SOURCE: Kestner, Joseph A. “‘Real’ Men: Construction of Masculinity in the Sherlock Holmes Narratives.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 29, no. 1 (spring 1996): 73-88.

If we understand masculinity as a constant contradictory struggle rather than just the privileged position within a power disequilibrium, we come closer to a full definition of gender studies.

Stearns 108

In Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey describes a theory of reading and a theory of text generation integral to the practices of the nineteenth century—“the theory of expressive realism”: “This is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one … individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as true” (7). Belsey then observes:

Expressive realism belongs roughly to the last century and a half, the period of industrial capitalism. … The procedures of expressive realism have certain ideological implications which may indicate that their development during this period is more than coincidental. … Formulations of commonsense positions are found most often in periods when the position in question is new and in the process of displacing an earlier position, or when it is under attack.

(7)

Belsey proceeds to argue that, subjected to deconstructive processes, such realism, thought to be serenely confident of its representational powers, can be shown to be intensely conflicted. As it happens, realism was in fact intensely debated during its heyday in the nineteenth century, perhaps no more rigorously than in a set of fictional texts, the detective tales of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Meta-fictional allusions and discussions are frequently incorporated into stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson, often in conversations about Watson's techniques in his chronicles of Holmes's exploits and particularly in regard to the “realism” of such accounts. In September of 1891, at the beginning of “A Case of Identity,” Doyle constructs the following dialogue:

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes, … “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window … and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events … it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I [Watson] answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”

“A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect,” remarked Holmes. … “Depend upon it there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.”

(30)

The formulaic structure at the heart of this discussion of “realism” becomes evident from two later stories in the series which were to constitute The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Just as the above remarks occur at the inception of “A Case of Identity,” so in two other stories there are similar observations at the beginnings of tales. In the opening of “The Red-Headed League,” Holmes declares:

“I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of every-day life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own little adventures.”

(49)

As if to emphasize the importance of these meta-fictional allusions in the tales, Doyle begins the final story of the series, “The Copper Beeches,” with the following discussion between Holmes and Watson:

“To the man who loves art for its own sake,” remarked Sherlock Holmes … “it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes célèbres and sensational trials in which I have figured, but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.”

“And yet,” said I, smiling, “I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records. …”

“You have erred, perhaps, in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements, instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.”

(270)

Holmes then summarizes his own argument:

“If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing—a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales. … At the same time … you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases … a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. … But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.”

(270-71)

Observations like these were to appear in subsequent tales, such as “The Abbey Grange” (September 1904).

These discussions about “realism” in Doyle's tales clearly indicate that, as Belsey will argue, even in the nineteenth century the category of “realism” was deconstructing itself in part through repeated use and overuse of its own formulaic devices. It seems clear in the present instance that Doyle's narratives are alternately sensational (“The Speckled Band”) or mundane (“The Blue Carbuncle”), that as many tales deal with the prevention of a crime as its execution, that several tales do not deal in illegalities in the strict sense (“A Case of Identity”), that as many tales undermine the ideology of the Victorian family as reinforce it (“The Copper Beeches,” “The Noble Bachelor”), and that Holmes in fact sometimes fails in his efforts to save his client (“The Dancing Men,” “The Five Orange Pips”). These stories deploy many devices to convince the reader of their “realism” (e.g., specificities of seasons, streets, restaurants, musical events, transportation, weaponry, clothing) while at the same time presenting Holmes himself as essentially bizarre and outré; (his cocaine, his violin, his bullet-marked wall, his fondness for disguises, his arrogance). Doyle's tales indicate that the “realism” induced by such practices is rhetorically negotiated rather than merely presented, that it is constructed rather than merely recorded.

In order to understand this problem in Victorian realism, one needs to adopt a perspective as distinctive as one of Holmes's own unique analytic demonstrations. One dimension of Doyle's practice of Victorian realism remains remarkably underinvestigated, namely, the construction of masculinity in detective fictions. Catherine Belsey proves helpful here:

Classic realism … performs … the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding.

(67)

Belsey notes of realist texts:

Ideology, masquerading as coherence and plenitude, is in reality inconsistent, limited, contradictory, and the realist text as crystallization of ideology participates in this incompleteness even while it diverts attention from the fact in the apparent plenitude of narrative closure.

