At the beginning of The
Sign of Four (1890), Watson and Holmes discuss Watson’s “small brochure
with the somewhat fantastic title of ‘A Study in Scarlet’.” Holmes is critical
of it:
“’Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is,
or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same col and
unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism …'
‘But
the romance was there,”’ I remonstrated. ‘I could not tamper with the facts.’ …
'Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion
should be observed in treating them.’” (The
Sign of Four, Chapter 1)
This meta-fictional moment of
subtle advertising presents a paradox: Watson
claims that the romantic treatment of the story is realistic. Holmes
suggests that a more unrealistic approach would have been appropriate to
showcase his scientific method. We must blame Watson’s dogged adherence to the
whole truth for the sensational qualities in these narratives.
This kind of a tug-of-war between realism and romanticism is typical to
Victorian sensation fiction. It occurs in both the content and the structure of
sensation novels. This is not the only sensational feature of Conan Doyle’s
early Holmes stories. I agree with Andrew Maunder when he writes
that “there are various kinds of sensation novel and to talk of sensation
fiction as though it were all of a single type of equal merit would be
misleading.” (Maunder, x) Nevertheless, both contemporary critics like H. L.
Mansel and Margaret Oliphant, and later academics draw our attention to the
same identifying features of the genre. It is therefore
possible to examine to what extent these characteristics are present in A
Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890)
My sources for the common features of sensation novels are Victorian
Sensation Fiction by Andrew Radford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009); The Maniac in the Cellar Sensation
Novels of the 1860s by Winifred Hughes (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1980); “General
Introduction” to Varieties of Women’s
Sensation Fiction: 1955-1890 by Andrew Maunder (Volume 1, London: Pickering
& Chatto, 2004); “What is ‘Sensational# about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” by
Patrick Brantlinger in Nineteenth Century
Fiction, June 1982, Vol 37, Nr 1, pp1-28) and The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel by Lyn Pykett (2nd
edition. Tavistock: Northcote, 2011).
Both A Study in Scarlet and The
Sign of Four are murder mysteries. They open with
an act of crime committed by an unknown culprit, and the main plot is propelled
forward by the detective’s actions to identify and capture the culprit. This is seems logical and we can assume Holmes would approve. The
victims and their immediate surroundings, however, are strange and terrifying:
“On his rigid face there stood an
expression of horror, and, as it seemed to me ,of hatred, such as I have never
seen upon human features. This malignant and terrible contortion, combined with
the low forehead, blunt nose, and prognathous jaw, gave the dead man a
singularly simious and ape-like appearance, which was increased by his writhing
unnatural posture.” (A Study in Scarlet,
part 1, chapter 3)
There is no expression of
sympathy or pity for the victim in the narrative, only disgust and horror as the murder has turned
its victim into a monster, stripped of his human qualities. A similar effect is
found in The Sign of Four:
“The features were set however,
in a horrible smile, a fixed an unnatural grin, which in that still and moonlit
room was more jarring to the nerves than any scowls or contortions. … It seemed
to me that not only his features, but all his limbs, were twisted and turned in
the most fantastic fashion.” (The Sign of
Four, chapter 5)
The settings of the murders
reflect the “unnatural” and “fantastic” state of the victims. The murder scene
in A Study in Scarlet is in an
abandoned, semi-derelict house, which “wore an ill-omened and minatory look. … [with] three tiers of vacant melancholy
windows which were blank and dreary. … A small garden sprinkled over with a
scattered eruption of sickly plants.” (A
Study in Scarlet, part 1, chapter 3) Inside, the room where the body id
found is “blotched in places with mildew, great strips [of wall paper] hung
down, exposing yellow plaster beneath. … The solitary window was so dirty that
the light was hazy and uncertain, giving a dull grey tinge to everything, which
was intensified by the thick layer of dust which coated the whole apartment.” (Ibid.) In The Sign of Four, the house, where Bartholomew Sholto has been
murdered is “girt with a very high stone wall topped with broken glass. A
single narrow iron-clamped door formed the only means of entrance.” (The Sign of Four, chapter 5). “Inside, a
gravel path wound through desolate grounds to a huge clump of a house, square
and prosaic, all plunged in shadow save where moonbeam struck one corner and
glimmered in a garret window. The vast size of the building, with its gloom and
its deathly silence, struck a chill to the heart.” (Ibid.) There are “great rubbish-heaps which cumbered the grounds” (Ibid.) the grounds are “scarred and
intersected” with “trenches and pits.” “The whole place, with its scattered
dirt-heaps and ill-grown shrubs has a blighted, ill-omened look which
harmonized with the black tragedy which hung over it.” (Ibid.)
In both novels, the crime takes place in a suburban enclave of horror.
These melodramatic, Gothic scenes are located in the kind of streets where Conan
Doyle’s readers lived. In A Study in
Scarlet, “Number 3, Lauriston Garden” on Brixton Road is “one of four which
stood back some little way from the street, two being occupied and two being
empty.” (A Study in Scarlet, part 1,
chapter 3) When Holmes and Watson arrive there is already “a small know of
loafers” outside watching the proceedings (Ibid.).
The murder scene “looked out upon one of the main arteries of suburban London.”
(Ibid.) In The Sign of Four, the Sholto’s carefully guarded villa “Pondicherry
Lodge” is in Upper Norwood (The Sign of
Four, chapter 4), a suburb built in the nineteenth-century on the West
Sussex side, south of London.
The two essential ingredients of a sensation novel are mystery and
‘proximity.’ “Mystery … in the sensation novel it is the dominant element.”
