. Violet was a woman with no family or parents or external support network. She had been out of work for a while, and was close to broke before the offer of a job came in. The job was very, very well-paid, but the employer and his requests ... well, to be honest, were more than a little creepy and suspicious. Despite that, since the job was extremely well paid and she was rapidly approaching destitute, she'd determined that she had to take it.
She starts out asking Holmes' advice on whether or not to take the job, presumably in an effort to make him hear it through first. She finishes, though, by saying that she has made up her mind to take the job, but wanted to run it past someone with knowledge (and, I think, a suspicious mind) first. When Holmes says that the fact that she's made up her mind surely settled the matter already, she reiterates that she genuinely does want his opinion and his suspicions.
And when he agrees that he finds the whole thing creepy and possibly dangerous, what she says is: "I thought that if I told you of the circumstances you would understand afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so much stronger if I felt you were at the back of me."
Essentially, she was a woman with no means and no support, who had been offered a position she couldn't really afford to refuse, who basically wanted back-up if it went as wrongly as she suspected it was going to. She had already decided on her course of action, because it was the only one she felt was open to her. She manipulated him a little bit at first, playing up her need for his advice and making it sound like he had a say (which says something about what kind of man she expected him to be initially). Holmes, once he realises this, doesn't react with offense but with a smile and a question as to why she was asking him if she'd already made up her mind.
And when she comes down to the bottom line, that she feels she's going into danger and wants someone to know where she's gone and why, someone who can back her up ... Holmes says she has it. She has only to telegram him, day or night, and he'll come to help her.
Now. What all of this looks like on the surface is your standard 'helpless woman needs a man to protect her' story. Except ... well, not really.
The narrative doesn't describe or treat Violet as a foolish woman who wandered into danger against the advice of a man and had to be rescued for it. It portrays her as a sensible, savvy woman who saw in advance the potential dangers of the position, but because of her circumstances and her need to do something about them, felt she had to accept it anyway. And then, being a basically sensible person, she went and got backup and someone to know where the hell she was, instead of just blindly following the flash of money and landing herself in a dangerous situation with no way out. A woman willing to manipulate the interview a little to manage the hurdles she expected Holmes to put in front of her - she basically expected that he wouldn't have a thing to do with her unless he thought he would have a say in her decisions, and she was willing and able to verbally work her way around that.
And Holmes, for his part, both listens all the way through, doesn't flip out when he realises that she's been leading him somewhat, agrees with her concerns, and willingly agrees to help her should she need it.
And by the end of the story, despite having been lied to and violently threatened over the course of the story (her employer threatened to throw her to his starving dog if she ever went near the locked areas again), she manages to have amassed enough information on the situation to call Holmes in and have him do something about it. 'It' turning out to be the imprisonment of her employer's daughter to force her to surrender her money whether she married or not. She basically stays clear-headed, suspicious and observant the whole way through, allowing for her rather understandable moments of blind terror, supports Holmes and Watson through their actions to the finish, and at the end of the story goes off to run a private school in Walsall and have every success.
Yes, she's essentially the prototype of the female amateur sleuth, and yes, there are moments when Holmes is rather patronising towards her, but essentially Violet Hunter again proves that in the Holmes canon, female characters could be clever, capable and self-sufficient on their own merits. They could get in trouble and need help without being put down for it. They could stand up under pressure and take action to redress situations. They could mildly manipulate the main characters in pursuit of their own needs, and the necessity of the action will be cheerfully acknowledged. They can go on to have success on their own merits.
And they can do all that without ever being the love interest. Because despite Watson's hopes on the matter, him being something of a soppy romantic, neither Violet nor Holmes himself ever show signs of considering each other any more than allies and business acquaintances, and both go cheerfully their own way at the end of it.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face:
This story is one of the most quietly subversive in the original canon, I think. Gender and race, in this one. And the protagonist, again, being allowed to be wrong. I think it's a thing that tends to get brushed aside in a lot of Holmes adaptations, that the character wasn't perfect, didn't think of himself as perfect, had canon, on-screen failures, and generally reacted to them by trying to learn from them. Yellow Face is the story where Watson takes time to note at the start that Holmes is sometimes wrong, and if he doesn't tend to focus on those cases, it's often because cases where Holmes is wrong are also cases where no-one finds the answer where he can't. There are, however, definite cases where Holmes was just plain wrong, and he does document a few.
I think that, like Scandal and the deliberate order it was written in, this shows that Conan Doyle was aware of the temptation to make Holmes all-powerful and all-seeing, and deliberately checked himself every so often with cases where Holmes failed, or was upstaged, or misread the situation, or was just plain stupid (Devil's Foot, so much). They actually show up every so often: Scandal and Five Pips early on, then Yellow Face and Musgrave Ritual in the middle section, Wisteria Lodge and Devil's Foot in the later stories. In the ACD canon, Holmes just generally doesn't ever go for too long without eventually tripping himself up, and the canon is perfectly fine with that.
In Yellow Face, his main problem is that he tends to err on the side of pessimism, and generally tends to expect the worst of people. You actually see that all through the stories, how he is deeply suspicious of people's actions when left unchecked, and how he will often suspect the worst possible motives for people. This is an area where generally Watson balances him, both showing and believing in the finer motivations, and providing a counterpoint for Holmes to turn on.
