The Valley of Fear, & A Case of Identity

[osprey_archer]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear turns out to have exactly the same structure as A Study in Scarlet: part one involves Holmes’s investigation into a mystery, which turns out to have an extensive backstory in the American West, so at the beginning of part two we jump across an ocean and about twenty years back to spend many chapters learning all the necessary backstory, before letting Holmes wrap it up in a chapter or two.

However, Doyle must have gotten some complaints about the abrupt shift between Parts One and Two in Scarlet, because in Fear Watson carefully informs us that he is now going to spend many chapters unfolding the events many years ago that led to the current investigation. This is quite helpful, actually! I did spend a few chapters in Scarlet going “...is this still the same book actually?”

I’ve also been reading along with Letters from Watson, which sends you all the Sherlock Holmes stories in reasonably sized emails). Originally I intended to post about these stories as they came in - in fact, I was hoping that a year devoted to Sherlock Holmes might at last make me a Sherlock Holmes fan - but in actual fact I haven’t had much to say about them. They’re well-paced and fun and they feel rather slight. Maybe I just don’t have the Sherlock Holmes port in my brain that makes other people go gaga over him and all his successors.

However, I simply must complain about “A Case of Identity,” in which Sherlock Holmes takes a case from a young woman to find her missing fiance. He deduces that the “fiance” is in fact her disguised stepfather, who wants to ensure his stepdaughter never marries so he can retain access to her money. He confronts the stepfather with this fact, and then – never tells the girl who hired him!

“She will not believe me,” Holmes tells Watson comfortably, as if there were no possible way that he could have convinced her, like, say, having her hide in the bedroom to hear her stepfather’s confession as Holmes wrung it out of him. And anyway, she’s the one who hired him! He owes her the answer whether or not he thinks she’ll believe it! She might turn out to be more amenable than you expect, sir!

Back when Sherlock was burning up the internet, I saw more than a few Holmes apologists insisting that the original Holmes is not a misogynist, but I’ve come to the conclusion that they must be reading very selectively. Not only is there the entire plot of “A Case of Identity,” but in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” Watson says outright that Holmes “disliked and distrusted the [female] sex.” It doesn’t get clearer than that.

Comments

[oracne]

I have not read the original stories in SO LONG.

[osprey_archer]

There are so many of them! And with so many new things coming out all the time, it can be hard to find time to revisit older works...

[sanguinity]

A Case of Identity is a piece of work; I know no one who doesn't froth over that ending.

Holmes is something of a mixed bag about women, imo, but I generally put him in the not-a-flaming-misogynist camp. Which, yeah, is somewhat selective reading, but it sticks in my mind there's some evolution from one end of the stories to the other. Letters for Watson hasn't yet gotten to the stories where Holmes is a champion for the women in the case, or where the female client does the investigating.

And for myself, I never give a lot of weight to Watson editorializing about Holmes: quite a lot of those statements are made for dramatic effect, and are later contradicted (often in the same story!) by the way Holmes actually behaves.

[osprey_archer]

I've heard that there's an evolution in Holmes' views (particularly about women, but not just about women) over the course of the stories. We'll see how it goes as the stories continue.

[asakiyume]

I wish people felt able to just like a thing *in spite of* whatever its problematic aspects are, rather than trying to insist the problematic thing didn't exist. But of course The Discourse makes it very hard to acknowledge that something has problems but that you still like it anyway. WHAT?! ARE YOU A BABY EATER OR SOMETHING?

But with Sherlock Holmes in particular, I feel like people's general impression is an amalgam of all the various incarnations and retellings and stuff that permeate popular culture. It's not as simple as, say, LoTR books v. movies, or even various Star Trek franchises. It's more like how people feel about vampires: it's a mix of everything from Bram Stoker's book on forward, down such interesting alleyways as Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer took us down. And because of that, I think it's possible for people to try to insist Sherlock Holmes wasn't sexist "No, he's, he's just focused; he's not interested in relationships; he's on the spectrum, he's--" etc.

[osprey_archer]

I think to some extent people were reacting against the dark, edgy, borderline sociopathic Holmes in Sherlock, and as often happens when people are reacting in this way, they overstated their case: Holmes is a warm, genial man who has no issues with women at all! And he has moments of warmth, and moments of geniality, and clearly he's not so frothingly prejudiced against women that he can't recognize a woman's good qualities... But there are cold, standoffish, sexist elements to his character too, in the original stories.