I believe Holmes was into Classicism, in another form. “Classicism is a force which is often present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions; however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Enlightenment, when Neoclassicism was an important movement in the visual arts.” Now, we know Doyle was heavily involved with the Enlightenment. “In general, classicism can be defined as a style in literature, visual art, music, or architecture that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome, especially fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Athens and late Republican Augustan Rome.” Arthur Conan Doyle was a serious student of Greece and it’s history, and during the time of Augustus, there was the famous Romantic poet, Ovid, a huge influence on Shakespeare. I know Holmes is familiar with Shakespeare but I wanted quotes, and found these. “When Doyle himself wrote a play featuring Holmes he first approached two leading Shakespearian actors, Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving (who both turned it down) before allowing American actor William Gillette to adapt the play…So did Conan Doyle have Shakespeare in mind when he wrote the character of Holmes? According to Ted Friedman, “Sherlock Holmes is familiar with the writings of William Shakespeare … Holmes quoted Shakespeare from 14 of his plays in various cases”. The most famous Shakespeare quote spoken by Holmes, though, is the brief sentence “The game is afoot” which comes in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, and is from Henry V. It hardly indicates that Shakespeare provided a lot of obvious inspiration for Conan Doyle. Robert Fleissner, though, wrote a serious study that finds many connections between Doyle and Shakespeare in 2003 with Shakespearean and Other Literary investigations with the Master Sleuth (and Conan Doyle) Homing in on Holmes.”
Fantastic commentary. Thanks for the addition! Of course, my own favorite Shakespearean quote Holmes uses is from Twelfth Night, on his return to Watson, though ostensibly addressed to Moran: “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”
@marsannay quite right! More classics! Pocket editions needn’t be poetry. I prefer the sonnets because that’s more romantic, but Holmes calls himself an “omnivorous” reader, so it could be either.
Also re: the initial discussion of Mycroft and the Diogenes, club culture wasn’t particularly gay, only very middle/upper class—straight, gay or otherwise. And everyone liked naming things after Greek things. The educated Victorians thought of themselves as the second Roman Empire, which wasn’t too far off the mark. Gay culture drew on majority culture’s love of the classics, not vice versa. The Diogenes COULD have been a gay club—they did exist—but it isn’t obviously one.
@ghislainem70 re: TEH, I never stopped to wonder where he got those books. Do you think they were his or might he have bought them off a corner bookstand on the way to the murder scene? I can imagine he’d enjoy Catullus, but “British Birds” and “The Holy War” sound rather unlike him, “omnivorous” taste in books notwithstanding.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I think it’s a question of why ACD chose those titles. Adding the random “British Birds” and “The Holy War” makes it seem the titles could be random, not something he carried on the hiatus. And yet, Catullus is, and was in ACD’s day, infamous as an explicitly gay, even pornographic text, amongst well-educated Victorian men such as ACD, and Holmes. So it’s a case, in my view, of ACD either deliberately or unconsciously throwing camouflage over an otherwise clearly stated suggestion by Holmes to Watson in TEH that Watson has an empty space (on his bookshelf) that needs filling— with gay pornographic Latin verses.
Or not.:)
OH. Well, that’s notably more interesting than I’d expected.
@a-candle-for-sherlock I’m assuming when discussing ACD’s choice to mention Catullus we’ve all read the pornographic Catullus 16. But there is also the beautiful Catullus 65, “Shall I never see you again, brother dearer to me than life?” Which seems something that Holmes might well have dwelt upon during the Hiatus.
IMO, the queercoding is not in any particular style that Holmes (or Watson) might have preferred, but in a combination of the titles, themes, authors, etc. Rather than use an “atmosphere”, he makes various singular references. The Catullus is so clear an example of this that even Samuel Rosenberg noticed it.
In BBC Sherlock, instead of greeting John with a work by Catullus, Sherlock quotes gay writer Edmund White’s autobiographical novel The Beautiful Room is Empty:
That’s very true, though I wouldn’t say Holmes shows no interest in the classics at all—he does compare Horace and Hafiz, with noticeable appreciation. I’m of the school that believes Doyle wrote Holmes as gay just by recording the traits of men he’d known and loved who were queer (or who he wished were uninterested in any intimacy but his friendship) rather than deliberately queercoding him, and we’re left to fill in the blanks of what he could be. I read Holmes as intersex and gay and mycroft as asexual, but the reading could easily be reversed.
“But for me, the tuxedos (which depersonalize waiters and lend distinction to friends), the banquet, and the toasts all permitted me for two minutes at a stretch to imagine we were a club of lovers…” [x]
… which is slightly more reasonable in 2014 than an armful of Catullus.