The case itself initially reads more or less like your standard 'private investigator asked to confirm that his client's wife is having an affair'. However, the client himself, Munro, is adamant that his wife loves him, and from his description of their life, they seem to have been happy together. His wife had been previously married to a lawyer in America, but he and their child had supposedly died, leaving her to come to England. She had signed over her not-insignificant money to her new husband on marriage, at her insistence more than his (he was afraid holding it jointly would mean they lost it all if his business went bad), and with the proviso that should she ever need some, he should give it to her immediately. They apparently happily abided by this for three years.
And then, the wife asked for 100 pounds, no questions asked. And shortly afterwards, began to act suspiciously, keeping her distance from him and acting strangely around him. Someone has moved into the cottage next to theirs, someone unnatural, with a rigid and chalky-white face. And then he finds his wife getting dressed and leaving in the night, lying to him when she gets back. At this point, he starts thinking the worst. Shortly afterwards, he finds out it's the new neighbour she's been sneaking out to see. She begs him not to challenge the neighbour, that she has a secret there and their life together depends on it, and he agrees provided she doesn't go back, which she promises not to. Shortly afterwards, he finds she broke her promise, and he leaves, coming down to consult Holmes.
And Holmes? Oddly enough, his first thought isn't 'wife having affair', it's 'wife is being blackmailed by the new neighbour', followed by 'the neighbour is obviously the first husband, supposedly dead, whom she fled when he contracted some horrible disease'.
Ah. Victorian era, yes? Also, Holmes really does tend to think the worst of people.
But what they find, when they come with Munro to investigate and force their way into the cottage despite his wife's pleas, is not her supposedly deceased first husband, but her supposedly deceased child by said husband. A very, very coloured child.
Her first husband, as she angrily explains, was John Hebron of Atlanta, a man who was, as Watson puts it, 'strikingly handsome and intelligent-looking, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent'. As she describes it, she 'cut herself off from her race' to be with him, to marry him and have his daughter, who took after her father. A daughter she loved very much. When he died and she left America, the only reason she left the child behind was because Lucy was ill and couldn't make the trip. When she met Munro, she was afraid to tell him about the child, or bring the child to England, for fear she'd lose him because of it. But eventually, she had to have her daughter with her, and tried to disguise her (hence the mask, the 'rigid and chalky-white face') and hide her, trying to keep her husband away. And how that her child has been revealed, she believes she will lose him now.
And the three men, Holmes, Watson and Munro? How do they react? Well, Holmes and Watson had reacted to the child with immediate delight and relief, because it was a much, much better circumstance than the one they'd feared. Holmes is delighted to be wrong, and asks to be reminded of it should he start getting on his high horse in future.
And Munro? After a moment of shock and horror ... he walks forward, picks up the kid, kisses her, and says to his wife: "We can talk it over more comfortably at home. I'm not a very good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one than you have given me credit for being."
Again, the threads from Scandal are carried forward: a woman may have previous relationships, and not be ashamed of them. A person may choose who to love, and society be damned for what it thinks of them for it. A white woman may love a black man, and have it be considered good (there was a degree of support for families of white men and coloured wives at the time, but support for the other way around was somewhat rarer). And from what Munro said, that even a not-very-good man should be good enough to welcome his wife's child, regardless of her race or her origins in a previous relationship, the story also appears to support step- and mixed families.
Basically? Holmes canon quietly came out in support of mixed-race marriages, a woman's right to choose who she loved, and families of non-traditional structure. In the 1890s.
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton:
This one is ... a less happy thread, really, and one that will be complicated depending on how you view personal vengeance. But it needs mentioning.
The initial sections of Milverton serve to showcase a lot of the more troubling aspects of the ACD canon's approach to gender. Holmes is massively, patriarchally protective of women, sees them as sweet and beautiful creatures that need to be shielded. Watson too (though you caught a glimpse of that in Scandal, as well, when Irene's beauty momentarily damages his determination to act against her, and only his loyalty to Holmes spurs him on). It also shows Holmes pretending to be in a relationship with Milverton's maid to get information and immediately dropping her like a hot rock afterwards, which Watson finds shocking (and Holmes partially excuses by saying he made sure he had a rival for her affections first, so she would have someone to fall back on - not the best reasoning in the world, honey).
However, at the same time this story also, by the crescendo, has served to prove to them both that a woman who is pushed hard enough is more than capable of violently dealing with problems herself.
The blackmailer in this story makes his business essentially by playing on Victorian high society's view on what things are acceptable in a woman's past should she want to marry. Previous relationships, even of innocent sorts taking place in letters, are a massive no-no. A woman may be ruined for them. (He also made a living blackmailing men, presumably for other matters, but most of what Holmes focuses on is the women). Holmes, who has never had too much attachment to what society thinks in the first place, is ... violently enraged by this. I'm not kidding, he loses his temper to the degree that Milverton wins the initial encounter, and actually has himself and Watson almost assault the man. He then follows up by burgling the man's house.
