derien | i talk too much

i talk too much

I never shut up.

I talked way too much in someone else's journal, today, sucking the life from the conversation.
Quick summary:
1) Victorian homoeroticism (Watson/Holmes, Bracy/Gedge), and certain LOTR pairings (Legolas/Gimli, Merry/Pippin) rule. (I didn't say that Legolas/Aragon shippers can bite my lilywhite, but... That's just wrong. And not in a good way.)
2) I'm a spaz.

We went to Bean's and got some good stuff - 40% employee discount is cool. Today was cooking day for

eor - he did about seven hours in front of the hot stove. I did laundry and groceries.

Now much to do before sleeping - packing and lunch makings for hiking tomorrow.

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I think everyone should be into Victorian homoeroticism and seek it out in 19th century literature :-) (And Holmes? So gay. All that sitting around indoors thinking, languid gestures, the drug use, the obsessively "sterile" music - he only ever plays the violin for himself, yes? - apparently all 19th century literary codes for "unnatural" interests, according to the book on homosexuality in the 19th century I was reading).

Legolas/Gimli is good! And canonical! Sheesh, what part of the "love conquering all, including millennia of racism" don't the L/A shippers get?

apparently all 19th century literary codes for "unnatural" interests, according to the book on homosexuality in the 19th century I was reading

I didn't know that. I mean, judging by the attitudes of our time, he feels gay, but one really must try to guess at the attitudes of the time the stories were written it. If analysis by standards of that time period seems to fit, I guess it's quite possible Doyle was writing him as gay.

If analysis by standards of that time period seems to fit, I guess it's quite possible Doyle was writing him as gay.

I think it's perfectly possible - Doyle didn't have a lot of the prejudices it's commonly assumed the Victorians had. (And Robb's book, Strangers makes the perfectly sane assessment that a lot of the public horror at prominent people being outed wasn't due to suddenly realising someone was gay, but due to the fact that now there could no longer be the polite fiction of people not knowing; Wilde, for example, had tremendous public sympathy and support - but could no longer be received publicly by polite society.) Interestingly, some of the evidence at Wilde's trial was precisely the literary stereotypes - readers "knew" homosexuals kept the curtains drawn and liked heavy perfume in a room, so the prosecution based part of its case on Wilde's rooms being like that.

I think it was

mizzmarvel reading "Strangers" that started the conversation in her LJ. She didn't buy the author's assertion that Holmes WAS gay, because we can't ever know what Doyle intended. I think, given she has no evidence to the contrary, she's going on the assumption that Doyle did have all the prejudices of the usual Victorian. Do you have that peice of information from a seperate source, or the same book? Just for corroboration, because if the author wants to prove his point... you know. But I'd be willing to believe that you're right simply based on his involvement in the whole paranormal area. It was a fad of the time, but I think it had to be a movement of people who were a little more open-minded than the norm.

I'm going on the same book, but his argument is more sophisticated than Holmes (or other characters) simply not noticing a woman's beauty (I found her post, but don't want to respond without checking the book again). However, people who've read a lot of Doyle, like

yonmei, have told me that not only was Doyle not racist, he was actually anti-racist by the standards of his time (at a time when the N-word was flung around very casually, Doyle uses it a total of something like three times in the Holmes stories, and always by a character with already defined prejudices). So that's one prejudice that Doyle at least seems not to share.

Point to you and

yonmei. I had almost forgotten "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," which impressed me even when I first read it (erm, 10 or 11 years old?) as being very progressive in it's portayal of a white woman who married a black man, and the pain inflicted on them and their child by prejudice.

Aha! The game is afoot, and wearing particularly fetching shoes. Doyle apparently was fascinated by homosexuality, had gay friends and was interested in collecting information on sexuality in other cultures. He also knew and admired Wilde (and Robb suggests Wilde's personality may have influenced that of Holmes) and thought that he should not have been sent to prison (suggesting instead he should have been found a doctor, or possibly a therapist). Some choice quotes from Robb's book that don't seem to be forcing the evidence to a desired pattern:

Conan Doyle himself was quietly ambivalent on the subject of homosexuality. In one of the medical tales collected in Round the Red Lamp (1894), an alienist called Charley Manson, 'author of the brilliant monograph, Obscure Lesions in the Unmarried, regrets that, while 'some of the richest human materials that a man could study' can be found in the field of medicine, these subjects are out-of-bounds to the novelist: for example, 'the singular phenomena of waxing and of waning manhood' and 'those actions which have cut short many an honoured career and sent a man to prison when he should have been hurried to a consulting room.' [. . .] Doyle had once asked Roger Casement to provide him with information on sexual perversion among the natives of the Peruvian amazon, and he supported him publicly even after the 'Black Diaries' had revealed Casement's own enthusiastic contribution to homosexual perversion in South America (pp260-261) [The 'Black Diaries' contained extensive notes on Casement's sexual use of boys, and were used to discredit him and aid in his execution for treason. Robb notes that the more stringently applied legal penalties during the 19th century fell quite frequently on Irish figures or Irish sympathisers who were distrusted by the British establishment.]