*unprintable language aimed at The Empty Hearse’s ability to break my heart again*
I was reading the blog of someone who earnestly believes there’s no romantic/sexual tension between Sherlock and John on the show. This person genuinely believes that it’s 100% something that fans have imagined is there.
But, the thing is, the way the show is written, acted and shot is not how you would write, act and shoot a show without romantic/sexual subtext between the two leads. Like, if the goal were for these men to seem like they weren’t attracted to each other then they would need to re-write and reshoot a lot of the show.
If these characters are supposed to seem like they’re not attracted to each other then the show is a failure. If you have two characters staring deeply into each other’s eyes for prolonged periods of time and they’re supposed to seem like 100% straight men with a 100% platonic bond then someone in the team would say, ‘wait, that needs to be shorter and less intense because it’s going to seem gay if we do it this way’.
I’ve seen an interview where the show runners discussed that the scene where Sherlock is whipping a corpse in the original pilot made him seem gay. And they kept it, knowing that. And they did another versions of it for TAB. Why would you consciously code something in a way that you didn’t intend? That doesn’t make a lick of sense.
We have all seen so, so, so many examples of male platonic friendship onscreen, we know that there’s a line that most even very homoerotic movies/shows don’t cross. BBC Sherlock crosses that line in every single episode. (I mean Top Gun kind of does cross it all over the place but most too-chose-yelling scenes from Army movies are at least supposed to be straight).
So, yeah, if things accidentally look gay on your show, a lot, then maybe you need to work a lot harder to convey your vision of straight platonic friends because you’re failing. At something very, very simple.
I’m so glad it wasn’t just me who felt this way!! I went back to the episode to find the exact quotes on the queercoding side of things. First we’ve got Eurus, who has this interaction with Sherlock:
Eurus: Oh! Have you had sex? Sherlock: Why do you ask? Eurus: The music. I’ve had sex. Sherlock: How? Eurus: One of the nurses got careless. I liked it. Messy, though. People are so breakable. Sherlock: I take it he didn’t consent? Eurus: “He”? Sherlock: She? Eurus: Afraid I didn’t notice in the heat of the moment. And afterwards, well, you couldn’t really tell.
Here we have Sherlock, the hero, establishing a heteronormative, non-consensual narrative for what happened; Eurus wrongfoots him by queering this narrative. Throughout their conversation, Eurus is scaring him, setting him off balance, being cruel. This has been the pattern of their conversation so far. So when she introduces queerness, it’s implied that she is intending to have that same effect: of scaring, setting off balance, seeming morally wrong to Sherlock’s morally right. She explicitly states that gender doesn’t affect her sexual choices, which would usually be indicative of, perhaps, pansexuality – but it’s done in a way that’s frightening and destabilising both for Sherlock and for the viewer. Queerness is a trump card for her to play, here, another weapon.
Then we have Moriarty. Firstly, he arrives to the tune of I Want to Break Free by Queen – lead singer Freddie Mercury, “self-confessed bi-sexual”/ The joke in the song name is there, it’s funny, but then you pair that reference with what Moriarty says and things become a bit more nasty. There are two snippets for him:
Moriarty [apropos of nothing, speaking out of the blue]: Do you like my boys? This one’s got more stamina, but he’s less caring in the afterglow.
and
Mycroft: You’re a Christmas present. Moriarty: Oh! How do you want me?
In the first instance, the words are being spoken to the head of the prison; in the second, to Mycroft. Both times, knowing Moriarty as we do, we assume that they are meant to frighten – since that’s kind of his whole thing whenever he talks at all.
Both of these villains use queerness to destabilise the “normal”, to take the good guys’ heteronormative worlds and twist them, add an edge of unexpected danger. Queerness is quite clearly written in TFP as something you shouldn’t do, something that is frightening to do, something you can use as a threat, something you can use as a weapon. This is never challenged. There is no positive queer narrative to counteract it. It’s not a bad thing to have a queer villain – but when both villains are explicitly queer and no one else is, that’s queercoding. It’s hugely damaging. When people react negatively to queerness for no reason they can put their finger on – when people tell you “it just makes them feel weird” or “it grosses them out” or “it makes them nervous” – point fingers at this. It’s this that solidifies the connection between queerness and deviance, queerness and dangerous mental imbalance, queerness and moral wrongness. And it sucks.
This makes me want to cry. I missed some of that dialogue (noisy family members) when I watched it, and this is such a clear explanation. I just don’t understand why the writers would do that. I really want to believe the best of them, but this really is inexcusable.
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