And while there, when he and Watson are essentially hiding behind the curtains in Milverton's office, waiting for the man to move so they can get to work, they witness Milverton's business violently catching up to him, in the form of a woman whose life he had ruined and whose husband he'd driven to suicide. A woman who, with extraordinary on-screen violence compared to many of the stories, shoots Milverton multiple times in the chest, watches him claw around on the floor, shoots him again when he gets back up, and finally grinds her heel into his face to make sure he's really dead. Make no mistake, the scene is portrayed with every possible violence.
And Holmes and Watson, during the course of it, are busy hiding behind the curtains. Watson does make a move to intervene, but Holmes grabs his wrist and silently tells him not to. They simply watch as the man gets what they consider his just desserts, at a woman's hand. Their only action, once the murderess has fled and the hue and cry is starting up, is to bolt the door long enough to burn every scrap of blackmail material Milverton had on anyone. Which almost leads to their getting caught, and to Lestrade and the police looking for two men for the murder the next day, one of them fitting Watson's description. But Holmes considers the protection of people's good names from societal reprisal worth the risk.
Again, the canon decides to show Holmes that, just as not all women are the silly creatures he thought they were before Irene, so also they're not the gentle, fragile things he thought they were before Milverton. That they are capable of vicious, premeditated violence when provoked. (The Problem of Thor Bridge, later on, continues this, with a woman who had not nearly so sympathetic a reason). In this case, he comes down wholly on her side, even keeping Watson from interfering and later refusing to help Lestrade bring her to justice, because he believes that 'some crimes to an extent justify personal vengeance'. Also, because he thought Milverton was a scumbag who deserved what he got.
Women in the ACD canon were not the hapless femmes fatale of a lot of the adaptations, who end up needing men to help them out of the messes they've made. In the ACD canon women, like men, were perfectly capable of violently solving problems for themselves while ... well, while the male leads hid behind the curtains. Whatever you think of the rightness of their actions, they were at least not denied the capability of making them, wholly independant of and without the help of the leads.
And whatever said leads thought of the matter, the canon every so often would go out of its way to prove them wrong.
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange:
Again, this story is one I keep coming back to, one of the must-reads of the ACD canon for a great many things. For this essay, the main reason is that it sort of combines the threads from the previous stories, particularly Scandal, Yellow Face and Milverton.
There are three sets of criminals in this story.
The first and most obvious are the gang blamed for attacking the house, murdering the husband, and assaulting the lady. Though they are actually criminals, Holmes clears them of involvement in this particular case, at least in his own head, in short order. And they're shortly alibied by being arrested in New York not a few days later.
The second is the murdered man himself, who is revealed by the police, the maid and the injuries on the Lady's arm to have been badly abusive towards her (among other things, he stuck pins in her arm, threw glass bottles at her and her maid, and set her dog on fire). By the end of the story, it turns out that he had interrupted her and the man she loved (but had never slept with or ever done anything inappropriate with) having a conversation, which had mostly consisted of the man trying to determine if she was safe with her husband, and had responded by belting her so violently across the face that he'd almost killed her, and her lover had killed him in the ensuing fight in defense of himself and her.
And then, ultimately, we have the trio of the wife, her lover, and her maid. Who, having killed the man in self-defense, arranged to frame a violent gang for the crime, disguise the evidence, and steer blame for the incident away from themselves. The man they send back to his ship, so that he won't be anywhere near the case when things go down.
And that's interesting for a few reasons. In the first, although it was the Captain who actually struck the man down, it's the maid who immediately starts setting up damage control and plots to keep the other two safe. And it's the Captain they send away to safety while the two women move to face the music and see the pretense through. Again, following the line from Scandal and Milverton, it's the women of the story who move to sort the problem out for themselves and for their loved ones, and they're willing to take on Holmes and the police to manage it.
It doesn't work, of course. And in the end, since it was the Captain who killed the man, it's the Captain Holmes goes after (though he makes sure it's only himself, not the police, because already he's mostly decided that, like Milverton, the murdered man basically deserved what he'd got). And it's the fact that it was in defense of a woman that helps Holmes along to this conclusion, though he also appreciates the Captain's honour and honesty, and did test him to make sure he wasn't just trying to get the Lady for himself by killing her husband.
But the threads are carried through. The story, by its result and through Holmes' judgement, says that a man who is abusive towards his wife doesn't deserve to keep her, whatever society might think (a woman could file for divorce on the grounds of cruelty from 1878 up, in an amendment to the Matrimonial Causes Act, and in 1884 they were legally recognised as not chattel of the husband by the Married Women's Property Act, but it was slow going). Again, like Scandal and Yellow Face, the story supports a woman's right to choose who she loves (though not really an affair in the sexual sense, it still allows that she loved a man outside her marriage, and was proven right in that love by the end of the story). Like Milverton, the story shows a pair of women arranging their own safety and a degree of vengeance, and they're not punished for it in any way. It shows two women facing Holmes in defense of a man (and he did lean on Lady Brackenstall for an answer), and though they're not successful, it's still mostly shown as quid pro quo for what the Captain was willing to do for them in turn. It shows a woman acting in defense of another woman, and being able to stare Holmes down on the issue.
It does, in the end, show a series of persistent threads throughout the ACD canon that quietly support women's rights to act and make choices, both in life and in the narrative, and have the narrative itself back them up on it. Even, if necessary, to the cost of the main (male) leads.
