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[derien]

Am loving the discussion of slash fandom interpretations of Holmes and Watson's sexuality going on over at cox_and_co. :)

PT went well - will probably be done after Thursday.

Comments

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Huh, that is indeed a very interesting discussion.

It's funny, I only had kind of a short flirtation with the Holmes fandom, though the canon's great and I do still read the occasional H/W. Some of that obviously has to do with falling crazy in love with Due South, but I find it's interesting to read people's comments about fic tropes in H/W and how many of them could also be said of Jeeves & Wooster fanfic.

I mean, obviously in terms of canon there's the similarity of two male leads, one of whom is the primary narrator, and the other who's more aware of what's really going on. And that pattern tends to be carried over into fic for both of them - someone mentioned how rare it was to have a story in 3rd person in H/W, and that's very true of J/W as well. There are the blackmail plots, the shoutouts to Oscar Wilde, Holmes or Jeeves's presumed issues being attributed to queerness, Holmes or Jeeves's control issues, pining of slightly different types on both sides, Watson or Wooster usually being the one who gets whomped and receives h/c, & etc. There's the classic structure of the Seekrit Slashy Manuscript.

The differences are interesting too, though: there's sometimes an attempt to have Bertie help Jeeves a la Watson learning to deduce, but it's uncommon, as Jeeves bottoming. And of course J/W is typically much less angsty than H/W, which obviously makes sense. (Or at least it used to be. I'm having some serious trouble wrapping my brain around the apparently growing number of rapefics in J/W. DDD: )

I wonder now if part of the reason I ducked out of Holmes fandom, though, isn't that I ended up displacing some of my frustrations with J&W fandom - the lack of stylistic variety, the focus on the OTP to the point of ignoring secondary characters, the sort of weird attitude towards female characters.

I mean, someone commented in that discussion that it's great that there's not a lot of Mary-bashing, and if you're looking at it in comparison with slash fandom as a whole, yes, it is great that a female character who does to some extent come between the two guys doesn't just get exoriated by most of the fandom. I still find it...weird, though, that the OP had to ask the question of whether "Mary was real." I mean, one of the most popular novels specifically focuses on her and her case, and she does appear - however peripherally - in other stories. Having one or two stories where there's an AU proposition that she was made up is one thing; having it be that pervasive as a trope is a little unsettling. And then there's the notion that, well, Watson might have loved her "in a way," just not as much as he loved Holmes.

I wonder to what extent this is expressive of the fan's frustrations with Mary as a character. Is she too passive and mild to spark up interest in her as her own character? Because, okay, I have doubtlessly not read every fic in the fandom (though I sure as heck tried, months ago) but I can't think of even one fic from her POV, and only one with a threesome. :/

And on the J/W side...well, obviously Bertie never gets married, and most of his love interests are unsympathetic in canon. But not, I think, to the extent they're portrayed in fic: I'm pretty sure we're supposed to like a few of Bertie's female friends, at least as much as we're supposed to like the male ones. And I'm continually sort of disconcerted by the way 80% of all J/W stories seem to feel the need to not just write Bertie as gay rather than bi, but to actually have him explain, sometimes at length, that he's never really been attracted to girls at all. I mean, it's one interpretation? But considering that he does get sizable crushes on at least four female characters in canon, and that generally speaking it's unlikely to have been their personalities that attracted him, why does fic have him so firmly on the "ew, girls!" end of the scale?

...Okay, that was a bit of a digression. Um. Anyway. All very interesting, so thanks for linking to the discussion!

[derien.livejournal.com]

I like your compare/contrast. :) I think that Wodehouse really wanted to write a parallel for the Holmes and Watson stories, and he started to in the Psmith and Mike stories, but because of basic structural flaws with the characters he ended up feeling that they didn't interact in quite the right way (Mike is the less articulate of the pair and can't serve as narrator) so he dropped them and created another pair that would serve the purpose.

I also suspect that Jeeves less often bottoms because their overt master/servant relationship is flipped by his topping. Yes, we know he's actually in charge all the time, but that feels almost like a glimpse at their secret life given to the reader (and his close friends, really) - the stuff that we're reading as the implication of their relationship.

(I, too, am having a huge difficulty with all the rape fics coming out of J/W fandom, lately. It's like there's this certain kink that some people have of taking anything fun and making it angst, and they're such poor writers that they can't do angst without rape. Or rape is just their particular kink. I think if we took a poll we'd learn that these writers are young and haven't read a lot of Wodehouse. They saw the show and have read yaoi.)

