"As if men had the monopoly on murder": why Elementary is a feminist show

SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses the plot of Elementary episodes 22 (The Woman) and 23 (Heroine).

The fourth Great Sherlock Holmes Debate was this Saturday, and I was fortunate enough to participate yet again. Thanks so much to the organisers at MX Publishing for gathering together Holmesian experts from all around the world, it was fantastic to hear everyone's presentations and thoughts on various adaptations of our favourite detective.

The recording of the entire debate should be up online in a couple of weeks once everything is edited, so keep an eye out for that. There was a great presentation on the Warner Bros. Sherlock Holmes films by Mary Platt and an amazing contribution by Bonnie MacBird who told us all about BBC's Sherlock. Luke Kuhns talked about Holmes pastiches, and we also had the Holmesian legend Roger Johnson, author of The Sherlock Holmes Miscellany, deliver a presentation about Lenfilm's Sherlock Holmes adaptations starring Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin as Russian Holmes and Watson. This is one of my personal favourites, so I was really glad to hear Roger talk about them. If you are so inclined, you can watch them all online here. The video quality isn't ideal, but it has English subtitles.

Natalie Dormer as Irene Adler in Elementary

My presentation was about Elementary, and although I only had about five minutes to try and explain why it was (or wasn't) a good contribution to the Holmesian legacy, I felt like it went pretty well and the feedback I received was all positive. In it I talked a little bit about how the show's announcement was met with astounding negativity and how it withstood all the criticism that was thrown at it and came out to be one of the most watched shows on CBS. I briefly touched upon the show's female characters and how I thought they were handled very well – I said that, in my opinion, Lucy Liu's portrayal of Watson was perhaps the closest to the original, Doyle's Watson, and I mentioned that Elementary's writers were mindful of having both their male and female characters multi-dimensional and complex, without resorting to tropes or the unfortunately popular virgin/whore dichotomy. I'd like to expand on this, primarily by talking about the most important woman in Sherlock's life: Irene Adler.

I have discussed the treatment of Irene Adler in a previous post, where I talked about her updated character as it was shown to us in the episode A Scandal in Belgravia in BBC's Sherlock. In this, her characterisation went from a point of strength to utter weakness, as the narrative displaced her from her strong, empowered queer identity and depowered her to suit itself and the character progression of its (presumably heterosexual) male characters. In essence, she had at least one foot in the refrigerator. (Here is a very good summation of the women in refrigerators trope.)

In Elementary, however, Irene Adler starts out in the deep, cold depths of the fridge, and then fights her way out. At first she is merely a mention, the beautiful dead girlfriend type who probably starred in most of Edgar Allan Poe's dreams and fantasies, the ethereal artist whose demise at the hands of the second most dangerous man in London drove the world's greatest detective to lose all semblance of control over his drug use. By now mostly everyone is familiar with the quote – to him, she was the Woman, the late Irene Adler. But is she? Adler is indeed, as Elementary shows us, one of dubious and questionable memory. She is not late at all: in fact, it turns out that she is Moriarty, Holmes's arch nemesis and the cause of most of his misfortune to date. The Woman and the Napoleon of Crime are thereby fused into one person. Which one of them beat Holmes, then? Canon tells us that they both did, at least for a time, and the same thing happens on Elementary. It's not done with the same drama that we saw in The Reichenbach Fall or read in The Final Problem, but then again the finale of the first season of Elementary wasn't meant as his plunge down a waterfall, simply a bump in the road, albeit a very significant one for Holmes.

Candis Cayne and Jonny Lee Miller
as Ms Hudson and Sherlock Holmes in Elementary

Adler's transformation teaches Holmes that there is no such thing as the Woman, because there is no such thing as a perfect representative of the female gender. There is no girl in the fridge, there isn't a virgin or whore because they are all people, and this is Elementary's greatest strength: people. Moriarty's characterisation isn't perfect and lacks some depth that other characters have, but this is to be expected since we have only seen her in one episode, while all the other characters got at least 23. Here's to hoping this won't be the end of Moriarty and she'll return in the second season.

Of course this isn't the only reason why I think that Elementary is a feminist show: there is Ms Hudson, a transgender character played by a transgender actress (Candis Cayne), who is treated with respect and not subjected to sexual violence, which is a rare occurrence when it comes to portrayals of transgender characters in mainstream media. However, perhaps the best example to support my argument here would be Joan Watson.

Lucy Liu as Joan Watson in Elementary

Some critics expressed certain misgivings about the fact that an actress was cast in the role of Watson rather than going for the traditional choice of a male lead, but I have already talked about this in a previous post. Suffice to say, none of their worries came true. Elementary did not take Holmes and Watson's friendship for granted, it built it from the ground up. Their relationship is one based on trust and respect, and the show goes to great lengths to make sure the audience sees how that trust and respect is gained. Joan was shown as an equal to Sherlock rather than just his sounding board: she listens to him and learns from him, but he also learns from her.