And, if I'm perfectly honest, there are times when I think the ACD canon does that consistently better than many of the adaptations, despite the pervasive late Victorian ideals it has to work through. I loathed what was done to Irene Adler in BBC Sherlock, taking away her capability and her right to choose who she loved in order to make sure the main male lead was a) always right, and b) so awesome that even gay women who in the original canon gave not one shit about him will fall in love with him. What happened to her in the Downey version wasn't much better, again making her a love interest, again sacrificing her capability for it, and in the end actually killing her because of it. (Why, for the love of god, is it so hard to leave Irene alone and not-a-love-interest? Seriously!) And many of the surrounding women in the adaptations also suffer.
Though I will admit Mary Morstan/Watson was quite wonderfully handled in the first Downey movie (she had grace and power and could catch Holmes in disguise and was so confident in John's love for her that she could treat Holmes from a position of power in the relationship, and do so gently), and not that badly in the second (yes, she was gotten rid of quite quickly, but like Violet Hunter from the ACD canon, she showed calm and aplomb in dealing with an assault first, and got a touch of revenge on Moriarty at the end). She was actually a wonderful surprise in that adaptation, when to be perfectly honest I'm getting used to women being treated like shit in Holmes adaptations.
But. In general, I sometimes get the impression that the original ACD canon is more friendly to women (and other races), to their rights and choices and the option to have the narrative follow through on them, than many of the modern adaptations.
Which, when the canon in question was written in the 19th fucking century, does not say good things about trends in modern adaptations, does it? *grumbles savagely*
Anyway. Yes. I'm shutting up now. And, again, sorry for the spam of Holmes meta of late, yes?
Um. First things first, though. The canon was written in the 19th century by a male doctor. There are ... several significant and continuous problems in the text. In particular, the whole 'woman are precious innocents who must be protected' thing wears on me, and there are several baseline assumptions on what roles people in society should have that are problematic to a modern audience. The whole 'must always save the girl' part of both Holmes' and Watson's makeup is very wearying after a while.
However. Reading back through it, there are several stories where Conan Doyle makes quiet little decisions about characterisation and narrative that are ... honestly, nearly better than a lot of the modern stories I've seen. I'm just ... Bear with me for a bit, yes?
I'm going to take these in chronological order, because it's possibly more enlightening than just taking them individually. The stories I want to focus on are Scandal in Bohemia, The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, The Adventure of the Yellow Face, The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton (AKA Master Blackmailer), and The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.
(Yes, these particular stories have come up a lot for me, but really they're very illustrative. If I was picking a list of must-reads from canon, I think they would definitely be on it, since you've got Holmes & People, Holmes & Morality/Legality, Holmes & Gender, Holmes & Race ... They hit most of the notes, actually).
[Note: for this essay, I'm not putting the links to the stories at the bottom, but up in the main text. Some of them really need to be read for context before we get to my possibly questionable interpretation, yes?]
A Scandal in Bohemia:
Right. We'll start out with the meaty one. And the story order for this one is actually quite important. Scandal is actually the first of the short stories written, with only the two novels Study in Scarlet and Sign of Four preceding it. Which, when you see the way the story goes and the shapes the stories that follow it take, is quite an important decision, I think.
So. Irene Adler. Everyone's favourite love interest for Holmes in adaptations, the criminal he admires that he can safely also lust after, since she's female and not too morally repugnant. Throw in a century or so of femme fatale narratives and the whole Batman/Catwoman thing, and it seems a solid recipe, yes?
It also has exactly nothing to do with the original canon or the original Irene. I really think this cannot be stated enough. Though ACD Irene does have the distinction of being the only woman Holmes really took notice of (though Watson nurses some hope for his friend and Violet Hunter in Copper Beeches, only to be disappointed), and Holmes does keep her photograph as a reward from the King, his excitement was at her skill more than anything, and that aside, she had no interest in him at all. Holmes was never anything more than a potential threat to her, something to be dealt with to live safely, not a man she had any interest in. The entirety of her desire in the original story was to be married to the man she truly loved (Godfrey Norton), and free of the shadows of her previous relationships.
ACD Irene was, in essence, a woman of, ah, adventurous lifestyle (she was an actress, she regularly crossdressed just for the freedom it gave her, she had a number of relationships including one with an heir to a European throne, she kept documentation of those relationships as insurance against reprisals), who was apparently desired by everyone who met her, and who came into canon for one brief moment when someone hired Holmes to hunt her down, and she took steps to stay ahead of that so well that she beat Holmes at his own game.
However, that's not what I want to focus on. What I want to look at is what the story says about women, the choices they are allowed to make, and the roles they are allowed to play. And, also, what impact women are allowed to have on lead male characters.
In this story, Irene has had previous relationships with men of power. This has put her in a dangerous position. But she is not, in the story, punished for it. At the end of the story, Irene is married to the man she truly loves, and made clean her escape from reprisals. She is also not really decried for it, though the King's diatribe against her at the start is fairly damning (and not necessarily inaccurate - Irene was blackmailing the King. Mostly to hold him off long enough for her own marriage to come through, but still). She is described as resolute and honourable even by the King himself, who happily takes her word as inviolate despite everything she's done, and at the end is nearly more enamoured with her for her daring in defying him than he was before. At the end, he thinks she would have made a fabulous queen, had she only been on a level with him, and is rather snippily put down by Holmes for the musing ("From what I have seen of the lady, she seems, indeed, to be on a very different level to your majesty," said Holmes, coldly), though admittedly it rather goes over the King's head.
