THE Woman: Irene Adler

Art by Casey Sprague SC ’14

Ladies and gents, we are about to embark upon a journey into the world of Sherlock Holmes. If you haven’t read the original Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” seen the 2009 and 2011 Guy Ritchie adaptations of the original stories starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, or watched the Sherlock episode “Scandal in Belgravia,” then consider yourself warned that you are entering the Land of Egregious Spoilers.

“To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman.”

So “A Scandal in Bohemia,” one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes short stories, describes Irene Adler. She is the only woman to outwit Holmes in the original series, and as a result, has become something of a feminist icon in the Sherlock Holmes fandom. Recent years have seen a spate of Holmes adaptations, including two Hollywood movies directed by Guy Ritchie and the BBC miniseries Sherlock. Both adaptations prominently feature Adler. But does she really deserve to be seen as a feminist character? And, if so, how has she fared in more recent adaptations?

Although “A Scandal in Bohemia” was written in 1891, you’d never guess it from the way Irene Adler is written. For those a little fuzzy on the details, let’s review:

She outmaneuvers Holmes at several points. First and foremost, she gets away with the photograph he’s been hired to steal from her. But she also railroads him into serving as best man at her wedding, sees through one of his disguises, and even manages to don a disguise and follow him back to his rooms at Baker Street to bid him goodnight without his knowledge.

Although Adler is the antagonist of the story in the sense that she keeps Holmes from getting what he wants (namely, the picture his client is afraid of getting blackmailed with), she never behaves villainously. She makes it perfectly clear to Holmes at the end of the story that she doesn’t plan on blackmailing anyone. Holmes’s royal client assures the detective that “her word is inviolate.” Holmes sympathizes with and respects her; when his client laments that Irene isn’t “on his level” in terms of class, Holmes snarkily replies, “‘From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty.’” Irene is a powerful female antagonist, but she doesn’t fall into the stereotypical femme fatale role that gobbles up so many female villains.

Far from existing only to help male characters, Adler has her own goals and isn’t shy about going after them. Even though Adler does spend most of the story trying to get married, she’s marrying a character who only says a few lines in the whole piece; if anything, he’s the one stuck in her shadow. There is never any question that Adler is chasing her own happiness, not living for anyone else.

Finally, Adler changes the mind of Sherlock Holmes, a misogynist even by 19^th-century standards, about women’s intellect. Though Watson, narrating the story, insists that there was never anything romantic between the two of them, Holmes still keeps a picture of Adler over an emerald ring as payment for the case. Furthermore, Watson testifies, “[Holmes] used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late.”

Clearly, Irene Adler’s reputation as a strong female character is well-deserved. Unfortunately, her incarnations in recent adaptations have been substantially altered from the original, and then changes are often not for the better.

Let’s begin with the 2009 and 2011 Hollywood movies directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. There is no denying that the Adler in these movies (played by Rachel McAdams) proves her badassery time after time, outwitting Holmes and giving a pair of back-alley muggers a taste of their own medicine. It’s also readily apparent that she’s made an impression on Holmes—he keeps a picture of her on his desk, much like in the original stories. No, what this Irene fails at is being her own person.

The movie implies that Adler was only chosen for the job she’s doing (long story…) because of her previous connection with Holmes. This proves to be a double-edged sword for our corseted courtesan, when she winds up falling for Holmes for real. I believe Moriarty sums it up best when he snaps, “Your job was to manipulate Holmes’s feelings for you, not succumb to them!” She only sticks around after that because of her devotion to Holmes. In other words, she’s only in the story to begin with because she knew Holmes, and she has no visible motive outside her attraction to him.

If the 2009 movie hasn’t convinced you that Hollywood’s Adler is a pale distortion of the original, maybe its 2011 sequel will. Adler is killed off about fifteen minutes in, by Moriarty, for getting too friendly with Holmes. This serves to make Holmes rather melancholy for the first few scenes and lends credence to Moriarty’s threats to kill Watson (who, let’s face it, is the one Holmes really cares about) later in the movie… and that’s it. Irene’s death isn’t a plot point. Nor does it have any thematic importance. It’s just there to prove that, yes, the bad guy is bad, and to serve as an emotional bump in the road on the male main character’s journey.