(104)

In its movement to closure, however, the realist text exposes its own fissure:

The classic realist text moves inevitably and irreversibly to an end, to the conclusion of an ordered series of events, to the disclosure of what has been concealed. But even in the realist text certain modes of signification within the discourse … evade the constraints of the narrative sequence. … Contradiction is a condition of narrative. … The text, in spite of itself, exposes incoherences, omissions, absences and transgressions. … It contains within itself the critique of its own values.

(105, 106, 107, 109)

Belsey then discusses several of the Holmes narratives, noting that they demonstrate classic realist structures:

The project of the stories themselves, enigma followed by disclosure, echoes precisely the structure of the classic realist text. … This project requires the maximum degree of “realism”—verisimilitude, plausibility. … This is why even their own existence as writing is so frequently discussed within the texts.

(112-13)

In the Holmes narratives, she concludes, there exists “another uncompleted and undisclosed narrative” (115). For Belsey, these incomplete texts often involve the silencing of shadowy female characters, but there is another conflicted and gendered presentation in the Holmes narratives, that of masculinity.

That the construction of masculinity in these putatively “realist” texts was an element of their appeal to the predominantly male readers of the Strand magazine is indisputable. Striking evidence that Holmes and Watson in their moral character and their rhetoric represented masculine gender models can be found in Robert Baden-Powell's influential Scouting for Boys, first published in 1908. In “Tracking,” Chapter IV of this manual, Baden-Powell emphasizes the importance to the youth of Britain of learning good habits of “observation,” particularly how to read “signs”:

Remember how “Sherlock Holmes” met a stranger and noticed that he was looking fairly well-to-do, in new clothes … with a soldierly bearing, and a sailor's way of walking, sunburnt. … What should you have supposed that man to be? Well, Sherlock Holmes guessed, correctly, that he had lately retired from the Royal Marines as a Sergeant. …

(139)

This allusion to Doyle's famous introduction of Mycroft Holmes in “The Greek Interpreter” (September 1893) is employed by Baden-Powell in his construction of a paradigmatic masculinity to be emulated by the sons of Empire. Baden-Powell advises his readers to peruse Doyle's “The Resident Patient” (August 1893) and to study Holmes's adroitness with signs (141). Baden-Powell then advises scoutmasters to demonstrate “Sherlock-Holmesism” (157) by teaching “deduction in practice”:

Read aloud a story in which a good amount of observation of details occurs, with consequent deductions, such as in either the Memoirs [1894] or The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [1892].

Then question the boys afterwards as to which details suggested certain solutions, to see that they really have grasped the method.

(162)

Baden-Powell encourages scoutmasters to create a stage set from a story such as “The Resident Patient,” to have scouts study it for three minutes and then present their results (163). He recommends the Memoirs and Adventures for further reading. In general, then, Baden-Powell could plausibly endorse the Holmes tales as constructing a masculine script, given that they endorsed qualities which were radically gendered as masculine in Victorian culture: observation, rationalism, facticity, logic, comradeship, pluck, and daring.

Even so, as Belsey thinks, the realist text often seems conflicted in its ideologies, including its gendered ideologies. Such contradiction is evident in the manner in which real-life detectives themselves appraised the Holmes narratives. Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard wrote in 1903 that the Holmes tales often exhibited “exaggeration,” that the story interest depended on the tale rather than the logic, that “the incidents of many of these tales could never be accepted as within the category of possible fact,” and that “judgment capitulates amidst the thrilling incidents” (557). On the other hand, J. C. Cummings, of the New York division of the Secret Service, wrote in 1910 that “the detective-hero [Holmes] himself has many qualities to recommend him to even his living detective critic. … Sherlock Holmes is more natural than most of his brother fiction sleuths, [in as much as] Doyle modelled him after a man [Dr. Joseph Bell] in real life” (499). Doyle himself was to state in an interview in May, 1892, that “we [authors] have hitherto neglected realism too much. These men who now go to the extreme do good by pushing the average farther out” (Blathwayt 51), implying that the definition of “realism” for him was fluid and that the Holmes tales could be construed as “realist” only in this sense. The American detective writer Melville Davisson Post argued in 1917 that even “dime novel” detective fiction, such as that involving Nick Carter, was not at all sensationalized compared with actual criminal activities. It should be clear from Baden-Powell and Cummings that detective fiction did project a model of one kind of masculinity even if such modelling seems conflicted, judging from the remarks of Anderson and certain meta-narrational statements within the Holmes tales.