That was how she had affected the King. As for how she affected Holmes, Watson had the following to say: "[...] the best plans of Mr Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late."
If we judge a narrative by what the characters are allowed to do, how the text reacts to those actions, and how they get their come-uppance at the end ... Scandal in Bohemia makes some interesting statements.
A woman is allowed to have had previous relationships before finding true love without textually being considered any less for it. A woman is allowed to choose for herself who she loves, no matter the relative stations of the suitors in question. A woman may refuse the advances of the most powerful men in her narrative, and by her own wit and capability justify that refusal.
A woman may inhabit the narrative in direct opposition to the main character, and neither lose to him nor soften towards him for reasons of her femininity. A woman may inhabit the same narrative as the male lead and genuinely consider him nothing more than a stumbling block in her own plans, and then be proven right. A woman may inhabit the same narrative as the male lead, have interests and goals that have absolutely nothing to do with him, and win through on those goals despite his interference.
A woman may be respected by the male leads for doing all of the above. She may have an impact on him, and possibly more of one than he had on her, since according to Watson, Irene Adler permanently changed Holmes' views of her entire gender, whereas we never see any evidence that she ever so much as thought of him again.
And the text thereafter actually does bear that out. Scandal was the third Holmes story ever published. Which means that, as soon as he had his detective set up and established, Conan Doyle set up a character to knock him out of his complacency, to teach him that he may be wrong, he may lose, he may consistently underestimate whole sections of the population and have the text prove him wrong for it.
A lot of the themes from Scandal are actually borne through the rest of the stories: that women may have more than one relationship or desire for relationships without being made to suffer for it (Milverton and Yellow Face show this, I'll get to them), that woman are perfectly capable of sorting out their own problems if they need to (Milverton), that a woman may be in the right and the main lead wrong (Yellow Face), that women are perfectly capable of deciding on their own goals and working towards them (Copper Beeches), that society shouldn't really have too much of a say in characters finding happiness (this isn't women specifically - it's a thread that runs through Holmes' interactions with society itself - he consistently chooses the safety and happiness of the individual over societal/legal concerns in the matter).
Essentially, in the third story of his series, Conan Doyle set out to prove that his main character could be wrong, that said character was better for it and for learning from it, and he did that by having a woman come in and knock the man on his arse while on her way to somewhere and someone else entirely. And then backed that choice up in the rest of the stories, continued the theme and the lesson throughout. All the myriad problems with the ACD canon and women acknowledged, I'm still rather happy about that.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches:
Copper Beeches is an interesting story on the heels of Scandal. It can, for example, be taken as a mild confirmation of the idea that Holmes was attracted to Irene, since the qualities he admires in Violet Hunter (and the ones that make Watson hopeful his friend might find a mate) are many of the same ones he admired in Irene: confidence, quiet capability, the forthright pursuit of her own goals, a degree of self-sufficiency. However, Holmes never really shows any more permanent interest in Violet than he does in, well, much of anyone really, so perhaps not so much.
I'm picking Copper Beeches because of what Violet Hunter came to Holmes to ask, and how he reacted. Violet was a woman with no family or parents or external support network. She had been out of work for a while, and was close to broke before the offer of a job came in. The job was very, very well-paid, but the employer and his requests ... well, to be honest, were more than a little creepy and suspicious. Despite that, since the job was extremely well paid and she was rapidly approaching destitute, she'd determined that she had to take it.
She starts out asking Holmes' advice on whether or not to take the job, presumably in an effort to make him hear it through first. She finishes, though, by saying that she has made up her mind to take the job, but wanted to run it past someone with knowledge (and, I think, a suspicious mind) first. When Holmes says that the fact that she's made up her mind surely settled the matter already, she reiterates that she genuinely does want his opinion and his suspicions.
And when he agrees that he finds the whole thing creepy and possibly dangerous, what she says is: "I thought that if I told you of the circumstances you would understand afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so much stronger if I felt you were at the back of me."
Essentially, she was a woman with no means and no support, who had been offered a position she couldn't really afford to refuse, who basically wanted back-up if it went as wrongly as she suspected it was going to. She had already decided on her course of action, because it was the only one she felt was open to her. She manipulated him a little bit at first, playing up her need for his advice and making it sound like he had a say (which says something about what kind of man she expected him to be initially). Holmes, once he realises this, doesn't react with offense but with a smile and a question as to why she was asking him if she'd already made up her mind.
And when she comes down to the bottom line, that she feels she's going into danger and wants someone to know where she's gone and why, someone who can back her up ... Holmes says she has it. She has only to telegram him, day or night, and he'll come to help her.
Now. What all of this looks like on the surface is your standard 'helpless woman needs a man to protect her' story. Except ... well, not really.
