Fun with bad Sherlockian scholarship!
Apr. 26th, 2010 07:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseI found an amazingly terribly book at the uni library. No, seriously. Terrible. Far too bad not to share.
It's called In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle's Stories of The Great Detective. It was written by a gentleman with a lovely string of alphabet soup after his name on the title page: Christopher Redmond, B.A., M.A. It's funny, because the book isn't published by an academic press, so the credential-waving just comes off as pathetic. B.A.? Don't knock yourself over patting yourself on the back there, dood. Lots of people have gone to college.
Despite the prose, this book was written in 1984. It reads like something from 1948.
Have some choice passages!
from Chapter VI: Sherlock Holmes in Love:
“The first of such [stories about damsels in distress] begins with the words 'my dear fellow,' which may be said to suggest a return, after the exotic and heterosexual flights of the Irene Adler business, to the cosy bachelor life of Holmes and Watson” - because there's nothing sexy going on at Baker Street, oh hell naw.
Of “The Speckled Band”: “Miss Stoner's exaggerated feminine qualities and Holmes' macho behavior contribute to the story's effectiveness” - macho? Really?
From Chapter IX: A World Without Women:
“The sexual activities and motives discussed so far have been heterosexual. One would not call them all normal, extending as they do to rape, flagellation, and other antisocial behavior (!), but they are all derived from the originally normal attraction of men for women and women for men (!!). Homosexual matters are much less obviously present in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but since homosexuality is a part of human life, and the stories are meant to be a reflection of human life, some evidence of it is likely to be found there.”
“[Queer] analysis, though it may sounds both far-fetched and distasteful, is supported by many details in the story …. It will certainly appear far-fetched to use it as the basis for an allegation (!!!!!) that Holmes is drawn as a homosexual, or that Doyle deliberately wrote a story with homosexual motifs.” I mean. Distasteful? Allegation? Faugh!
Of the “worth a wound” scene: “It can be called nothing but a love scene. For years, of course, Sherlockians have enjoyed the joke that Watson was a woman or, perhaps, Holmes was. Aside from such comic suggestions, do the characters, after all, emerge as active or latent homosexuals? …. the bald fact is that the detective and his partner are not portrayed as homosexuals” - I'm not sure if the har har they're gay thing or the paternalistic it's the facts attitude hacks me off more. But this passage is pretty much everything wrong with dudely Sherlockian scholarship. Gag.
The chapter then maunders off into Freud and castration and I don't even, finally coming to an end with this jewel: “The final chapter turns from the less pleasant sexual topics of this chapter to the most pleasant sexual topic of all: successful, even sometimes happy, heterosexual love and marriage.”
There are not enough interrobangs in the world.
Man, I don't get it. How does this rubbish get printed - and why does no one want to write a book about how Sherlock Holmes is kinda gay?! All joking aside, I am really rather shocked that this kind of heterosexist tripe is both contemporarily printed and housed in my University library – why, IU, why? It always shocks me a bit to find this kind of prejudice in ostensibly academic contexts. I'm so much a child of the nineties that I'm awfully used to feminist/queer crit being borderline passe.
Also – I would dearly love to see a study on doodly criticism of commonly-queered books. The panicked anxious masculinity in Mr. Redmond's writing has some very interesting psychosexual implications. But then you'd have to deal with their fapping, and really, who wants to?
FWIW, I've also been reading - and tremendously enjoying - Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. Not only does he win my heart right off the bat by giving the diss to some of the more extreme strains of Foucauldian sexual theory, but his book might be the gentlest, sweetest book I've ever read about sexual "deviancy." He goes beyond law and medicine to talk about actual queer lives, in the process re-discovering the fact that queer relationships can involve love as well as sex. It's a heartbreaking book, as all books of its kind are bound to be, but it's also surprisingly romantic.
It's called In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle's Stories of The Great Detective. It was written by a gentleman with a lovely string of alphabet soup after his name on the title page: Christopher Redmond, B.A., M.A. It's funny, because the book isn't published by an academic press, so the credential-waving just comes off as pathetic. B.A.? Don't knock yourself over patting yourself on the back there, dood. Lots of people have gone to college.
Despite the prose, this book was written in 1984. It reads like something from 1948.
Have some choice passages!
from Chapter VI: Sherlock Holmes in Love:
“The first of such [stories about damsels in distress] begins with the words 'my dear fellow,' which may be said to suggest a return, after the exotic and heterosexual flights of the Irene Adler business, to the cosy bachelor life of Holmes and Watson” - because there's nothing sexy going on at Baker Street, oh hell naw.
Of “The Speckled Band”: “Miss Stoner's exaggerated feminine qualities and Holmes' macho behavior contribute to the story's effectiveness” - macho? Really?
From Chapter IX: A World Without Women:
“The sexual activities and motives discussed so far have been heterosexual. One would not call them all normal, extending as they do to rape, flagellation, and other antisocial behavior (!), but they are all derived from the originally normal attraction of men for women and women for men (!!). Homosexual matters are much less obviously present in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but since homosexuality is a part of human life, and the stories are meant to be a reflection of human life, some evidence of it is likely to be found there.”
“[Queer] analysis, though it may sounds both far-fetched and distasteful, is supported by many details in the story …. It will certainly appear far-fetched to use it as the basis for an allegation (!!!!!) that Holmes is drawn as a homosexual, or that Doyle deliberately wrote a story with homosexual motifs.” I mean. Distasteful? Allegation? Faugh!
Of the “worth a wound” scene: “It can be called nothing but a love scene. For years, of course, Sherlockians have enjoyed the joke that Watson was a woman or, perhaps, Holmes was. Aside from such comic suggestions, do the characters, after all, emerge as active or latent homosexuals? …. the bald fact is that the detective and his partner are not portrayed as homosexuals” - I'm not sure if the har har they're gay thing or the paternalistic it's the facts attitude hacks me off more. But this passage is pretty much everything wrong with dudely Sherlockian scholarship. Gag.
The chapter then maunders off into Freud and castration and I don't even, finally coming to an end with this jewel: “The final chapter turns from the less pleasant sexual topics of this chapter to the most pleasant sexual topic of all: successful, even sometimes happy, heterosexual love and marriage.”
There are not enough interrobangs in the world.
Man, I don't get it. How does this rubbish get printed - and why does no one want to write a book about how Sherlock Holmes is kinda gay?! All joking aside, I am really rather shocked that this kind of heterosexist tripe is both contemporarily printed and housed in my University library – why, IU, why? It always shocks me a bit to find this kind of prejudice in ostensibly academic contexts. I'm so much a child of the nineties that I'm awfully used to feminist/queer crit being borderline passe.
Also – I would dearly love to see a study on doodly criticism of commonly-queered books. The panicked anxious masculinity in Mr. Redmond's writing has some very interesting psychosexual implications. But then you'd have to deal with their fapping, and really, who wants to?
FWIW, I've also been reading - and tremendously enjoying - Graham Robb's Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. Not only does he win my heart right off the bat by giving the diss to some of the more extreme strains of Foucauldian sexual theory, but his book might be the gentlest, sweetest book I've ever read about sexual "deviancy." He goes beyond law and medicine to talk about actual queer lives, in the process re-discovering the fact that queer relationships can involve love as well as sex. It's a heartbreaking book, as all books of its kind are bound to be, but it's also surprisingly romantic.
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Date: 2010-04-27 03:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 04:45 pm (UTC)