Hello Victorianists,
On Thursday, we will be wrapping up our discussion of
Victorian literature. It feels like
someone should be getting married, no?
As a way to revise what we have studied and synthesize the
discussions of a very productive semester, I would like you to choose one text
from the second half of the semester (those of Dickens, Christina Rossetti,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arnold, Hopkins, Eliot, Meredith, Hardy, or Levy) to
compare to The Sign of Four. What connections can you discover between
Doyle’s text—its narrative, characters, themes, style, tone—and that of one of
the other authors?
For example, you might note that The Sign of Four has a double setting: the characters during the
actual unfolding of the adventure remain in London but the mystery and Small’s
lengthy retelling position us in India. That
Doyle sets his text on a symbolically potent borderline might remind you of
Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” located as it is on the cliffs between England and
France. You might consider how each
author uses the cultural/national border—how he asserts the difference between
self and other, and how he blurs that distinction.
Or, perhaps Doyle’s treatment of female characters as
commodities (Watson compares his engagement to Mary Morstan to gaining a
treasure like that of the Indian jewels) reminds you of Christina Rossetti’s
great poem of fruit and prostitution.
Comparing the power that women in each text have and how they operate in
the Victorian exchange economy might be illuminating.
Don’t be afraid, of course, to compare seemingly unlike
things; we didn’t read Eliot for nothing.
We have plenty of light at our command; disperse it as you will over
that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
Please enjoy the famous images of Holmes by Sydney Paget (his original illustrations did much to create the image of Doyle's detective we still have). Then, please enjoy this scene from the iconic 1987 film adaptation of The Sign of Four by the British television behemoth, ITV Granada. The clip features the revelation of Tongo (beginning at 0:52).
Happy (re)reading,
Prof. M.
Prof. M.
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| from "The Silver Blaze" |
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| from "The Man with the Twisted Lip" |
The character of Sherlock Holmes reminded me of two men in Middlemarch, Casaubon and Lydgate. Like the two of them, Holmes is deeply invested in the study of minutiae – sometimes at the expense of the bigger picture. Holmes has his treatises on cigarette ash and other such stuff, Casaubon has his key to mythologies, and Lydgate has his key to medicine. Practical, every-day life holds little interest for them. Like them, he suffers from arrogance. And all three men seem to be incapable of happy marriage – Casaubon and Lydgate demonstrably so, though Holmes is bright enough to realize his shortcomings in that respect. All three men, when stripped of their mission, are lost. Casaubon and Lydgate turn to despair, while Holmes gets high instead, but essentially all three men are fully dependent on one source of fulfillment. All three men think themselves self-sufficient, and above the fray. Lydgate believes he can get through life in Middlemarch unscathed, only to be saddled with a wife and a bad reputation. Casaubon believes he can get married and continue life unaffected. Holmes makes sure to stay emotionally unengaged with any of his cases. Yet all three men need others, for one purpose: admiration. The Middlemarchers get wives for that purpose (disastrously), while Holmes has his beloved Watson. (Notably, all the supporting characters in these relationships eventually recognize their husbands’/friend’s weaknesses). And all of these men are seemingly doomed to tragedy. All die before their time (putting aside reincarnation for the moment). It’s as though this sort of character – who thinks himself above it all, and is in ways larger than life – has no place in society, and must, like the fallen woman, be ejected from it through death.
ReplyDeleteThis is a stretch, but here goes:
ReplyDeleteWe talked about ACD's romping writing style that he uses for exceedingly complex and mournful historical, social issue; the the language is cognitively dissonant with the subject matter. But ACD drags us into his caper anyway, and we kind of “forgive” him for his cavalier racism, even semi-forgetting upon completion of the novella that it's covered with the shrapnel of gross ethnic stereotypes.
Besides a 3 initial name, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Doyle share a habit of inserting totally unexpected, inappropriate language into their narratives. The quick wit, alliteration, funky metre, fun rhyme, etc of "Carrion Comfort,” for example, masks the fact that this poem is kind of inscrutable, though nearly overwhelmingly emotional. The poet’s speaker is sort of hysterical. There is a madness of language being thrown together in a manner or with subject matter that doesn’t truly work, yet, somehow does and manages to really fun while deeply disconcerting. Of course, the poet consciously puzzles his language to create a simultaneously confusing, scary, welcoming, lovely, horrible commentary on…something. GMH consciously messes with how people conventionally think about language -- you know, as the primary means of conveying a point— to bring out a totally different power language can have. Obviously, ACD’s writing is probably unwittingly complicated; he isn’t making a point with the slapped together string of words being so out of synch with the topic, but, yet, that reality does bear a certain similarity to the very consciously, brilliantly written poems of GMH.
Quick side point: ACD’s lazy, laid back racism may be less markedly memorable, or, more precisely, easier to overlook for the sake of the story, when one is forced to get used to seeing one’s own identity being raped as fodder for a story.