One of my main complaints about Sherlock is the fact that Watson is not someone who is independent to Holmes: he is second fiddle, an accessory, someone intelligent enough for Holmes to bounce his ideas off, only this and nothing more. He sometimes makes a heroic effort of biting back, but there is never the sense of an equal footing. He is always running to catch up. Joan Watson starts out as an employee with her own hopes, ambitions and demons, and she turns from an employee into a partner and a friend, a detective and a heroine. She is shown to be intelligent, hard-working, caring and entirely independent: she bludgeons criminals and breaks into cars, and she solves cases on her own. She helps Sherlock be a better person, as he himself tells her. Watson is not afraid to call anyone out on their nonsense, least of all Sherlock. When he suggest that she is in a bad mood because she's on her period and saying that he's worked out her schedule, she comments: "Couching it as a scientific observation totally negates the misogyny."

There's a reason the second part of the Elementary finale is called Heroine. It's not just Sherlock, it is also Watson who wins in the end, and her victory is not just over Moriarty, but also over misogyny. In a scene, Moriarty and Watson meet in a crowed restaurant, and Moriarty says this: "As far as I can determine, you're a sort of... mascot. You were his sober companion, a professional angel to perch on his shoulder, fend off his many demons, but now... now I don't know what you are. Do you want to sleep with him?" To this, Watson replies with: "I thought you told him that you were just like him. That you saw the same things that he did." Moriarty succumbs to internalised misogyny and she underestimates Joan Watson just as some of the previously mentioned critics of the show underestimated Joan Watson, and Moriarty fails because of that.

Elementary punishes misogynists and rewards those who fight misogyny, and in this current media climate of racism and sexism, where characters are whitewashed (spoilers for Star Trek: Into Darkness at the link) and female characters perpetually get naked for the enjoyment of the audience and nothing more, seeing someone like Joan Watson and Ms Hudson is a refreshing and welcome change, and I for one eagerly await the second season of Elementary. 

Sherlock and The Woman: What on Earth Happened to Irene Adler?

SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses the plot of Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia.

I enjoy Sherlock as a show. It has many faults, but I have respect for what it is doing and how it is trying to modernise Conan Doyle's stories. Some of the modern translations of Victorian plot points, tropes and 'gadgets' have worked extremely well and have been done with the writers paying great respect to the canon they were using. My compliments in this respect especially go out to Mark Gatiss for the episode The Great Game in the first series and the way that the writers have so far treated the character of Moriarty.

However, no television show is flawless, or tries to be. Sherlock, for one, has always had problems with how it portrayed female characters, and these problems have only been accentuated with the first episode of the second series, A Scandal in Belgravia, aired last night.

Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, played by Rachel McAdams (source)

Holmes's treatment of and attitude to women is that of a rescuer, which perpetuates the idea that women require to be rescued by men, that women are passive when in peril, and the only way they can be removed from a threatening situation is by male interference. Men, the narrative of Sherlock shows us, are at their most manly when they are fighting side by side to rescue women. Sarah Sawyer, from The Blind Banker, is an independent person – she is a doctor and a working woman who knows what she wants, and she is independent. She fights off Chinese smuggler acrobats like it's her job, until the very end of the episode, when she is captured and tied, and almost shot through with a spear. All her previous strength and independence is obliterated in order to serve the purpose of furthering the narrative, and, more importantly, to show her being rescued by a more successful and more able male protagonist – in this case, Holmes. All merit as strong female characters that she has had up to this point is lost, as she serves to further assert that masculinity is more powerful than and superior to femininity.

The myriad of women from various occupations and walks of life makes Sherlock a very modern work when it comes to the treatment of femininity. At the same time, however, it is steeped in nineteenth-century misogyny and sexism in the way these women are treated, both in the construction of the narrative and by the characters within it. Unlike the men, who are all (mostly) well-rounded and complex, the women in Sherlock serve as one-dimensional character types. In fact, the female characters are a typical example of the Victorian idea of binary coding of female identity, the Whore and the Virgin, if you will.

Female characters are seen through and defined by a male perspective, and not in their own right. In the first series, Sally Donovan is a sergeant of Scotland Yard, a position which she would have attained through extremely hard work, being both a woman and a person of colour, the only example of both of these traits in the all-male, all-white team. However, she is shown only through her negative history with Holmes, which has turned her bitter and reduced her dialogue to almost exclusively calling him 'freak'. Moreover, she is shown through her subordinate relationship with men, be it personal or private: she is both 'guilty' of office romance, the alleged partner in an alleged affair, for which Holmes openly shames her in front of her colleagues. Molly Hooper is a pathologist at St Bart's Hospital – a position which would have taken her at least five years to qualify for – and yet she is characterised solely as being love struck and wide-eyed towards Holmes, even though he treats her with no respect.