The narrative doesn't describe or treat Violet as a foolish woman who wandered into danger against the advice of a man and had to be rescued for it. It portrays her as a sensible, savvy woman who saw in advance the potential dangers of the position, but because of her circumstances and her need to do something about them, felt she had to accept it anyway. And then, being a basically sensible person, she went and got backup and someone to know where the hell she was, instead of just blindly following the flash of money and landing herself in a dangerous situation with no way out. A woman willing to manipulate the interview a little to manage the hurdles she expected Holmes to put in front of her - she basically expected that he wouldn't have a thing to do with her unless he thought he would have a say in her decisions, and she was willing and able to verbally work her way around that.
And Holmes, for his part, both listens all the way through, doesn't flip out when he realises that she's been leading him somewhat, agrees with her concerns, and willingly agrees to help her should she need it.
And by the end of the story, despite having been lied to and violently threatened over the course of the story (her employer threatened to throw her to his starving dog if she ever went near the locked areas again), she manages to have amassed enough information on the situation to call Holmes in and have him do something about it. 'It' turning out to be the imprisonment of her employer's daughter to force her to surrender her money whether she married or not. She basically stays clear-headed, suspicious and observant the whole way through, allowing for her rather understandable moments of blind terror, supports Holmes and Watson through their actions to the finish, and at the end of the story goes off to run a private school in Walsall and have every success.
Yes, she's essentially the prototype of the female amateur sleuth, and yes, there are moments when Holmes is rather patronising towards her, but essentially Violet Hunter again proves that in the Holmes canon, female characters could be clever, capable and self-sufficient on their own merits. They could get in trouble and need help without being put down for it. They could stand up under pressure and take action to redress situations. They could mildly manipulate the main characters in pursuit of their own needs, and the necessity of the action will be cheerfully acknowledged. They can go on to have success on their own merits.
And they can do all that without ever being the love interest. Because despite Watson's hopes on the matter, him being something of a soppy romantic, neither Violet nor Holmes himself ever show signs of considering each other any more than allies and business acquaintances, and both go cheerfully their own way at the end of it.
The Adventure of the Yellow Face:
This story is one of the most quietly subversive in the original canon, I think. Gender and race, in this one. And the protagonist, again, being allowed to be wrong. I think it's a thing that tends to get brushed aside in a lot of Holmes adaptations, that the character wasn't perfect, didn't think of himself as perfect, had canon, on-screen failures, and generally reacted to them by trying to learn from them. Yellow Face is the story where Watson takes time to note at the start that Holmes is sometimes wrong, and if he doesn't tend to focus on those cases, it's often because cases where Holmes is wrong are also cases where no-one finds the answer where he can't. There are, however, definite cases where Holmes was just plain wrong, and he does document a few.
I think that, like Scandal and the deliberate order it was written in, this shows that Conan Doyle was aware of the temptation to make Holmes all-powerful and all-seeing, and deliberately checked himself every so often with cases where Holmes failed, or was upstaged, or misread the situation, or was just plain stupid (Devil's Foot, so much). They actually show up every so often: Scandal and Five Pips early on, then Yellow Face and Musgrave Ritual in the middle section, Wisteria Lodge and Devil's Foot in the later stories. In the ACD canon, Holmes just generally doesn't ever go for too long without eventually tripping himself up, and the canon is perfectly fine with that.
In Yellow Face, his main problem is that he tends to err on the side of pessimism, and generally tends to expect the worst of people. You actually see that all through the stories, how he is deeply suspicious of people's actions when left unchecked, and how he will often suspect the worst possible motives for people. This is an area where generally Watson balances him, both showing and believing in the finer motivations, and providing a counterpoint for Holmes to turn on.
The case itself initially reads more or less like your standard 'private investigator asked to confirm that his client's wife is having an affair'. However, the client himself, Munro, is adamant that his wife loves him, and from his description of their life, they seem to have been happy together. His wife had been previously married to a lawyer in America, but he and their child had supposedly died, leaving her to come to England. She had signed over her not-insignificant money to her new husband on marriage, at her insistence more than his (he was afraid holding it jointly would mean they lost it all if his business went bad), and with the proviso that should she ever need some, he should give it to her immediately. They apparently happily abided by this for three years.
And then, the wife asked for 100 pounds, no questions asked. And shortly afterwards, began to act suspiciously, keeping her distance from him and acting strangely around him. Someone has moved into the cottage next to theirs, someone unnatural, with a rigid and chalky-white face. And then he finds his wife getting dressed and leaving in the night, lying to him when she gets back. At this point, he starts thinking the worst. Shortly afterwards, he finds out it's the new neighbour she's been sneaking out to see. She begs him not to challenge the neighbour, that she has a secret there and their life together depends on it, and he agrees provided she doesn't go back, which she promises not to. Shortly afterwards, he finds she broke her promise, and he leaves, coming down to consult Holmes.
And Holmes? Oddly enough, his first thought isn't 'wife having affair', it's 'wife is being blackmailed by the new neighbour', followed by 'the neighbour is obviously the first husband, supposedly dead, whom she fled when he contracted some horrible disease'.
Ah. Victorian era, yes? Also, Holmes really does tend to think the worst of people.