The construction of masculinity at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain was of particular concern, albeit a conflicted concern, for several reasons: the increasing difficulty of policing the Empire, the rise of nationalist sentiment in colonial possessions, the difficulty of finding recruits for the Victorian army due to physical and intellectual inadequacies of young men, the effects of a global economic depression during the final decades of the century, and the rise to economic hegemony of the United States and Germany. All of this contributed to a perceived “crisis of masculinity” in late-Victorian society (Kestner 1-39). Critics of detective fiction have recognized as one of its functions the provision of a sense of order, control, and stability for the culture of this period. Hutter notes how it attempts to provide “conflict resolution” (207), while Clausen notes that “Doyle's purpose … was not to encourage social change. … The solution of individual crimes … restores the social balance that each crime had upset. It never brings that balance into question” (115), even if very often “the outcome does not erase the impression of horror and unreason” (119). Ernst Kaemmel, noting that the “detective novel plays an important role in the capitalist world” (56), argues that its agenda would prove that “the individual is capable of repairing the rupture in the moral order” (58). For Kaemmel, this success rested on male-reader identification with the masculinity presented in Holmes himself:

Sherlock Holmes was a representative of law, justice, and capitalist order; his readers, generally middle-class and lower middle-class people, whose interest … was based … on the acuity and superiority of the detective, with whom they were inclined to identify themselves, expect the violated order to be reconstituted in a suspenseful story. … The success of detective literature in the capitalist world at least shows how strongly the defects of its social order are felt.

(60, 58)

For Mandel, the detective narrative “reflected the stability of bourgeois society and the self-confidence of the ruling class [which] assumed that this stability was a fact of life” (44). Even if the conclusions of many of the Holmes narratives reasserted stability through narrative closure, in the manner of the realist text, the negotiation of this process of stabilizing bourgeois, hegemonic masculinity was inwardly conflicted.

The reason for instability in the realist text so far as masculine gender has been concerned is addressed by Kaja Silverman in Male Subjectivity at the Margins:

The dominant fiction [of masculinity] calls upon the male subject to see himself … only through the mediation of images of an unimpaired masculinity … by believing in the commensurability of penis with phallus, actual and symbolic father.

(42)

That is, males by possessing the penis believe they are inscribed into the dominant patriarchal ideology. She then contends:

The phallus/penis equation is promoted by the dominant fiction, and sustained by collective belief. … The dominant fiction offers a seemingly infinite supply of phallic sounds and images within which the male subject can find “himself.” It is imperative that belief in the penis/phallus equation be fortified.

(44-45, 47)

For Silverman, however, the penis/phallus equation is based on a méconnaissance, “the misrecognition upon which masculinity is founded” (42). In short, the realist text such as the Holmes narrative purports to re-establish at its end a belief in the penis/phallus equation and in the hegemony of the dominantly masculine and bourgeois order. The possession of the penis deludes males into reading these texts as constructions of the penis/phallus equation. This misrecognition occurs, as Serge Leclaire argues, because “the possession of the penis … serves as a screen denying the fundamental character of castration. Man comes to believe that he has not been castrated” (46). Belsey declares of the Holmes narratives: “The classic realist text installs itself in the space between fact and illusion through the presentation of a simulated reality which is plausible but not real. In this lies its power as myth” (117). One of realism's defining myths, one may conclude, is that of the penis/phallus equation, the legitimacy of the invariant dominant masculinity, ostensibly reestablished by the closure of the text. But, as Belsey contends, this realistic principle in fact constitutes the tale's “evasion of the real”:

Through their transgressions of [their] own values of explicitness and verisimilitude, the Sherlock Holmes stories contain within themselves an implicit critique of their limited nature as characteristic examples of classic realism.

(117)

From the perspective of constructing masculine gender, the classic realist texts of the Holmes narratives reveal the méconnaissance of the dominant fiction of masculine subjectivity, even as in the 1890s such texts attempt to conceal and refute a crisis of masculinity at the fin-de-siècle.

That the Holmes narratives should address masculine encoding and scripting is not surprising, as Knight observes:

The audience of the Strand was predominantly male; they bought the magazine, in shops, at bookstalls, especially on stations. They did take it home—there were sections for women and children, but they are just sections. … Acquisitive individualism … is basic to the economic world-view of the city workers, clerks and businessmen who patronised the Strand.

