Sherlock Holmes adapters thes days seem familiar with only a few of the dozens of stories Doyle (or if you prefer, Watson) told of Holmes: they know The Final Problem and they know A Scandal in Bohemia, and thus give us countless mentions of Moriarty and Adler. But it’s not so much of a stretch to portray Moriarty as a modern supervillian - he was (per the story) a dangerous criminal operating a large organization. But Irene Adler was simply a beautiful opera singer who had a relationship with a royal and held onto a photo as a precaution. Once she was safe, she caused no one any trouble, in spite of the fact that her ex-lover sent several agents to break into her home to steal from her. But in a modern adaptation, she is often portrayed as a con-artist/prostitute with a twisted relationship with Holmes, thus managing to treat the character in a more sexist way than she was written 150 years ago. What’s (as Seinfeld might ask) the deal with that?
Did this cross your mind because she was in the next-to-latest episode of Holmes (1x08, March 30th) or is it coincidence?
Episode summary from Wikipedia:
Summary
Irene Adler (Whoopie Van Raam) seeks out the Holmes Clinic to treat her son Angus (Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez), claiming that he is Sherlock’s biological child. Watson divides the team into two groups: Sasha and Adam are tasked with diagnosing Angus while Stephens and Ingrid must determine whether Irene is trying to deceive them. Despite being warned by a mistrustful Shinwell, Watson finds himself growing close to Angus after noticing how the boy’s wit and insights match those of Sherlock. He suspects that Angus may be suffering from a genetic flaw that is hereditary to male members of the Holmes family. To prove this, he has Shinwell meet with Mycroft Holmes (Vincent Gale) at the Diogenes Club to obtain the only known sample of Sherlock’s DNA. The team learns that Irene has previously dabbled in charity fraud and realize that Angus is deliberately faking his condition. Irene steals the DNA sample and attempts to fly to Austria, but Watson and Shinwell intercept her. Watson explains how he knows Irene, suffering from multiple myeloma, only wanted to sell the sample and provide for her son. Irene then asks him to assume guardianship of Angus in the event of her death. To her surprise, however, Watson offers her the chance to participate in the clinical trial of a treatment that could save her life.
I was confused for a minute until I realized you meant “episode of Watson”
I think you’re right and I agree. But maybe Doyle himself deserves some of the blame, for the way he opens the story (“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.”), which maybe sets us up to expect her to be a bigger deal in the overall canon.
Correct
I agree that modern adaptations deviate from the original story, but I feel you are also not doing Conan Doyle justice. Irene Adler was not simple an opera singer, the point of the story was that she was an intellectual match of Sherlock Holmes. That alone sets her apart from the host of other characters in the stories.
From a production perspective I can see that she is the ideal candidate to remedy the scarcity of interesting female characters in the stories. Having her return and play a larger role is natural. I also agree that the precise characterisation in modern adaptations seems somewhat off, but from a Victorian perspective she looked indeed like an indecent woman and adventuress (the story itself already highlights her unsuitability as a spouse and makes the other characters share their suspicion of base motives on her side).
Tusculan nailed a big part of it – there aren’t a lot of strong female roles in the Holmes canon, and Adler stood out as one who had anticipated Holmes. She was “the” woman, as Holmes noted. Combine that with Holmes’ lack of interest in women in the Canon , and it was an irresistable “hook” for pastiche writers to drag her in as a paramour and mistress to Holmes. She shows up thus in the motion picture version of The Seven Per Cent Solution (although not in Nicholas Meyer’s novel, to my recollection). Some even go as far as to claim that Holmes and Adler were the parents of Nero Wolfe.