But what they find, when they come with Munro to investigate and force their way into the cottage despite his wife's pleas, is not her supposedly deceased first husband, but her supposedly deceased child by said husband. A very, very coloured child.
Her first husband, as she angrily explains, was John Hebron of Atlanta, a man who was, as Watson puts it, 'strikingly handsome and intelligent-looking, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent'. As she describes it, she 'cut herself off from her race' to be with him, to marry him and have his daughter, who took after her father. A daughter she loved very much. When he died and she left America, the only reason she left the child behind was because Lucy was ill and couldn't make the trip. When she met Munro, she was afraid to tell him about the child, or bring the child to England, for fear she'd lose him because of it. But eventually, she had to have her daughter with her, and tried to disguise her (hence the mask, the 'rigid and chalky-white face') and hide her, trying to keep her husband away. And how that her child has been revealed, she believes she will lose him now.
And the three men, Holmes, Watson and Munro? How do they react? Well, Holmes and Watson had reacted to the child with immediate delight and relief, because it was a much, much better circumstance than the one they'd feared. Holmes is delighted to be wrong, and asks to be reminded of it should he start getting on his high horse in future.
And Munro? After a moment of shock and horror ... he walks forward, picks up the kid, kisses her, and says to his wife: "We can talk it over more comfortably at home. I'm not a very good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one than you have given me credit for being."
Again, the threads from Scandal are carried forward: a woman may have previous relationships, and not be ashamed of them. A person may choose who to love, and society be damned for what it thinks of them for it. A white woman may love a black man, and have it be considered good (there was a degree of support for families of white men and coloured wives at the time, but support for the other way around was somewhat rarer). And from what Munro said, that even a not-very-good man should be good enough to welcome his wife's child, regardless of her race or her origins in a previous relationship, the story also appears to support step- and mixed families.
Basically? Holmes canon quietly came out in support of mixed-race marriages, a woman's right to choose who she loved, and families of non-traditional structure. In the 1890s.
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton:
This one is ... a less happy thread, really, and one that will be complicated depending on how you view personal vengeance. But it needs mentioning.
The initial sections of Milverton serve to showcase a lot of the more troubling aspects of the ACD canon's approach to gender. Holmes is massively, patriarchally protective of women, sees them as sweet and beautiful creatures that need to be shielded. Watson too (though you caught a glimpse of that in Scandal, as well, when Irene's beauty momentarily damages his determination to act against her, and only his loyalty to Holmes spurs him on). It also shows Holmes pretending to be in a relationship with Milverton's maid to get information and immediately dropping her like a hot rock afterwards, which Watson finds shocking (and Holmes partially excuses by saying he made sure he had a rival for her affections first, so she would have someone to fall back on - not the best reasoning in the world, honey).
However, at the same time this story also, by the crescendo, has served to prove to them both that a woman who is pushed hard enough is more than capable of violently dealing with problems herself.
The blackmailer in this story makes his business essentially by playing on Victorian high society's view on what things are acceptable in a woman's past should she want to marry. Previous relationships, even of innocent sorts taking place in letters, are a massive no-no. A woman may be ruined for them. (He also made a living blackmailing men, presumably for other matters, but most of what Holmes focuses on is the women). Holmes, who has never had too much attachment to what society thinks in the first place, is ... violently enraged by this. I'm not kidding, he loses his temper to the degree that Milverton wins the initial encounter, and actually has himself and Watson almost assault the man. He then follows up by burgling the man's house.
And while there, when he and Watson are essentially hiding behind the curtains in Milverton's office, waiting for the man to move so they can get to work, they witness Milverton's business violently catching up to him, in the form of a woman whose life he had ruined and whose husband he'd driven to suicide. A woman who, with extraordinary on-screen violence compared to many of the stories, shoots Milverton multiple times in the chest, watches him claw around on the floor, shoots him again when he gets back up, and finally grinds her heel into his face to make sure he's really dead. Make no mistake, the scene is portrayed with every possible violence.
And Holmes and Watson, during the course of it, are busy hiding behind the curtains. Watson does make a move to intervene, but Holmes grabs his wrist and silently tells him not to. They simply watch as the man gets what they consider his just desserts, at a woman's hand. Their only action, once the murderess has fled and the hue and cry is starting up, is to bolt the door long enough to burn every scrap of blackmail material Milverton had on anyone. Which almost leads to their getting caught, and to Lestrade and the police looking for two men for the murder the next day, one of them fitting Watson's description. But Holmes considers the protection of people's good names from societal reprisal worth the risk.
Again, the canon decides to show Holmes that, just as not all women are the silly creatures he thought they were before Irene, so also they're not the gentle, fragile things he thought they were before Milverton. That they are capable of vicious, premeditated violence when provoked. (The Problem of Thor Bridge, later on, continues this, with a woman who had not nearly so sympathetic a reason). In this case, he comes down wholly on her side, even keeping Watson from interfering and later refusing to help Lestrade bring her to justice, because he believes that 'some crimes to an extent justify personal vengeance'. Also, because he thought Milverton was a scumbag who deserved what he got.
Women in the ACD canon were not the hapless femmes fatale of a lot of the adaptations, who end up needing men to help them out of the messes they've made. In the ACD canon women, like men, were perfectly capable of violently solving problems for themselves while ... well, while the male leads hid behind the curtains. Whatever you think of the rightness of their actions, they were at least not denied the capability of making them, wholly independant of and without the help of the leads.