(Form 374, 372)

Thus, Holmes is “the model of a superior being, a superman” (79) by virtue of several qualities: he is “his own provider [marked] by self-help [and a] resourceful independent power [characterized by] the dominance of the hero over the action [with] the aura of science … a master of the data of his subject” (77-79). Holmes in addition conveys “the aura of chivalry, of patronising autocracy and essential conservatism” (83) which appealed to readers of the Strand. Watson embodies “the high priest of the commonplace” (83), but this quality is crucial to the ostensible gendering function of the tales: “The closeness Watson has to Holmes links the detective firmly to the actual bourgeois world” (85). Thus Doyle strategizes his two principals, protagonist and chronicler, to accord with male readers' privileging of the dominant fiction of male subjectivity. That being established, the tales nevertheless query that dominant fiction by constructing repeated transgressions of the penis/phallus equation, exposing the contradictions of the realist text.

One of the most evident manifestations of this contradiction is that in many of these narratives it is not a professional criminal who causes the challenge to the dominant order but rather an individual putatively of the dominant order. One particular group of such characters is composed of males who become perverse fathers and step-fathers through ruthless exploitation of patriarchal dominance. In “A Case of Identity,” for example, James Windibank, the step-father of Mary Sutherland, masquerades as her lover Hosmer Angel in order to prevent her marriage and the loss of his control over her income. “The man married a woman very much older than himself for her money … and he enjoyed the use of the money of the daughter as long as she lived with them,” Holmes observes (45). This incestuous scenario is executed with “the connivance and assistance of his wife” (46), that is, Mary Sutherland's mother. Unfortunately, as Holmes is forced to recognize, the law cannot punish or touch Windibank. The tale exposes the venality of the family patriarch as well as the futility of the law confronted with an injustice which is not in itself illegal. A similar account of patriarchal greed occurs in “The Copper Beeches” as Jephro Rucastle employs Violet Hunter as a governess to impersonate his daughter Alice, whom he has locked at home to prevent her marriage and thus the loss of her money. Rucastle survives an attack by his vicious dog, and no legal prosecution is possible. Such narratives demonstrate processes of camouflage and transgression in the realist mode of presentation.

The most famous of such accounts is the scheme of Dr. Grimesby Roylott to control his step-daughters' monies by murdering the one and plotting the murder of the other in “The Speckled Band.” As Hennessy and Mohan note, the murder weapon, a snake, constitutes “murder as symbolic rape [thus dramatizing] the sexual economy of patriarchy: the equation of woman and property” as well as an evident “incest motif” (390, 398). While it would appear that Holmes is the chivalric rescuer of Helen Stoner, the condition of the narrating act is that Helen is compelled to silence:

It is possible that I [Watson] might have placed [the events] upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was made at the time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given.

(171)

The result of this circumstance, as Hennessy and Mohan note, is the

position of Holmes … in collusion with a “band” of patriarchs implicated in suppressing that which poses an economic and sexual threat to patriarchal gender relations. Holmes's position … is more a re-articulation than a transformation of the sexual economy of patriarchy.

(395)

In all three of these tales, the penis/phallus equation of dominant male subjectivity, which granted males moral superiority and surveillance, is challenged by the incestuous/economic transgression of male patriarchs. For males, the fact that three members of the male establishment engage in nefarious behaviors must raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of male prerogatives, while the futility of the law in “Case” and “Beeches” suggests the failure of masculinity to police itself. The tales become critiques of their own ideological discourses, even as they represent the male “fear of being supplanted, losing control” (Knight, “Case” 377).

Another group of tales deconstructs the penis/phallus equation by exposing a masquerade lurking behind the dominant fiction. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” this disguising is actualized in the behavior of Neville St. Clair, who “appeared to have plenty of money,” [who] “took a large villa … lived generally in good style [and] married the daughter of a local brewer, by whom he now had two children” (130), in other words a bourgeois establishment figure. At the conclusion, it is revealed that St. Clair actually lived by masquerading as a beggar, Hugh Boone, in London. The entire structure of the marriage was posited on silence and deception: “My dear wife knew that I had business in the City. She little knew what” (146), St. Clair confesses. Again no legal action is taken, although Holmes warns: “If you are found again, then all must come out” (148). In effect, the tale juxtaposes two masculinities, one “legitimate” in St. Clair, the other subversive in Boone. The tale is indeed destabilizing, as Jaffe conjectures:

The story describes not a crime but a disturbance in the social field, a confusion of social identity. … In the context of changing ideas about gentlemanliness … a beggar might very well be a gentleman; at the same time the increase in both financial speculation and unexpected, devastating crashes made it appear likely … that a gentleman might someday have to beg.