The relationship that the Holmes we see in Sherlock has with its women is very much different to the kind of Holmes that Watson describes in The Adventure of the Dying Detective:  'He had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.' In Sherlock, Holmes exploits women for being female, and he is far from courteous or gentle with them. He plays on the stereotypically 'female weaknesses' – emotions, vanity, and sexuality – in order to manipulate them into giving him what he wants. Women, as they are written in Sherlock, mainly through the pen of Steven Moffat, are body and nature, determined by and a slave to their emotions, hormones and instincts. Men, on the other hand, transcend their biological materiality and 'basic instincts' such as emotion or sexual desire: women are entrenched in their physicality. They can try to be like men, in the sense that they can try to conquer their emotions, but Steven Moffat teaches us, on the example of Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia, that they can never succeed.

Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia, played by Lara Pulver (source)

In adapting A Scandal in Bohemia or just involving Adler in other stories, most writers seem to forget (whether by accident or by design) that 'the woman' was the only person in the canon to ever outsmart Holmes and leave him on her own terms. They also seem to forget that Adler had no romantic interest in Holmes – in fact, she was trying to marry Godfrey Norton, who is rarely even alluded to, or more often completely omitted from adaptations. The most recent unjust treatment that Adler received was in the 2009 Sherlock Holmes by Guy Ritchie, and you can read about that in more detail in Renee Cohn's excellent blog post, A Defense of Irene Adler, in two parts.

I had hopes for this modernised Irene Adler, and despite Moffat's notorious history of failed female characters, most recently seen in the Doctor Who Christmas special, I went into the episode with an open mind. The modern Adler is a sex worker and a dominatrix, a profession which is treated with an unexpected and welcome lack of prejudice by both the writer and the characters. She uses her intellect and her sensuality in an equal degree to achieve her goals: again, a welcome change to female characters (and previous Irene Adlers) who are shown as using sexuality as their only weapon. She is clever, capable, resourceful, and follows faithfully the Adler that Conan Doyle envisioned in A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891, a time when New Women started redefining the meaning of femininity, and the strict rules that had up to then governed gender and sexual identity were starting to break down. Although femininity and masculinity are safe within their traditional frames in most of Conan Doyle's stories, Adler is one character that challenges them, and in the end outwits the super sleuth.

This refreshingly well-done portrayal of Adler is pulled off in A Scandal in Belgravia in the first 90% of the episode. Adler plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Holmes and she is seen as always having the upper hand: at one point, she drugs Holmes and escapes, leaving him passed out on the floor. When she first meets Holmes, she is completely naked, not because she wants to present herself as an object to be lusted after, but because she knows that Holmes reads people based on their clothing, and that way she remains an enigma to him. Her clients are both male and female - the primary plot of the show is that she has some compromising photographs of herself with a female member of the Royal Family - and she identifies herself as gay in an exchange with Watson. A positive portrayal of a queer sex worker on prime-time television? It's almost too good to be true, since queer women in mainstream media are almost always erased or fetishised.

Unfortunately, Adler's self-identifying as gay is completely forgotten when Holmes enters her life. 'Brainy is the new sexy', she declares, and Holmes is able to beat her based on the fact that he deduces she is 'in love' with him because her heart rate increased when their hands touched and her pupils dilated when they were close. The issue here is not so much that lust and love are confused in a blatant display of ignoring basic biology, but rather that a presumably lesbian character has fallen in love with a man. Of course, I am not denying the fact that sexuality works very differently for each person and that it is fluid and subject to change: the problem with Adler falling head over heels for Holmes is the fact that she, as a queer woman, falls prey to erasure like so many before her. Up to this point, her sexuality was not the primary defining point of her character.

It goes further downhill from there: the viewer finds out that Adler's intellect and resourcefulness are not her own. She was helped by Jim Moriarty all along, and the narrative once again becomes the traditional Moffat story of women not being able to succeed independently. The point is rammed home at the end of the episode - a weeping, bound Adler (reminiscent of the one in Sherlock Holmes) is saved from death by the heroic Holmes.

The message is clear: women cannot fight their own battles. They will always need a man to save them in the end, either from an outward threat, or from their own misguided sexuality. Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia had a lot of potential to be the best Irene Adler since 1891. She was independent, her sexuality was not her sole defining feature or primary weapon, and she outsmarted Holmes. And then, with a penstroke and a camera tilt, she was lying in Holmes's bed, a crying mess, she had let her emotions play her for a fool (the password to her phone was made to read 'I am Sherlocked', which, all previous things considered, could not be meant in an ironic manner), she was the pawn of Moriarty, and she had to be rescued by a strong, brainy masculine presence.

This starts out as a kind of Irene Adler that Conan Doyle wrote, and ends a twisted caricature of the fantastic, clever person from A Scandal in Bohemia. Has Steven Moffat finally succumbed to a bad case of George Lucas syndrome? And can female characters, queer or otherwise, hope for a good portrayal on the BBC if one of their most prominent writers has them put in the place he wants them, subordinate to men?