The Woman

[dreamer_easy]

In recent months I've been reading a little of the extensive scholarly work on Sherlock Holmes - colonialism, gender, etc. (Which reminds me - I must see if anybody's doing work on Top Gear and masculinity. ETA: aha!) Ho ho, how well the Victorians knew their position at the top of the totem pole, the apex of the chain of being, was a fragile illusion - they were sweating bullets about the New Woman, "reverse colonisation", and a bunch of other stuff that threatened their superiority. (ETA: Viz. They were bricking it.)

One of the things I absorbed was an essay called "Displacing Urban Man: Sherlock Holmes's London" by Andrew Smith (cite below). As Smith points out, confusingly, Victorian women were increasingly out in public - shopping, going to clubs, etc. Suddenly you didn't know who was a lady and who was a whore; if this kept on, you wouldn't know who was a woman and who was a man. Along comes Irene Adler, who not only shags what she likes but bests our hero at the masculine game of logic. (The loveless Sherlock gets to be her groom - geddit?) This sort of thing can only lead to smoking and voting - not to mention wearing trousers, which Irene explicitly does in her "male costume". (I was slightly disappointed that we didn't get the Scandal in Belgravia Irene delivering the famous "Good night, Mr Sherlock Holmes" while in male clobber, until I realised that of course we did.) Fortunately, when it comes to women, Irene is an exception. Mostly. She's not the only bad girl in the canon, suggesting a spot of Victorian nail-chewing over shifting gender roles.

__
Smith, Andrew. "Displacing Urban Man: Sherlock Holmes's London". in Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (eds). London eyes: reflections in text and image. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.

Comments

[viomisehunt.livejournal.com]

It was an interesting time.

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I must see if anybody's doing work on Top Gear and masculinity

What's to study? I mean, isn't it just a big ball of testosterone punctuated by thin layers of racism, homophobia and snark?

(And yet... I STILL watch the show)

Seriously, though, that could be an interesting thinkproject. I mean, it's easy to dismiss it as the above, but then one gets a look at Mays' choice in sweaters. Or Hammond's hair.

But I'm not smart enough to tackle that sort of thing, hell no.

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

I have a theory - well, several, but this is the main one - that they deliberately exaggerate behaviour gendered "masculine" in the contemporary West, in the same way that mediaeval Hindu goddess statues exaggerate their female characteristics in what's called a "peak shift". They might be seen as taking the piss out of all this blokeyness, but I think they're really just performing it - to attractive effect, like the statues. (It's so exaggerated, in fact, that it could be argued that it effectively genders the smaller, prettier, better-groomed, vulnerable Hammond as female by comparison with his co-hosts.)

In unrelated news, Sherlock has converted another young TV viewer into a reader. :)

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I agree that at least *some* of the behavior must be a put on, mostly 'cos I keep hoping that people as horribly as Jeremy Clarkson appears to be can't exist - I know, vain hope...

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

What makes Clarkson tolerable, I think, is his willingness to look like a complete idiot. Alas, too many of the audience don't get enough irony in their diets to get the joke!

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

I need to steal that phrase "Not enough irony in their diets". May I? ;)

And I quite agree!

[dreamer-easy.livejournal.com]

Do eet