(404)

A powerful if muted drive in the story aims “to eliminate precisely the kind of instability Holmes implicitly acknowledges” (403), with the result that the realist text in this instance “both constructs and disables fiction's fantasy of social control” (404). A similar process of disabling the penis/phallus equation occurs in Holmes's earliest case, “The Gloria Scott”, wherein it is discovered that the father of Holmes's college friend Victor Trevor was in fact a convict named James Armitage, who had escaped a transport ship and prospered in Australia before returning to England. In this instance, a man who for twenty years seemed the respectable owner of an estate proves in fact an escaped convict. In both “Gloria Scott” and “Twisted Lip,” masculine legitimacy via the dominant fiction is revealed to be a matter of masquerade, destabilizing the realist texts of the accounts.

This process of exposing the méconnaissance of dominant male subjectivity implicit in the realist text also extends into another group of tales, a group involving the failure of the aristocratic or upper bourgeois orders. In “The Red-Headed League,” the master criminal is one John Clay, alias Vincent Spaulding and William Morris, who tunnels into a bank to secure deposits of gold coins. At the conclusion of the tale, Holmes reveals Clay's true identity: “‘John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher, and forger. He's a young man … but he is at the head of his profession. … He's a remarkable man, is young John Clay. His grandfather was a Royal Duke, and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford’” (67). Such information contributes to the anxiety about “race degeneration” at the fin-de-siècle, reinforcing a conviction that there indeed existed a “crisis of masculinity” in the culture. A similar deviation from normative masculinity into radical criminality marks Sebastian Moran, an acolyte of the lethal James Moriarty, in “The Empty House”:

Son of Sir Augustus Moran, CB, once British Minister to Persia. Educated Eton and Oxford. Served in Jowaki Campaign, Afghan Campaign, Charasiab, … Sherpur, and Cabul. … Clubs: The Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, the Bagatelle Card Club.

(23)

Moran's tutor-in-crime Professor Moriarty is characterized by Holmes in “The Final Problem” as follows:

“He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. … On the strength of it, he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller Universities, and had, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood.”

(251-52)

Similarly, the murderer in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Jack Stapleton, is the son of Sir Charles Baskerville's younger brother Rodger and a former school-teacher and local collector of butterflies. He is described by Watson as “a small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and lean jawed” (64). Despite Holmes's assertion that Stapleton has drowned in the Grimpen Mire, no such evidence in the text exists, and it is entirely possible that Stapleton has escaped the law.

A similar destabilizing of the realist mode occurs in “The Priory School,” when the Duke of Holdernesse is forced to confess that his erstwhile “secretary” James Wilder, who connived in the abduction of the Duke's son Lord Saltire, is in reality the Duke's illegitimate offspring. When Holmes notes that Wilder is at least by implication the instigator of the murder of Professor Heidegger by Reuben Hayes, the Duke replies: “Morally, Mr. Holmes. No doubt you are right. But surely not in the eyes of the law. A man cannot be condemned for a murder at which he was not present. … At least we may take counsel how far we can minimize this hideous scandal” (127-28). Ultimately, it is revealed that the Duke has contrived the escape of Wilder, to which Holmes responds:

“In the first place, your Grace, I am bound to tell you that you have placed yourself in a most serious position in the eyes of the law. You have condoned a felony, and you have aided the escape of a murderer. … To humour your guilty elder son you have exposed your innocent younger son to imminent and unnecessary danger. It was a most unjustifiable action.”

(131)

This realist text, by reason of its unresolved conflicts, exposes the fallacy of the penis/phallus equation even as the narrative shields, so to speak, the aristocratic order of things. A weakening of the aristocratic order during a general crisis of masculinity during the 1890s appears in “The Naval Treaty.” There, Percy Phelps, nephew of Lord Holdhurst, loses an important international document; Phelps confesses to Watson: “I have been off my head ever since the blow fell” (214). He admits that he has suffered from “brain fever” (214), “mad fits” (226), and “nerves” (236, 240), to the extent that he “was practically a raving maniac” (225). Here, Doyle in effect warns that any refutation of the penis/phallus equation or destabilized masculinity may have international repercussions. What Langbauer designates as the “masculine fantasy” of “an integral self” (83), one term of the realist equation, has collapsed.