The "is Mary real" question, though, that's actually not invented by the fandom. Or, at least you can't blame the slash fandom for it. Holmsians have been debating that one for a long time, because if you study Watson's timeline as he gives it in the stories you'll notice he moves in and out of Baker Street like a ping-pong ball. I'm pretty sure there was an essay exploring that question written for one of the Baker Street Irregular meetings in the 60's, (though I'm not sure how to back up that assertation, mine being the flimsiest memory on the planet) where it was suggested that Mary might have been fictional, or possibly an actress they hired or a friend who agreed to a marriage of convenience. (Alternatively, one of the ways they refute some of the dates Watson gives in order to make new timelines is to argue that he must have been lying or incorrect because he was or wasn't apparently married at the time.) And then of course there are other explanations amongst regular Holmsians - one suggested that Mary Morstan didn't last long, that they divorced and he ended up remarrying up to five times, and that the Mary whom (who?) he 'lost' while Holmes was gone after Riechenbach was a different Mary. Or their relationship was on-again/off-again, and he moved back in with Holmes when he wasn't in favor with her, but that doesn't explain how his practice comes and goes at convenience, or the thing of his having rooms in Queen Anne street at one point.

I think the general belief that if she was real Watson didn't love her as much as he loved Holmes might be because people can't quite wrap their heads around the fact that some people CAN love more than one person very deeply. You notice in my reply in that conversation I referred to Watson as Holmes's One True Love, but not the other way around - I support the idea of a Mary who's real and Watson having Two True Loves, and I'd love to see more threesomes, but that means I have to subscribe to one of the alternate time-line theories where he's lying about dates, and choosing which makes my head spin.

crap, I ran out of character space and have to break this into two replies.

[derien.livejournal.com]

But, yeah, as far as Bertie and his attractions to women are concerned, he definitely has some in canon, and it's completely silly, as you say, for people to try to pretend otherwise. I may have mentioned this to you in the past, but I actually had one person who betaed a story for me insist that Bertie hates Florence Craye, when I am fairly certain that he states in a canon story that he's quite fond of her, so long as she's not trying to marry him. In fact, he throws his arms open to hug her and says, "Darling!" when he sees her, and I'm pretty sure it's in the story where he trips a policeman in a night club raid so she can escape - and the same beta insisted Bertie would never use the pet name "Darling."

This is kind of like the flip side of the straight Holmesians who insist Watson wasn't romantically in love with Holmes because he married a woman - the possibility of someone being a perfectly well-adjusted bisexual seems to pass some people by. Either that or Hugh Laurie's interpretation of Bertie pinged people's gaydars too strongly. :) I submit for your consideration that the same group of fans who go for the rapefic will also be the ones who tend toward "ew, girls!"-Bertie, and that they will have come to the fandom through television and yaoi, and not have read the stories.

We could ask some questions on Indeedsir and see if we can disprove my theory.

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

I think that Wodehouse really wanted to write a parallel for the Holmes and Watson stories

Huh, I hadn't really thought of it that way, but yes, he was pretty obviously influenced by them, wasn't he?

I figure that actually with Bertie and Jeeves some of the parallels grew kind of organically as the characters developed. Bertie developed out of Reggie Pepper because Wodehouse really liked having a funny narrator, but he quickly developed more depth than Reggie had; Jeeves was originally a one-line bit player, but bloomed into a full character in his own right. And I guess to some extent there's just the fact that it's useful, narratively, to have the viewpoint character be unaware of some parts of a situation, while having another who can explain everything at the end.

we know he's actually in charge all the time, but that feels almost like a glimpse at their secret life given to the reader

*nods enthusiastically* Yes, exactly. I sometimes worry that I harp too much about the class divide in Wodehouse, in meta conversations and whatnot. But it seems like sometimes fanwriters either miss that background entirely - and really, it's one of the world's basic assumptions, the master/servant relationship - or they overshoot it seriously and take the division to, like, early Victorian degrees where the serving classes were horribly oppressed with no recourse. Which isn't really any more correct.

Though in regard to the top/bottom thing - the seme/uke model of the more powerful character always being the penetrator or "man" while the weaker, prettier one is the penetrated or "woman" is kind of annoyingly pervasive in many areas of slash as well as yaoi, and it's...kind of annoying, IMHO, if there's no cultural reason for it. Because god forbid a strong character might like being on the bottom. Which isn't to say that there mightn't be some cultural prejudices about pitcher vs. catcher in Jeeves and Bertie's era, and I could see an interesting story being made about that. But it's usually just taken as an assumption, and if there's any explanation at all about why Jeeves is always on top it's because he was abused once upon a time. *sigh*

(I just. I don't like rapefic at all. Ever. I read a lot of fanfic in many different fandoms and I think I've seen at most maybe three stories addressing non-canonical rape that seemed to me to be well-done and non-gratutitous, and the fandoms themselves were much, much more serious in focus than the Wodehouseverse, and it was still a squick. Which isn't to say to people who dig rape fantasy, "Your Kink Is Not Okay," but just...maybe this isn't the right fandom and characters for it? Because I cannot see it ever, ever happening even in the darkest, most morally ambiguous version of the Wodehouseverse I can conceive of.)


The "is Mary real" question, though, that's actually not invented by the fandom. Or, at least you can't blame the slash fandom for it.

Ah, well, there you go: I'm a bit clueless about a lot of the old school Holmesian stuff. Makes sense. And oh, the old problem of having a canon where the creator was much less interested in continuity than the fans. XD Yeah, that happens all the time, and it's always sort of simultaneously hilarious and maddening.

...Though if you're not coming from a slash perspective, why on earth would Holmes and Watson have needed to invent Mary? o_O!