(Pykett, 5) Usually, these mysteries involve crime or at least a potential of
crime, even it turns out none was committed. This crime is “often murder as an
outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in apparently proper, bourgeois,
domestic setting.” (Brantlinger, 1). Hughes talks of “the axiomatic Victorian
fondness for murder.” (Hughes, 31) and goes on to suggest: “A sort of general
principle for the sensation novel. Too much sex begets murder” (Hughes, 32). Sexual passion is another important ingredient of sensation
fiction. As Brantlinger notes, sensation fiction displays “a strong interest in
sexual irregularities, adultery, forced marriages, and marriages formed under
false pretenses” (Brantlinger, 6). I am doubtful however, whether we should go
as far as Hughes, who suggests that “Murder may function as a diversion, for
both author and audience, a more socially acceptable channel for energy that
might otherwise be sexual.” (Hughes, 32)
There are two ways to interpret the interest in all things sexual in
sensation fiction. First, sensation fiction was aimed at the reader’s
sympathetic nervous system. Sex is a shortcut to this goal. Secondly, as all
the academics agree, sensation fiction was much occupied with gender roles and
relations. Pykett writes: “Another notably shocking feature of the genre was
the centrality of female characters and the way in which women and the feminine
were represented.” (Pykett, 9). Heroines began to kick ass, instead of simply
being rescued by heroes. Or as Hughes put it, the heroine became a
“participant” not “merely a victim” (Hughes, 44). Sassy heroines presented in
interesting and thrilling situations necessitated the introduction of sex into
the narrative.
All this criminal and sexual activity invariably has to take place
just around the corner from the reader to make it truly thrilling: “One of the
most shocking and thrilling aspects of sensation fiction, as far as its first readers
and reviewers were concerned, is the fact that the action in these fast novels
of crime and passion usually occurred in the otherwise prosaic, everyday,
domestic setting of a model middle-class or aristocratic English household.”
(Pykett, 8) This kind of a setting was shocking and sensational for two
reasons: first it gave the impression that dark secrets might be harboured and
foul deeds committed all around the readers, without them being none the wiser.
And it also suggested a titillating double-standard where apparent
respectability was hiding a multitude of sins. Sensation novels suggested "a
Britain full of sinister possibilities … dark secrets behind the respectable
surface.” (Maunder, xi). It was a world where “domestic tranquility conceals
heinous desires and deeds.” (Brantlinger, 3)
From the start A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four display the two crucial
features of sensation fiction: mystery with murder, and proximity. But is there
sex in them? In A Study in Scarlet, as
a young man, Hope falls in love with Lucy Ferrier, “the flower of Utah,” “as fair
a specimen of American girlhood as could be found in the whole Pacific slope.”
Lucy is described as a ”lithe, girlish figure tripping through the wheatfields,
or … mounted upon her father’s mustang, and managing it with all the ease and
grace of a true child of the West.” (A
Study in Scarlet, part 2, chapter 2) Lucy’s fate, and her dramatic transformation
from this tall and strong (Ibid.)
cow-girl to “the white silent figure” (A
Study in Scarlet, part 3, chapter 5) in the hands of Enoch J. Drebber, is
the driving force behind Hope’s crime. It is left to the reader’s imagination
what Drebber did to Lucy. In The Sign of
Four, there is a romantic subplot of Watson and Miss Mary Morstan – Watson gets
a wife out of the case (The Sign of Four,
chapter 12). Miss Morstan remains a passive figure, moved around and left
behind (The Sign of Four, chapter 6)
as suits the plot focused on the male protagonists’ adventure. Watson’s courtship
of her is limited to hand-holding (The Sign
of Four, chapter 5), telling anecdotes (The
Sign of Four, chapter 3) and appreciating the vision of domestic calm Mary embodies
as Watson leaves her behind once more and promises to “report any progress we
might make with the case.” (The Sign of
Four, chapter 7):
“As we drove away I stole a
glance back, and I still seem to see that little group on the step – the two
graceful, clinging figures, the half-opened door, the hall light shining
through stained glass, the barometer, and the bright stair-rods. It was
soothing to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the
midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.” (The Sign of Four, chapter 7).
This image is a good example how
Conan Doyle employs the basic sensational ingredients of mystery and proximity
in the two first Sherlock Holmes stories. The novels lack the traditional
sensational heroine, neither Lucy Ferrier nor Mary Morstan are active characters,
but like good Victorian women (?) with their innocence and all-around goodness,
provide motivation for the men. Yet, there is a romantic interest in both novels;
neither story would take place if it was not for a woman. Money, it must be
noted, goes with love in each novel: in A
Study in Scarlet Lucy’s fortune is part of the equation of her fate, in The Sign of Four, Watson agonizes over
Mary’s wealth.
We can understand Holmes’s
annoyance when he criticizes Watson’s writing arguing that “The only point in
the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from
effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.” (The Sign of Four, chapter 1) Watson is
not writing according to Holmes’s expectations. Instead of a linear, realist
narrative focusing on Holmes’s scientific method, these two novels take us
into a sensational world of “unnatural” and “fantastic” bodies in “ill-omened”
settings
Conan Doyle is using mystery and
proximity to great effect. These two qualities are arguably also key features
of detective fiction. However, we have already seen other sensational
characteristics in his stories. First, there is the tension between realism and
romanticism, and secondly the narrative style is melodramatic and typical to
sensation fiction. There are also other tricks of the sensation novel that
Conan Doyle uses in A Study in Scarlet
and The Sign of Four.
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