And whatever said leads thought of the matter, the canon every so often would go out of its way to prove them wrong.
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange:
Again, this story is one I keep coming back to, one of the must-reads of the ACD canon for a great many things. For this essay, the main reason is that it sort of combines the threads from the previous stories, particularly Scandal, Yellow Face and Milverton.
There are three sets of criminals in this story.
The first and most obvious are the gang blamed for attacking the house, murdering the husband, and assaulting the lady. Though they are actually criminals, Holmes clears them of involvement in this particular case, at least in his own head, in short order. And they're shortly alibied by being arrested in New York not a few days later.
The second is the murdered man himself, who is revealed by the police, the maid and the injuries on the Lady's arm to have been badly abusive towards her (among other things, he stuck pins in her arm, threw glass bottles at her and her maid, and set her dog on fire). By the end of the story, it turns out that he had interrupted her and the man she loved (but had never slept with or ever done anything inappropriate with) having a conversation, which had mostly consisted of the man trying to determine if she was safe with her husband, and had responded by belting her so violently across the face that he'd almost killed her, and her lover had killed him in the ensuing fight in defense of himself and her.
And then, ultimately, we have the trio of the wife, her lover, and her maid. Who, having killed the man in self-defense, arranged to frame a violent gang for the crime, disguise the evidence, and steer blame for the incident away from themselves. The man they send back to his ship, so that he won't be anywhere near the case when things go down.
And that's interesting for a few reasons. In the first, although it was the Captain who actually struck the man down, it's the maid who immediately starts setting up damage control and plots to keep the other two safe. And it's the Captain they send away to safety while the two women move to face the music and see the pretense through. Again, following the line from Scandal and Milverton, it's the women of the story who move to sort the problem out for themselves and for their loved ones, and they're willing to take on Holmes and the police to manage it.
It doesn't work, of course. And in the end, since it was the Captain who killed the man, it's the Captain Holmes goes after (though he makes sure it's only himself, not the police, because already he's mostly decided that, like Milverton, the murdered man basically deserved what he'd got). And it's the fact that it was in defense of a woman that helps Holmes along to this conclusion, though he also appreciates the Captain's honour and honesty, and did test him to make sure he wasn't just trying to get the Lady for himself by killing her husband.
But the threads are carried through. The story, by its result and through Holmes' judgement, says that a man who is abusive towards his wife doesn't deserve to keep her, whatever society might think (a woman could file for divorce on the grounds of cruelty from 1878 up, in an amendment to the Matrimonial Causes Act, and in 1884 they were legally recognised as not chattel of the husband by the Married Women's Property Act, but it was slow going). Again, like Scandal and Yellow Face, the story supports a woman's right to choose who she loves (though not really an affair in the sexual sense, it still allows that she loved a man outside her marriage, and was proven right in that love by the end of the story). Like Milverton, the story shows a pair of women arranging their own safety and a degree of vengeance, and they're not punished for it in any way. It shows two women facing Holmes in defense of a man (and he did lean on Lady Brackenstall for an answer), and though they're not successful, it's still mostly shown as quid pro quo for what the Captain was willing to do for them in turn. It shows a woman acting in defense of another woman, and being able to stare Holmes down on the issue.
It does, in the end, show a series of persistent threads throughout the ACD canon that quietly support women's rights to act and make choices, both in life and in the narrative, and have the narrative itself back them up on it. Even, if necessary, to the cost of the main (male) leads.
And, if I'm perfectly honest, there are times when I think the ACD canon does that consistently better than many of the adaptations, despite the pervasive late Victorian ideals it has to work through. I loathed what was done to Irene Adler in BBC Sherlock, taking away her capability and her right to choose who she loved in order to make sure the main male lead was a) always right, and b) so awesome that even gay women who in the original canon gave not one shit about him will fall in love with him. What happened to her in the Downey version wasn't much better, again making her a love interest, again sacrificing her capability for it, and in the end actually killing her because of it. (Why, for the love of god, is it so hard to leave Irene alone and not-a-love-interest? Seriously!) And many of the surrounding women in the adaptations also suffer.
Though I will admit Mary Morstan/Watson was quite wonderfully handled in the first Downey movie (she had grace and power and could catch Holmes in disguise and was so confident in John's love for her that she could treat Holmes from a position of power in the relationship, and do so gently), and not that badly in the second (yes, she was gotten rid of quite quickly, but like Violet Hunter from the ACD canon, she showed calm and aplomb in dealing with an assault first, and got a touch of revenge on Moriarty at the end). She was actually a wonderful surprise in that adaptation, when to be perfectly honest I'm getting used to women being treated like shit in Holmes adaptations.
But. In general, I sometimes get the impression that the original ACD canon is more friendly to women (and other races), to their rights and choices and the option to have the narrative follow through on them, than many of the modern adaptations.
Which, when the canon in question was written in the 19th fucking century, does not say good things about trends in modern adaptations, does it? *grumbles savagely*
Anyway. Yes. I'm shutting up now. And, again, sorry for the spam of Holmes meta of late, yes?
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