Porter observes that “the detective story promotes the ‘heroization’ of the agent of surveillance in his struggle against threats from within” (125). One of the most disruptive of these internal threats would be the Oedipal conflict between father and son depicted in several of the Holmes narratives. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” James McCarthy is arrested for the murder of his father Charles McCarthy because the two men had fiercely quarreled just prior to the father's death. As things unfold, the son loves Alice Turner, daughter of John Turner, and the two fathers are discovered to have known one another in Australia. McCarthy had been blackmailing Turner on the basis of his criminal past, an exploitation which drove Turner to murder. The quarrel between the McCarthys themselves involved the father's compelling the son to court the socially desirable Alice Turner, although James McCarthy himself had married a Bristol barmaid, herself already married. Neither James nor Alice ever learns of the true relations between their fathers. Watson writes: “Turner lived for seven months after our interview, but he is now dead; and there is every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live happily together, in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past” (101). While this tale deemphasizes the Oedipal scenario between the McCarthy men, any union between the two lovers can develop only by reason of a conspiracy of silence on the part of Holmes and Watson. A similarly displaced Oedipal scenario occurs in “The Norwood Builder,” in which Jonas Oldacre, employing the ruse of a legacy, frames John McFarlane for his murder, in revenge against McFarlane's mother, who had rejected Oldacre in his youth. Unjustly arrested, and by his own admission “nearly mad” (27) from the circumstance, McFarlane is almost convicted by a diabolical scheme concocted by his surrogate-father Oldacre. In the same series (Adventures) in which “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” occurs, an Oedipal scenario underlies “The Beryl Coronet,” in which Alexander Holder has his son Arthur arrested for the theft of a coronet, when in reality Arthur was protecting his cousin Mary, who had given the coronet to the villainous Sir George Burnell, with whom she disappears. The function of imprinting masculinity from father to son in each of these tales is sabotaged by the hostility of one part against the other, a destabilizing of the penis/phallus equation in its very essence. As Knight observes, in such tales Doyle offers “fables in which the class whose language, epistemology and values are enacted can examine the dangers that arise if its members are untrue to its codes” (Form 91).

Knight argues that Holmes serves a specific masculinizing agenda: “Masculine, delicate, scientific … the ideas go together to state the male self-concept, the delicate frailty it perceives in itself, and the protection it finds in a scientific hero” (“Case” 377). He then comments on the tales in Adventures:

In the early stories there are two distinct, but related, patterns of masculine fear. One is the fear of castration, directly losing potency. The other is fear of being supplanted, losing control over a daughter or a wife.

(377)

The stories in Adventures, Knight concludes, are “rich with male neurosis” (377). One of the most destabilizing of the neurotic elements is the concentration throughout the Holmes canon on wounded or disabled men, a marker of castration anxiety inscribing deep cultural doubt about masculine superiority and power.

This psychological rebus is noted at the very beginning of the Holmes tales with the details of John H. Watson's being wounded at the disastrous battle of Maiwand in the Afghan campaign, on 27 July 1880. In the second paragraph of A Study in Scarlet (1887), Watson comments: “I was … attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet” (5). In The Sign of the Four (1890), the narrative commences by reference to a wound: “I … sat nursing my wounded leg. I had a Jezail bullet through it some time before” (5). In “The Noble Bachelor,” from the Adventures (1892), Watson records:

I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain … and the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign, throbbed with dull persistency.

(221)

That Watson's wound is, so to speak, free floating, in one story in the shoulder, in another the leg, and in a third some unspecified place, signals its cultural somatic/symbolic import. In “The Cardboard Box,” in Memoirs, Holmes notes of Watson, “Your hand stole towards your own old wound” (33), a Holmesian observation which prepares the reader for the motif of the two severed ears in the tale itself, a doubling of the castration motif in a single text. As Leclaire has contended, the male persists in denying his castration, but the realist text insistently transgresses itself by inscribing the instantiation of castration.

