I came upon a book title, “In Bed With Sherlock Holmes, Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stories of The Great Detective,” by Christopher Redmond. Has anyone read this? Is it worth reading?
I’ve never heard of it and it doesn’t sound promising. Trying to dredge up sexual innuenedo in Holmes is like trying to see a homosexual element in Batman and Robin (I speak of the comics, not the movies, which were SO gay). It’s obvious that innuendo isn’t what the author intended, so any analysis along these lines is the equivalent of looking for faces in clouds.
You might try NAKED IS THE BEST DISGUISE by (ummm…? Rosenberg?) for a fascinating analysis of Doyle’s recurring sexual and murderous themes…
It’s obvious that innuendo isn’t what the author intended, so any analysis along these lines is the equivalent of looking for faces in clouds.
You’re falling prey to intentional fallacy, Bryan. Just cos the author didn’t intend it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
For eg: The Case of the Speckled Band (I think that’s what it’s called). Nasty brutish man who lives with his innocent stepdaughters tries to do away with them by inserting a poisonous snake into a hole in their bedroom wall. Incest between the man and his daughters is implied by the fact that his bedroom is very near theirs, he brutalises them and he has some kind of power over them. (I haven’t explained this very well - see John Sutherland’s ‘Will Jane Eyre be Happy?’ for more info.) Anyway, the point is, that the snake can easily be construed as a phallic symbol, and that it aids understanding of the story to think so.
Thanks for input, everyone. And I’ll check out that other book, C K Dexter Haven.
By the same token, bifar, just because you can see it, doesn’t mean it really is there. I refer you to the discussion on racism in Attack of the Clones, where at least one woman of Latino descent is upset at the portrayal of Latinos vis-a-vis Jango Fett, when the actor who plays that part is actually Maori.
I don’t pretend to know the layout of the average English mansion-that’s-falling-into-decay, but having bedrooms all in the same wing makes decent sense to me. By the same token, the doctor in the story could have simply been beating his daughters, rather than engaging in incestual relationships with them. Occam’s Razor comes into play here. Finally, I don’t see the snake as a phallic symbol – the doctor used it as a way to poison his daughters without being traced. Holmes makes mention of the fact that no English doctor would think to look for that type of snake venom in the victim’s body. I don’t see how viewing the snake as a phallic symbol “aids understanding” of the story. The doctor is killing his daughters to keep their money. Not a whole lot of sexual undertone there.
Now, there are definite flaws in the story; it’s obvious Doyle knew jack-squat about snakes. Not a real knock on him, though; I doubt many people in 1890s London knew much about poisonous snakes, nor do I think there was a whole lot of research on the topic.
Note: Minor spoilers follow, for those who haven’t yet read this story.
Doyle had the doctor feed the snake (which I think was identified as a “death-adder”, or maybe a “swamp-adder”) milk, when a poisonous snake would have needed meat (such as a rat); he wrote that the doctor “called” the snake by means of a whistle, which the snake would have been incapable of hearing; he has the snake kill the doctor almost instantaneously with a bite, which is so far beyond the realm of possibility as to be ludicrous; and the fact that the doctor would think that a snake would bite a sleeping person is just silly.
However, there are definite overt sexual tones in several of the Holmes stories. Watson ejaculates all over the place at the most inopportune times.
Doyle had the doctor feed the snake (which I think was identified as a “death-adder”, or maybe a “swamp-adder”) milk, when a poisonous snake would have needed meat (such as a rat); he wrote that the doctor “called” the snake by means of a whistle, which the snake would have been incapable of hearing; he has the snake kill the doctor almost instantaneously with a bite, which is so far beyond the realm of possibility as to be ludicrous; and the fact that the doctor would think that a snake would bite a sleeping person is just silly.
That’s why I think it’s a phallic symbol – it behaves more like a penis than a snake.
But yeah, I see what you mean. After doing loads of Freud for a year I was seeing willies everywhere. It was a lot of fun, I can tell you.
But it doesn’t matter where you start from, it’s where you end up. Considering the snake as a big willie, or as Holmes/Watson’s relationship as homosocial, or whatever, sometimes leads you to interesting conclusions.
Your penis comes when you whistle? Man, don’t ever watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.
And you were trying to convince us that there wasn’t an ugly sexual subtext to the story? :eek:
No Wendell Wagner in this thread yet? Surely the dog will bark, ere we interpret him differently.
