Holmes & Social Order

BOOK REVIEWS The method by which Wilde's "theory for social transformation" can be advanced is that of his "transgressive aesthetic" and "transgressive reinscription" (terms derived from Jonathan Dollimore in his Sexual Dissidence), wearisomely repeated by Price (on occasion, two or three times on a page) to the point of reductionism. There is, needless to say, more to Wilde's artistry—as exemplified in The Importance of Being Earnest—than an attempt to transgress against the "oppression" that Price perceives everywhere in the late nineteenth century. Price approaches the characters in Earnest as though she herself were transgressing the play. For example, she solemnly remarks of Algernon: "He is a transgressive element within the center of the social elite. But what prevents him from being truly [sic] transgressively reinscribed into the dominant order is his inability to understand the full political implications of his trivialities. In other words, he does not know what he is really revolting against." Such a view fails to grasp the nature of the dandiacal world of the play, inhabited not by the "People" but by those who believe, as Gwendolen asserts, that in "matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing." For there lies the beauty of life. Karl Beckson ________________ Brooklyn College, CUNY Holmes & Social Order Rosemary Jann. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes": Detecting Social Order. Boston: Twayne, 1995. xix + 150 pp. Cloth $22.95 Paper $12.95 IN 1902, there appeared in the London press an open letter to one Dr. John Watson, formerly of 22 IB Baker Street, requesting that the good doctor explain some of the inconsistencies in his latest manuscript , The Hound of the Baskervilles. This open letter marks the humble beginnings of what later came to be known as "The Higher Criticism," a game of literary scholarship which pretends that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was nothing more than Watson's literary agent and that Sherlock Holmes was a real man who walked the foggy streets of late-Victorian London. By the 1930s, the Higher Criticism was in full bloom—several Holmes "biographies" were already in print—and to this day its practitioners (affectionately known as "Sherlockians") continue to exercise their craft, studiously debating such issues as the real identity of the King of Bohemia and the true nature of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. At its best, this kind of intellectual parlor game playfully mocks the 87 ELT 41: 1 1998 self-importance of academic criticism; at its worst it becomes, in Christopher Clausen's formulation, "the most tedious pseudo-scholarship in the history of letters." Rosemary Jann's new study represents a different approach to Conan Doyle's stories, one that has its roots not in the Higher Criticism but in T. S. Eliot's 1929 essay, "Sherlock Holmes and His Times." No treatment here of Holmes and Watson as historical figures. Instead, Jann approaches the first twelve Holmes stories as commentaries on "the dominant cultural trends of the Victorian period." Treating Holmes as "a kind of modern epic hero summarizing the most valued traits of his class and era," Jann concludes that Conan Doyle's stories are full of "contradictory reassurances." It is by opening up and examining these reassurances that Jann is able to show how the Sherlock Holmes tales are engaged in a complex and revealing play of cultural validation, one which in the end legitimates the values and desires of Victorian England 's emerging middle-class. As part of the Twayne Masterworks series, Jann's study is necessarily divided into two parts. She begins with an analysis of the literary and historical context of the tales and then moves on to a close reading of the tales themselves. In her opening section, Jann starts with a brief discussion of Holmes as the "last Victorian Hero," continues with a even briefer discussion of Holmes's phenomenal popularity during the 1890s, and concludes with a 100-year survey of critical approaches to Holmes. This survey of critical approaches is by far the most developed part of the opening section, and for those unacquainted with recent shifts in Holmesian scholarship the chapter can serve as a solid introduction. The other two chapters do not...