Sherlock's Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History (review)

This contribution to the voluminous critical literature on Sherlock Holmes takes as its subject the ways in which the entire Holmes canon “served to model male gender behavior” (7), as social pressures upon male identity became particularly acute in the fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth century. Readers of Joseph Kestner’s Masculinities in Victorian Painting (1995) will recognize a number of the same critical moves and concerns that were there applied to the representation of gender in visual art. In this study he attempts to chart Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s shifting concerns about turn-of-the-century masculinity by analyzing the detective stories in chronological groupings to produce a Victorian, an Edwardian, and a “Georgian” Holmes. Although Kestner acknowledges that “stabilizing bourgeois, hegemonic masculinity” was Doyle’s general project, he sees such definitions as always being “inwardly conflicted” (13) and does an able job of revealing the many strains and contradictions contained within the illusion of a monolithic masculine identity during this period. By exhaustively inventorying instances of male behavior in the Holmes tales, he seeks to demonstrate that these detective fictions were inspired primarily by Doyle’s efforts to query, construct, negotiate, and contest contemporary masculine ideals.

His study offers a useful overview of gender issues throughout the canon and a number of fruitful insights: on Baden-Powell’s use of Holmes’s methods to model Boy Scout conduct, for instance, on Doyle’s own function as a male paradigm in the eyes of his contemporaries, on the alignment of reason and science with ideals of masculinity, on the symbolic possibilities of wounding in undermining male power, and on a recurring pattern of (failed) father-son relationships. The ambitious reach of the study and its eclectic theorizing are ultimately a source more of weakness than of strength, however. The catalogue of “issues concerning the formation of masculinity” that Kestner sets out to inventory covers virtually everything of cultural concern at the turn of the century: school, sports, army, and empire; concepts of heroism and chivalry; class insecurities; the prestige of science; national and ethnic stereotyping; international unrest; anxieties about racial degeneration, terrorism, and economic competition; law, punishment, and criminality; changing attitudes toward women (39). While signaling an admirable attempt to view gender roles as inextricable from larger networks of social power and ideology, this encyclopedic approach often blunts the study’s ability to contribute specific and original insights to the theorizing of masculinity. A great deal of the analysis here consists of citing (often at considerable length) what other critics have had to say about class, race, gender, imperialism, and family relationships in the Holmes stories, and simply recasting these as insights about the construction of masculinity, or of quoting historical generalizations about the Victorian or Edwardian turn of mind in order to map the Holmes stories point-by-point upon them. What results is more a compendium than a synthesis of previous theorizing. The study’s efforts to organize and classify the treatment of masculinity in the canon are not always convincing: attempts to differentiate between the homosocial and heterosexual emphases in The Return of Sherlock Holmes stories seem artificial, for instance, given that women appear to be no more or less instrumental in several mysteries in the first group (“The Dancing Men” and “The Golden Pince-Nez”) than they are in those from the second (“Solitary Cyclist,” “Charles Augustus Milverton”). Holmes’s Georgian period, plagued by “ambiguity, uncertainty and indeterminacy” (160), seems little different from his Edwardian one, characterized by “uncertainty, anxiety and disorientation” (126).

The New Historical language in which much of the study is cast—interrogating the script of masculinity, policing transgressive behaviors, and so forth—also assorts oddly with its occasionally conventional assumptions about authorial intentionality and literature as a mirror of contemporary concerns. While it is certainly plausible—indeed common—to see a text unconsciously serving conflicting ideological impulses, it is more difficult to make the case...