Samuel Rosenberg, Naked Is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes. [Amazon lists this as The Death and Revolution of Sherlock Holmes, which I take to mean that he is spinning in his grave from what’s been done to him after his death, but I digress…]
One of the first attempts to do serious literary analysis of the Holmes saga, as opposed to the “higher criticism” of the Holmesians.
From the back cover: “Samuel Rosenberg proves that Professor Moriarty is really Friedrich Nietzsche, that Thaddeus Sholto in The Sign of Four is really Oscar Wilde, and that Holmes himself is Sir Arthur’s superego, forever at war with repressed sexuality and unmentionable perversions.”
Both it and the Redmond book are out of print.
My personal preferences are for the lighter end of Holmesian scholarship, so I can’t really recommend it, but it’s worth reading – if you can make your way through it without throwing it at the wall – for the totally different perspective you get on the stories.
William S. Baring-Gould, who edited The Annotated Sherlock Holmes was also a fan of Nero Wolfe, and concocted a backstory that made Wolfe Holmes’s illegitimate son. I believe this is included in most editions of TASH.
hawthorne writes:
> No Wendell Wagner in this thread yet? Surely the dog will bark,
> ere we interpret him differently.
I just collect Sherlock Holmes pastiches. You can psychoanalyze the character if you want to, but I’m not interested in that.
Baring-Gould was besotted with this dotty theory (which was first propounded by Dr. John D. Clark in 1956) and beat it to death over many books. Irene Adler was supposedly Wolfe’s mother; the conception took place in 1892 in Montenegro during Holmes’ hiatus after his supposed death.
There’s a whole chapter detailing the “similarities” in his Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, his “biography” of Nero Wolfe, a semi-sequel to his Holmes bio, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.
My favorite bit of “proof”: “…surely it is no coincidence that the Christian name ‘Nero’ contains the er-o of Sherlock, and the surname ‘Wolfe’ the ol-e of Holmes.”
Come on Exapno: it isn’t just the er-o/ol-e but that it’s in the exact same order in both names. Isn’t it obvious now?
As for Holmes and Watson, Rex Stout famously opined that “Watson Was a Woman” at a Baker Street Irregulars meeting, so a homosexual relationship would have been impossible, as Holmes and Watson had a heterosexual one. Stout used the stories to “prove” it. I’ve never seen it, but it must have been hilarious–it caused a huge stir at the meeting that year.
Well, it all fits together. What Stout proved was not just that Watson was a woman, but that the woman was Irene Adler! And suggests that Lord Peter Wimsey might be their son! That Holmes, he sure was busy in between cases for a speedball freak.
“Watson Was a Women” is a bit hard to find these days, but it was reprinted in many classic collections that should be available used or at a library. They include:
The Pocket Mystery Reader, ed. by Lee Wright
Profile by Gaslight, ed. by Edgar Smith
The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. by Howard Haycraft
The Saturday Review Gallery, ed. by Jerome Beatty Jr.
Well, in the story’s defense,
Holmes did note that due to the sleeping victim, the snake might not bite immediately, but that the doctor would put the snake through again and again until she turned over in her sleep or did SOMETHING to startle the snake into biting. Now, it may still be farfetched, but it was addressed.
(God, I love that tag.)
Those black blocks are bizarre! :eek:
Granted, Leaper, but then …
we get back into the whole “calling the snake back with a whistle” deal. Assuming the doctor was lucky enough to get the snake to crawl through the ventilator in the first place, the most likely scenario is that the snake would curl up someplace and go to sleep in the room.
I think you are asking a bit too much in expecting “The Speckled Band” to contain accurate herptelogical information. It’s not the best Holmes story by any stretch – The Peyote Coyote would vote for “Silver Blaze” or “The Hound of the Baskervilles” or the one where the Duke of Holdernesse’s son gets kidnapped – but it does have its moments.
I like the confrontation between Holmes and Dr. Royce Grimsby. And, admit it, Sauron and bifar, don’t you feel twinges of suspense at the thought of two characters waiting in darkness for hours, armed with weapons, waiting for God knows what to happen?
Oh, I’m not faulting the story. As I mentioned before, I seriously doubt there was a wealth of information regarding tropical poisonous snakes in 1890s England. It’s a good plot device if you don’t know anything about snakes. If you know a bit, it looks foolish.
If you like the confrontation between Holmes and the doctor in “The Speckled Band,” check out Holmes meeting Steve Dixie. The name of the story escapes me now, but I think it has “Gables” in the title. (I want to say “The Adventure of the Three Gables,” but I may be mixing it up with “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs.”) The confrontation seems very racist to modern ears, but it still tickles me.