While Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes exist within a vaguely plausible spectrum of human intelligence, their sister is essentially an X-Men villain. Her intellectual powers are tantamount to magic, including the ability to hypnotize the entire staff of a high-security prison.
In a fascinating example of ‘Sherlock’ being more Victorian than its Victorian origins, Eurus also ticks every box for the kind of madwoman who gets locked up in an asylum in a 19th century melodrama: pale skin, unkempt hair, unpleasant sexual appetites (she’s implied to have raped and mutilated a prison guard), unspecified mental illness, and hints of supernatural powers. And, of course, all her crimes were motivated by a desire for male attention.
‘The Final Problem’ is the most entertaining episode of Sherlock season 4—and the most sexist.
(via hellotailor)
The X-Men villain comparison here is telling of what has always been one of Steven Moffat’s creative failures: his inability to imagine how such a thing as a female genius might actually exist. Here, he can only conceive of her by rendering her essentially supernatural, at the same time as he suggests she is unnatural due to her failure to correctly perform the social and emotional labor expected of women. (This is also often the root cause of the 19th century imprisonments noted above, which can frequently be read as a policing of women’s emotional performance.) Irene Adler, the other female genius of Sherlock, was a similarly “unnatural” woman whose deviance manifested itself as a failure to be correctly perform “womanliness”— most notably through a lack of appropriate interest in men that was then “corrected” so that she could be ultimately redeemed. (Irene was also, of course, as unrealistic as Eurus in her way: female giftedness imagined as sexual fantasy.) The implicit message in both cases is that high intelligence is itself unnatural for women. Here, it not only leads to hints of sexual perversion, but also to the destruction of the heteronormative family’s “natural” bonds— and to suffering and mental ill-health for the female genius herself, a literally prodigious creature who appears straight from the very Victorian obsession with medical monsters (particularly given her hospitalization since childhood).
In another sense, the evocation of Marvel is slightly unfair to Marvel, which has a better track record than Moffat on this issue. (And when Marvel has a better track record than you do, it’s time for self-examination.) At the very least, there are some female geniuses in Marvel who aren’t portrayed as sexually and emotionally unstable, or as rendered dangerously unnatural by their intelligence! Not that many, it’s true, but there are a few…
(via septembriseur)
The best articulation I’ve come across of my issues with Moffat and writing female characters. And Eurus really did seem to be peak Moffat in regards to his issues with writing women.
(via dogandmonkeyshow)
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