Arthur Conan Doyle and Subtext

Because it is apparently my calling in life to obsessively research 19th century homosexuality and then yell about it on this dumb website, I’m going to keep doing it.

I’ve started to work on two books:

Here’s some stuff I’ve screamed about so far:

1) Early on in his book Kestner makes the argument that ACD – deliberately and with premeditation – used specific forms of subtext and coding in his writing. He discusses some big issues from the late 19th century (anxiety about the rapidly changing social structure, worries about a German invasion, the complicated perceptions of America, etc) and then shows specific examples of how ACD tapped into these issues by using subtext in the stories. This is important because it supports the idea that ACD could also have constructed a subtext around some other popular topics as well (homosexuality). Additionally, Kestner believes that ACD “queried and interrogated” 19th century ideas of masculinity and manliness in the Sherlock Holmes stories and found them to be problematic. He notes that ACD creates a distinction between manliness and heterosexuality in his writing: you don’t have to be blatantly heterosexual to be a 19th century “man”, as we see in the character of Sherlock Holmes.

2) The readers of the Strand magazine which published ACD’s stories were predominantly male. ACD reportedly said his ideal audience was British men and boys. To me, this implies he could write about male culture perhaps in a way that men of that era could uniquely understand, including subtle nuances of male behaviour and relationships in both public and private spheres. (Those supposedly innocent Turkish bathhouse scenes fooled no one, ACD.)

3) Kestner notes that once Watson joins Holmes in living at 221B, they immediately “behave as if they had always lived together.” Aw. My heart. Also, he gives a list like “they read together and eat together and smoke together and walk together” and then my eyes just glazed over.

4) Then Barsham gives us these gems:

“As in all the Holmes stories, a hidden level of sexual reference anarchically parodies the formal orderings of masculine discourse, playfully concealed in the crime or mystery it investigates.”

and

“No amount of engagement with the massive archives of Sherlock Holmes’ scholarship can silence their celebration of the ingeniously superficial. Their depth lies only in the autobiographical impulses re-symbolised within them and the sexuality which they conceal.”

and

“The problem of marriage rather than the solution of crime is the main issue of the early Holmes stories. […]…the status of Watson’s marriage to Mary Morstan, which concludes the second novella, The Sign of Four, [provides] “the series’ one irreversible event.” Sexuality in the private sphere is the territory of silence in which Sherlock Holmes is initially configured.”

and

“…Doyle created a homoerotic religion of Western masculinity, located in a space safe from sexuality but charged with its symbols and their control.”

In my view, Barsham is saying that yes, there is sexual subtext in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and yes, these sexual references are carefully hidden within the mysteries.

More to come.

RB direct from the op for better tagging.