Sherlock, the BBC’s new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes transposed into modern-day London, is generally a much more quality show than most of what Hollywood churns out, so you might forgive me for expecting better of them re: Irene Adler. Alas, I was wrong. Sherlock’s missteps are different than Hollywood’s, but they’re just as bad.

A brief summary of the first seventy-five minutes, for those of us Americans who don’t have precognition and therefore haven’t seen it on PBS yet: Did Irene outmaneuver Holmes? Well, if you call “outmaneuvering” someone stripping naked, poisoning him, and beating him with a riding crop. Allow me to apply my head to my keyboard for a moment. Hyju. Okay, we’ll call that one a yes even though it burns my soul to do it. Female antagonist, but not a stereotypical femme fatale? Clearly an epic fail. Following her own goals? Check, although these goals are mysterious to us. Changing Sherlock’s mind about women? He certainly reacts to her very differently than he has to other female characters, so let’s call that a check. So far, we’re doing marginally better than Hollywood.

And then come the last fifteen minutes. First we have Adler’s confession that Jim Moriarty “gave [her] a lot of advice on how to play the Holmes boys,” a revelation to which I shall return. Then comes another shocker: Adler’s password actually makes her phone’s screen read “I am S_H_E_R locked.” As Sherlock puts it, “You could have chosen any random number and walked out of here today with everything you worked for. But you just couldn’t resist it, could you? I’ve always assumed that love is a dangerous disadvantage. Thank you for the final proof.”

Bringing Moriarty into the equation robs Adler of the intellectual prowess she displayed earlier in Scandal. The only talent she actually had, to paraphrase Mycroft, is one for making lonely men feel special—that is, that they are in love. But as Sherlock sneeringly tells her as he punches in the code to her phone, “Love is a chemical defect, found in the losing side.” In Sherlock, where intellect is prized above all else, highly-sexualized love—the woman’s way of getting what she wants—is actually the cause of her own undoing. In the original stories, Irene Adler was the one woman who caused Sherlock Holmes to reassess his views on her entire gender. In the Sherlock continuity, she merely provides a stunning confirmation of the emotional weaknesses of the gender she comes to symbolize.

And then Irene somehow winds up in Karachi about to be beheaded and Sherlock swoops in on a pony and saves her. Okay, there wasn’t a pony, but everything else is right.

Many feminists have criticized the episode, to the point that Steven Moffat, co-creator of Sherlock and author of Scandal, felt the need to explain in an interview that “both [Sherlock and Irene] are clearly defined as deranged – it’s love among the mad. He’s a psychopath, so is she. […] I’m not saying this is how people should date!” (Jeffries)

Apparently Moffat thinks that this statement makes it all better. But really, it doesn’t do anything to address the fundamental problem with this adaptation of Irene Adler. Moffat took a strong, independent icon of the Holmes canon and turned her into a mere pawn of the series’s main (male) villain. He took a witty, resourceful woman and turned her into a manipulator whose only weapon was sex—a weapon which ultimately turned against her. He took the one woman who outwitted the great Sherlock Holmes and turned her into a damsel in distress. In conclusion, what was Moffat thinking?

It might have been a little more forgivable if Irene Adler were original to these adaptations, but she’s not. All Ritchie and Moffat had to do was stick with the character as she’s written in the source material, and they would have been fine. But by re-appropriating an iconic strong female character and making her just another stock femme fatale or damsel in distress or emotional roadblock for Holmes, they drag us backwards. Backwards, I might add, from 1891.

Works Cited

“A Scandal in Belgravia.” Sherlock. Steven Moffat. BBC1.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia” (1891). Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, October 1992. Accessed 16 Feb 2012.

Jeffries, Stuart. “’There is a clue everybody’s missed’: Sherlock writer Steven Moffat interviewed.” The Guardian, 20 Jan 2012. Accessed 16 Feb 2012.

Jones, Jane Clare. “Is Sherlock Sexist? Steven Moffat’s Wanton Women.” The Guardian, 3 Jan 2012. Accessed 16 Feb 2012.

“Irene Adler: How to Butcher a Brilliant Woman Character.” Blog entry, Another Angry Woman, 1 Jan 2012. Accessed 16 Feb 2012.

Sherlock Holmes. Guy Ritchie. DVD. Warner Brothers, 2009.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Guy Ritchie. Warner Brothers, 2011.