MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Even at its most sensational, detective fiction can provide insight into the social, moral, and legal concerns foremost in the minds of the society from which it originates. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, being perhaps the most widely recognized of classical detective fiction series, illustrate a number of ideals, interests, and conflicts representative of the social conscience of Victorian England. While much has been made of the Great Detective’s strict adherence to logic and objectivity, as well as the ways real-world legal and investigative practices changed in part due to both Holmes’ influence and Doyle’s own involvement with the criminal justice system of Great Britain, many of Sherlock Holmes’ cases are also inextricably tied to the controversial changes in the social and legal status of women during the time of the stories’ writing and publication. Though the women featured in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, both clients and rivals, are often maligned as merely helpless damsels in distress or untrustworthy foes, Doyle’s nuanced writing of female characters and the specific types and patterns of victimization with which they are confronted serve to demonstrate how this iconic series is masterfully crafted not only as an example of its genre but as an investigation of the very real issues of domestic abuse, inheritance laws, and female independence and sexuality which were so much a part of late Victorian society. This paper seeks to contextualize several of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries—including “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, and “A Scandal in Bohemia”—in their proper historical moment and analyze the ways in which Doyle’s writing engages with, and often subverts, Victorian concepts of masculinity and femininity, for the purpose of demonstrating how these works exemplify the genre’s unique relationship with real-world issues of crime, morality, and society.