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Bertie and girls is an interesting subject. (I have Thoughts on the subj.! Beware!) To some extent I can see how people might justify an "eww! girls!" attitude on the basis of his periodic "Oh woman, woman" and "the f. of the s. is more d. than the m." type comments, but it's important to note, I think, that he usually is making those comments when a particular woman is particularly giving him a hard time.

Bertie's got at least four girls I can think of off the top of my head who he actively pursues at one point or another: Florence, Bobbie, Pauline, and Gwladys Whatshername, the lady painter in "The Spot of Art." He also has a whole gaggle of females he's friendly with in a non-romantic fashion - his cousin Angela, Corky Pirbright (Catsmeat's sister), Emerald Stoker, Nobby Hopwood, and even Stiffy Byng; whatever we as readers may think of some of these characters, he usually seems to be glad to see them and eager to squire them around for lunch or take them out dancing. He just objects to them blackmailing him or setting him up to be biffed on the head or whatever, and who can blame him.

Florence, though, is an interesting case. The "Darling!" bit is actually from the "Jeeves Takes Charge," the first story in the internal chronology. (As opposed to the first story Wodehouse wrote - IIRC, there were a few of the New York stories first, building off of Reggie Pepper.) JTC is the one where Bertie's engaged to Florence for the first time, and heavily infatuated with her; he makes several excuses for her personality, temper, etc., on the grounds that she has a "wonderful profile." It's only when he's been kind of ground down by said personality and temper - in response to that attempt at "the good old embrace" she "sidestep[s] like a bantam-weight" - that he's even able to consider the idea that they might not be made for each other. Which seems to be the pattern with characters who fall for Florence, actually: she would appear to be very pretty indeed, because men take one look at her and are instantly ready to give up cocktails and slay dragons for her, and very jealous and defensive of the idea that she can do no wrong; it's only gradually that they become aware that, at the end of the day, they don't actually like her that much.

Personally I've always figured that Florence is one of the characters Wodehouse really doesn't want us to like; I think she was intended specifically as an antagonist, with her tendency to make unreasonable demands, and was conceived of as a collection of things Wodehouse disliked himself: imperiousness and coldness, especially in women; intellectual pretension and snobbery. But that doesn't mean that's how Bertie perceives her, exactly; he obviously does feel a need to protect her, as in the nightclub scene, though some of that is doubtlessly his chivalry at work. After Agatha marries her father, Bertie begins to introduce her as his cousin, rather than his ex, despite the latter usually being the relationship that's important in the plot. To me, it looks like they have this relationship where they've known each other since childhood (see, again, JTC and Bertie's knowing the family a long time); Bertie had an unwise, brief crush on her that got him into the trouble of proposing, but most of that attraction has worn well away, and he'd really be happy to consider her as a family member and a sort of young aunt/almost-friend if she wouldn't keep getting engaged to him again.

(Related question: is Florence fond of Bertie? Her father's ward/presumably friend Nobby says she thinks Bertie's the guy she always most wanted to marry, and certainly she does keep circling back to him. Is this just because she thinks she can control him, or does she actually care to some extent and just suck at expressing it? Also, Bertie is hostile to her suggestions that he has potential he's wasting, but it seems to be a frequent contention of fandom that Bertie's fairly bright in his own flaky way; could this be what she's responding to, and trying to make it fit her own ideas of what smart people ought to be like?)

continued tl;dr

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

Another thought: is it possible that Bertie, on some level, kind of needs someone to organize his life for him? He's obviously inclined to kick a bit when he sees himself being overtly controlled, whether by an aunt, a love interest, or Jeeves, but at the same time, well, he's also happier having someone in his life to act as his guide, philosopher and friend. Part of growing up under his aunts' thumbs, where the way people showed they cared was to boss him within an inch of his life? Is it possible that Florence's pushiness was originally part of the attraction, before he had Jeeves, and that it was only when Jeeves was there to fill the same need much more subtly that he started twigging to how very incompatible they were otherwise?)

the possibility of someone being a perfectly well-adjusted bisexual seems to pass some people by

What? You mean bisexuals exist? They're not just gay people pretending to be straight, or straight people pretending to be gay? My world, she is rocked! *eyeroll* I don't even object to Jeeves and Bertie both being solid Kinsey sixes in some stories if it didn't seem like it was in every story. And that Bertie was actually going out of his way to say he'd never been into girls at all, nope, not a little bit, gayer than a maypole here and always have been, when it's often not even relevant to the plot, damn it.

...I swear to god, I've come out of some stories wanting to write het just for a little damn variety.

We could ask some questions on Indeedsir and see if we can disprove my theory.

Might be interesting. Tempted as I am to go all "damn kids, get off my lawn!" about the current state of the fandom, I don't actually know that most of the fangirls are actually that bad. There's certainly a lot of good fanart appearing lately, and though I've gotten upset about fic recently there were at least a couple eye-burninating badfics out there back in the day, as well. But Indeed, Sir hasn't done one of those "what was your fandom of origin" posts in a while, so it might be cool to see.