After the narrator Watson establishes this wounded male body as a topos of the Holmes narratives, it is registered in other contexts. In The Sign of the Four, Thaddeus Sholto observes that his father “had a most marked aversion to men with wooden legs” (26). Holmes later names the intruder: “‘His name … is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly-educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side’” (46). In “The Blue Carbuncle,” Peterson, who had tried to protect a man from assailants, is a commissionaire, that is, a soldier crippled in the Crimean War. In “The Man with the Twisted Lip” from the same series (Adventures), Neville St. Clair, supposedly a respectable bourgeois male, masquerades as “the sinister cripple” (132) Hugh Boone. Again from the same series, Victor Hatherley of “The Engineer's Thumb” loses that finger, although he has “a strong masculine face” (199); the loss leads to “hysterical outbursts” (200). In his escapade with the counterfeiters (who evade any and all punishment), Hatherley realizes that “my thumb had been cut off, and that the blood was pouring from my wound” (215). Hatherley is doubly castrated, symbolically by the loss of the thumb but professionally as well, since he will be unable to pursue his career. Henry Wood, whose body was tortured and crippled after he was betrayed by his friend James Barclay during the Indian Mutiny, is described thus in “The Crooked Man”: “The man sat all twisted and huddled in his chair in a way which gave an indescribable impression of deformity” (168-69). Langbauer regards one of Doyle's projects to be the “masculine reification of the body … what masculinity hopes to do with that (male) body is to arrest its everyday incremental change” (102). The presence of the wounded male body in many of these narratives indicates a profound cultural conflict about the security of dominant male subjectivity. These tales, collected in series after series, repeatedly attempt to reassert the penis/phallus equation which all realist texts try but fail to stabilize and secure. The “infinite continuance [males] wish sexuality to promise” (Langbauer 103) is constantly and finally confuted.

Conflicted male subjectivity in the realist text is most starkly exhibited in those narratives where Sherlock Holmes fails to solve the crime or otherwise to save his client. It has already been remarked here that the coiners in “The Engineer's Thumb” in fact escape. The first tale of the Adventures, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” shows Holmes being defeated by a woman, the contralto Irene Adler, who “has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men” (Adventures 14). She follows Holmes to 221B in order to alert him that she knows of his stratagems. She dresses herself in male attire: “Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives” (28). Not only is Holmes defeated, but the manifestation of this defeat is the woman's transgressive act of cross-dressing. In the cipher tale “The Dancing Men,” Holmes fails to save his client Hilton Cubitt, a disturbing event that Watson preserves thus:

I come to the dark conclusion. … I experience once again the dismay and horror with which I was filled. Would that I had some brighter ending to communicate to my readers; but these are the chronicles of facts, and I must follow to their dark crisis the chain of events.

(83)

In this startling admission, Watson, perhaps inadvertently, concedes that the realist text cannot suppress its distressing revelations about male subjectivity. In the episode of “The Five Orange Pips,” when Holmes realizes that his client John Openshaw has been murdered, Watson states:

We sat in silence for some minutes, Holmes more depressed and shaken than I had ever seen him.

“That hurts my pride, Watson,” he said at last. “It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. … That he [Openshaw] should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death—!”

(119)

The fact that “The Dancing Men” and “The Five Orange Pips” both stress Holmes's ability to decode sign systems but ironically declare the failure of his ratiocinative powers betrays a cultural anxiety about encoding the masculine in the nineteenth century.

What are we to conclude from so much evidence? Writing of the Holmes narratives, Catherine Belsey declares:

The project of the stories themselves, enigma followed by disclosure, echoes precisely the structure of the classic realist text. … Contained in the completed and fully disclosed story [“The Dancing Men”] of the decipherment is another uncompleted and undisclosed narrative, which is more than merely peripheral to the text as a whole.

(112, 115)

Belsey regards this undisclosed narrative as that of the silenced woman, but an even more incomplete narrative is that of masculinity—its construction, reification, imprinting, encoding—which equally “contradicts the project of explicitness, transgresses the values of the texts. … What becomes clear as a result of the uncertainty of the text is the contradictory nature of the requirements of verisimilitude in fiction” (115, 117). Jann observes that “the crimes that Doyle fears are less violations of the official law than challenges to the social and sexual conventions” (704); the contradictions of the realist texts of the Holmes canon “expose the incompleteness of Doyle's positivistic enterprise” (687). If, as Fillingham contends, Holmes's “psyche is constantly threatened with dissolution by the ordinariness of existence” (667), this condition would seem paradigmatic of all males confronted by the inescapable contradictions of the classic realist text when it endeavors to construct and imprint male gender. One peculiar value of the Holmes canon, therefore, is this very exposure of the contradictory nature of the realist text vis-à-vis a besieged late-Victorian masculinity.

Works Cited

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———. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

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