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8. "Are Women Protected?" Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home
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|8| “ A R E W O M E N P R O T E C T E D ? ” Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home “A Holmes stories must recognize that, whatever else the tales are doing, they are, above all else, celebrating the power of reason, venerating the human intellect and its ability to penetrate the mysterious surfaces of the world and explain the workings of the universe as rational and fully knowable,” writes Christopher Metress in his article “Thinking the Unthinkable: Reopening Conan Doyle’s ‘Cardboard Box’” (Metress, ). His statement summarizes much of the criticism on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s highly popular Sherlock Holmes stories, largely published in the Strand Magazine between and , stories that regularly assured late-Victorian and Edwardian readers that the world was knowable and therefore controllable. Metress notes, however, that “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” published in the Strand in January , does not fit the pattern. On the contrary, Metress contends, this text subverts “everything . . . Conan Doyle is trying to achieve” in the Holmes tales (Metress, ). Doyle himself seems to have recognized this, and attempted to suppress the tale: it was excluded from the collection assembled by the Strand ’s publisher George Newnes under the title The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (), and was not collected and republished in book form until (Metress, ). What was there about this story that threatened the textual You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. world of Sherlock Holmes, that rational, knowable, controllable world that so attracted late-Victorian and Edwardian readers? It should not surprise the reader of this book to discover that “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” is about wife murder. In this story, Holmes is asked to investigate a bizarre parcel sent to an elderly spinster, Miss Susan Cushing. The cardboard box contains two severed human ears, one a man’s and the other a woman’s. Reliably, Holmes unravels the semiotics of this grotesque message. He discovers that Susan Cushing had two sisters, Sarah Cushing and Mary Browner, the latter married to Jim Browner. The ears belong to Mary Browner and Alec Fairbairn, both murdered by Jim because he believed that Alec was Mary’s lover. This explanation seems a triumph for Holmes—and by extension a triumph for rational intellect—as he reads an entire human drama in two severed ears. The text ends with a confession from Browner confirming all that Holmes deduced. However, as Metress notes, “‘The Cardboard Box’ does not end here, and the way it ends takes this wonderfully straight and typical story and twists it all out of shape” (Metress, ). Instead of ending with the triumph of reason, the narrative concludes with a series of disquieting and unanswered questions. “What is the meaning of it, Watson?” asks Holmes, as he reads Browner’s confession that he murdered his wife: “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever” (SSH, ). The “perennial problem” to which Holmes refers was, of course, wife abuse, and just as marital violence posed an impasse to Mona Caird in The Wing of Azrael, so it seems to have threatened to stymie Doyle, her conservative male contemporary. For “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box” radically departs from Doyle’s standard narrative paradigm, one that reassures readers of the knowability and stability of their world by means of a simple sleight of hand. This customary sleight of hand is based on a narrative slippage whereby the solution to a particular case stands for the solution to the larger problem. According to this narrative logic, when Holmes solves the mystery of the speckled band, he simultaneously controls aberrant fatherhood ; when he works out who severed the engineer’s thumb, he promises to control the German threat to late-Victorian Britain. But in “The Sherlock Holmes and the Violent Home | You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. [3.145.167.226] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 20...