Like Shoshana, I would also like to compare a character to Lydgate, but not Sherlock, rather, Watson. In both Middlemarch and Sign of Four, there are love stories. The one in S4 happens so quickly, and with literally no foundation. So too, in MM, the relationship between Lydgate and Rosie happened so fast. In both relationships, the love has foundation in so little, and the scraps of foundation that they do have are based on embarrassingly external qualities. Lydgate wants to marry Rosie because he feels she is the "ideal woman". She is beautiful, poised, seemingly submissive, and will make the perfect wife to support him through his noble work of medicine. Similarly, Watson finds his "treasure" in Miss Morstan whom he says has "white hands" (evocative of Helen, idealistic woman), and whom he is drawn too inexplicably (when they hold hands as they are afraid), and whom he intends to protect from the harsh details of crime fighting (she must be very delicate). Their story also ends in a fast, and seemingly baseless marriage. We know how well Lydgate and Rosie's marriage turns out, and apparently Watson leaves Miss Marston at one point to return to Sherlock (although that could be ACD's inconsistency). Regardless of how the marriage turns out, both men have a very wrong idealistic view of marriage: that it takes no effort to be successful in, and that the woman aren't really independent people with thoughts and feelings. Rather they are there to serve their husbands and be used for ego-pumping, or they are there to be a "treasure" and be looked at and kept like some sort of art piece.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad that you saw this, too! I was planning on a Lydgate/Watson comparison as part of my paper, it's comforting to know that it's not unfounded.
DeleteI'd like to point out differences in the similarities of these marriages: Rosamund is enamoured with Lydgate's family connections and the prospect of wealth from them; Watson, however, is deterred from asking Mary to marry (heh) him because he fears that she is now a rich heiress, while he has no family or money and can't provide.
So it's funny how these unions end in a similar way, even though their attitudes toward money and family, (which ultimately cause the downfall of one of them) were on opposite ends of the spectrum.
I was tempted to draw connections between Doyle and Barrett Browning, simply because they are the only writers who mentioned India in their work off the top of my head. It’s a flimsy link to go on, but like I said, tempted… aren’t I lucky that EBB was covered in the first half of the semester?
ReplyDeleteDare I say that I see bits of Sherlock in Cohen? Both look for recognition of sorts, both feature in books which become wildly popular yet they remain unhappy with that success. Both want something intangible--understanding, the moon, intellectual highs, a vision, satisfaction--and don’t quite get it; or perhaps they do get it, but it is beyond the scope or comprehension of the narrator.
For we see both Sherlock and Cohen from the eyes of another. Holmes is a doer, regardless of how much he observes, and Watson, his watcher, is never quite on the same page no matter how much he tries to keep up. Cohen’s oggler believes that he knows and understands everything about his subject based upon the stereotypes he’s come to paint over the student and picking up on only bits of things that Cohen says-- while Cohen is in truth living on an entirely different plane than the narrator imagines. The onlooker is always several steps behind. Sherlock and Cohen reside in the untouchable mind which both begs to be touched and pushes all of that away. Although the pushing away of touch is mostly because the subject views the touching as intrusive; if it occurred under different circumstances or with different sentiments, perhaps it would be better received.
And I wouldn’t necessarily say that Levy is by extension like Doyle, since we previously established that she holds personal connections with Cohen; so let’s say that Sherlock/Levy is a viable link. I mostly see this in their response style: in Levy’s nonfiction, all of her points are, well, pointed--they address a specific incident which was problematic or interesting in the scene/article opposing hers, and she tears each one apart with logic and builds her castle upon the pieces. Sherlock solves cases in the same way. He looks at the big picture and diminishes it to little, individual pieces as he moves through the case, and puts it all back together with the backstories and reasoning behind each of the seemingly inconsequential or irregular circumstances and incidental accounts or background information/objects. (I also think that the form of logic Sherlock uses is really defined as “abductive reasoning,” and not “deductive,” which is interesting, because “abduct” is to remove by force, whereas “deduct” is more of a mathematical subtraction. Sherlock is more forceful in his reasoning, his problem-solving isn’t much of a passive action for him; neither are Levy’s responses in the Chronicle, and she pokes holes when “ש” attempts to use logic to made presumptions about her. )
(Also, as a non-BBC!Sherlockian, I just realized that the castle comment might be read as a “mind palace” reference, but it was unintentional).
become a BBC Sherlockian. That's an order.
DeleteAs much as I loath to compare Doyle to Dickens given the aggressive racism that plagued both of them, I think I will anyway.
ReplyDeleteMuch of The Sign of Four reminded me of Dicken’s voyeur-esque flanuer, in that it was endlessly fascinated by the world it was not a part of, seemingly because it was not part of it.
For starters, the book dedicated a lot of its time to the Jonathan Small’s story, a white man’s take on the goings on in India. This sounds a bit too much like the patronizing narration of sketches. Dicken’s narrator can tell us about London because he is not part of the class he is focusing on. Kind of Mansplaining about class, class-splaining, if you will. Doyle does this with his white characters. They are the voices of everything, they get to tell all sides of the story, and we only get their take both the Indian Revolution and the Indian characters.
Additionally, the gore of the novel(la?) was reminiscent of the way the people in Greenwich Fair go to look at the freaks. The inception of the moment is breathtaking, we watch characters watching freaks and think they that are freaks, and so in turn the readers become just as voyeuristic. When I read the death scenes, I was almost as thrilled as Holmes, ‘this just got interesting’ I thought. But at the same time I was unnerved by Holmes’s excitement. Until I realized that through Watson’s eyes I had become Holmes. I was watching his morbid fascination with my own morbid fascination.
In this way, both of the authors were similar to Levy’s expression of the third-party thinking they can understand those within a certain group. But in the end everything is highly filtered through the eyes of the outsiders, and so you have an author not bothering with the narrative cohesiveness of his Indian character’s names as well as Dicken’s, ‘the usual crowd of Jews and nondescripts.’ What is not us is all the same.