Moriarty gets a lot of attention from pastiche writers and adapters of Holmes, too. Apparently a lot of them felt that Holmes needed a worthy opponent. Although Moriarty only shows up in two of Holmes works – The Final Problem and The Valley of Fear – n ways that aren’t consistent with each other, people keep dragging him in. He’s the Bad Guy in the William Gillette/Arthur Conan Doyle play Sherlock Holmes that established him on stage and froze in time our image of the calabash-pipe-smoking Holmes and the Inverness Cape and Deerstalker costume. He was the villain in the second Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York (played by John Huston!) John Hawkesworth had him show up as the mastermind behind John Clay in the Granada/PBS 1985 adaptation of The Red Headed League. Dennis Rosa, in his stage adaptation of The Sign of Four has Moriarty as the mastermind behind Jonathan Small. Authors John Gardner and Anthony Horowitz have made Moriarty the central figure, if not the hero, or their novels. Alan Moore went so far as to reverse the canonical story and have Holmes killed at Reichenbach Falls and Moriarty the survivor in his League of Extraordinary Men series.
You can add Neil Gaiman (“A Study in Emerald”) and Kim Newman (Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles) to that list.
I’m not sure your math would impress Moriarty.
D’oh. I should have said “approximately” - or looked up the actual date of publication
James Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks features a James Moriarty who is elevated to eldritch god status. I don’t recall whether Irene Adler is featured in the triology.
And in Elementary, Irene and Moriarty are the same person.
I don’t think that’s better, but it is…different.
(And Reichenbach was a person, not a falls. Alas, the show sort of lost its way at the end.)
I’d note that the position of ballet dancers and opera singers, at that particular time in history, was not the same as today.
I’m not sure that I’ve read a direct treatise on the subject but my understanding of 19th century Europe is that operas and ballets were often quite seedy. (Particularly the ballet.) The men were often thieves or other form of rogue. The female leads were less often the most talented and, instead, the hottest. Male lords were often competing to date these women - whether they were married or not.
On the side of the women, many would have been actively husband hunting - to try and snag someone important and wealthy - as a way to move up in society, despite being lower class. If their lover was married, then they’d just be collecting gifts and favors.
I see, on the Wikipedia, that there’s a quote from the story, where her lover - the King of Bohemia - describes her as “a well-known adventuresss”. I.e. she has had several affairs with several lords and nobles.
Doyle presents her as a fairly proper and reasonable lady. But, likewise, Doyle was regularly getting fooled by hot babe mystics and spiritualists, possibly because he was sleeping with them.
And we see in modern day, characters like the prostitute, Inara Serra in Firefly, that are presented as wise, idealized women - and completely ignoring that the average prostitute is some - often underage - drug addict, being strung out by a boyfriend.
Authors can and do replace the reality of the time with their ideal, when it comes to women that trade sex for money.
I agree that Doyle is playing with expectations- Holmes assumes that Adler is immoral, because of her background- making the conclusion of the story a surprise (Adler escapes by outsmarting Holmes, and has no malign intent (and the Prince wishes he could marry her, because of her brains and character as well as her beauty). That’s part of what makes the modern versions less interesting- there’s no twist (Irene is portrayed from the start as a smart crook of some sort and remains so throughout)
Her portrayal in Sherlock was more of a dominatrix sex goddess.
She is the only woman to ever interest Holmes, I can’t blame writers for attempting to show modern audiences why. A quiet opera singer just would not do here.
May as well complain that there aren’t enough whale fueled London street lanterns in the retelling either.
Just how many of them are there? I just did a little searching and I found six adaptations (usually I call them pastiches) in the past 40 years in which Adler is a character. That isn’t really that many. I know of over 300 Sherlock Holmes pastiches published in the past hundred or so years, and there may be others I don’t know of. It’s not surprising that six or so of them use Adler, who’s an interesting character, in their pastiche.
Quietly deletes post.
No he didn’t, they both survive. Also, it’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
That being said, there is that one pastiche story in which Holmes goes over the falls into a parallel universe in which Moriarty did kill him at Reichenbach and is covertly wreaking political havoc. (Upon further research this is “The Adventure of the Missing Detective”, by Gary Lovisi.)
Audiences love a love interest. With how notoriously frigid Holmes was (though he could do a very good job of faking it), Adler was the only character who could, even potentially, fill the role of a love interest for him.
You can write a story about a love interest without making the other choices about her character