His impressions of Oscar Wilde (whom he met at a dinner given by the publisher of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sign of Four):

Wilde's conversation had left 'an indelible impression' - 'his curious precision of statement,' the 'delicate flavour of humour.' 'He towered above us all.'

On Holmes:

Like a true Decadent, Holmes enjoys 'introspective' German music and listens to it with 'languid, dreamy eyes.' 'Art for art's sake' is one of his mottoes - applied, not to poetry, but to the incongruously useful art of criminal detection. He possesses the prerequisites of any serious aesthete: 'extraordinary delicacy of touch', a 'catlike love of personal cleanliness', and artistic French blood. [There is also his brother Mycroft] a brilliant and eccentric bachelor who spends his evenings at a club for unsociable men, observing the 'magnificent types' that tread its carpet: 'The Diogenes Club,' explains Holmes, 'is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft, one of the queerest men.' (pp261-262) [Robb says "queer" had its modern sense by 1894 - the Marquis of Queensberry referred to "Snob Queers" - I think it must have been kept out of polite speech, though, unless we're to think of someone like Fenn using it ironically in his books - sometimes maybe, but it's used far too often for it to always have that meaning!]

Holmes is languid, earnest - both words with gay overtones (as in "The Importance of Being Ernest"). He also has 'a weakness' for Turkish Baths and [i]nstead of asserting his manliness in 'amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England', he frequents Chinese opium dens, consorts with 'rough-looking men', and has 'at least five small refuges in different parts of London in which he was able to change his personality. (p265) He also suddenly beg[s] Watson to run away with him to the Continent after almost losing his life in Vere Street - a name notorious in the annals of homosexual scandal.

(to be continued)

Given Doyle's documented interest in homosexuality in various cultures and his admiration and friendship for Wilde and Casement, both of whom he supported after their disgrace, I think we can safely say he wasn't homophobic (at least not by the standards of his time). Wilde and Casement were also politically deviant, given their support for Irish independence. Added to this, when we have all these code words that other people applied to Wilde (and most of the theatre/writing world knew Wilde was gay) applied to Holmes, I think there's a damn good case to be made for Holmes being deliberately written as a gay man. By not outright stating anything, Doyle would escape prosecution for obscenity, but some- many? - of his readers would know what he meant (Wilde himself used the same tricks, as did Gilbert and Sullivan in their satire on Wilde).

As for the argument that we don't know what an author intended (which so many people use when a theory they don't like or agree with is put forward) - I just don't agree. Are we ever going to find a sworn affadavit from Doyle saying "I wrote Sherlock Holmes as a sexual invert"? No, we are not. But we don't need to, because the code he used wasn't meant to be impenetrable, it was meant to be understood. And by reading his works in the context of 19th century society and other 19th century literature, it is understandable (and the same can be said about any literature, from any time period - it is understandable, we can see both what authors mean to say and what they deliberately leave out - which can, of course, underline what they mean to say even more strongly). And readers can see quite clearly what is in a text, once they even begin to understand the code - subtext really is there, after all. Where we do have an author's confirmation, it frequently only confirms what the reader has already seen (like the Buffy/Faith subtext being officially confirmed as existing, or the moving of Tara-as-queer from subtext to text - the viewers already knew). An author's imprimature may be nice for a particular reading, but it is supremely unecessary for careful readers/viewers who respect the text enough not to read their pet theories into it,, and respect it enough to read what it actually says.

Wow. I'm impressed. And convinced. This is pretty much condensed from "Strangers?" Or other sources that you know/knowledge you have from reading Victorian literature?

The first part is mainly a presentation of Robb's argument about Holmes, these two paragraphs are my opinion on that argument and on the "author's intent" argument - a large part of the literary work of Biblical Studies and Classics, for example, aims at learning how to separate out layers in a text, see what the various writers and editors are saying and how they argue with or modify the views of earlier writers. If it's possible to have a good degree of certainty about what a long-dead writer in a totally different language is doing with their text, it's possible to do it with a far more recent text where there are so many other texts to cross-check it with.

I don't think we can say with 100% accuracy that we absolutely know Doyle wrote Holmes as a gay man - but I'm happy to say that the burden of evidence points that way. Being able to ask Doyle (or any writer, including living ones) for an opinion wouldn't help either - would the Doyle who great admired Wilde give the same answer as the Doyle holding the telegram about his son's death iin the trenches or the Doyle obsessed with spiritualism of the 1920s? Authors change their minds about their own work, or just plain forget, or don't have their research material handy and so blather - but texts can be checke by themselves and must be, for they are what we have when the author is gone. (My favourite example of an author's opinion contradicting their own text is C J Cherryh's view of one of the characters, Dr Jordan Warrick, in her book Cyteen - she has said several times what a bad father this character is, how he'd be horrible to his son(s) lives and careers, what an all-round nasty person he is, caring only for his own work and professional reputation. Yet the character sacrifices his freedom and his personal reputation to save his partner and 17 year old foster son (who have no legal rights and could even be legally killed - I'll say no more if you haven't read it) and his own 17 year old son son, who is being framed for murder. There's quite a difference there! And his genuine love for all three of these people is underlined in the book, yet Cherryh thinks otherwise!)

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Gay Holmes, part two

Re: Gay Holmes, part two

Re: Gay Holmes, part two