Pastel & crayon drawings by Samuel Rosenberg. Clockwise from top left: Nature Studies “Trees”, Storefront, In the Garden at 2721, In the Garden at 2721.
Thinking about Samuel Rosenberg proclaiming that Sherlock Holmes was some kind of ‘defender against homosexuality’, when his name very probably was taken from two barristers defending a gay detective in the Dublin Castle Scandal (x). Honestly, how dare he?
What Uncle Rudy Began: Thoughts on Naked is the Best Disguise II
I recently wrote a thing about Samuel Rosenberg’s book Naked is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes (1974), promising to come back for a closer look at its influence on Sherlock.
Short version: The book has some very good ideas in it, although I don’t find it entirely reliable as a source about Doyle’s writings. However, because it’s an important piece of Sherlockian history, Sherlock can and does draw from it.
One of the things Sherlock appears to have drawn from it is Uncle Rudy.
“The siren call of old habits. How very like Uncle Rudy… though in many ways, cross-dressing would have been a wiser path for you.” (His Last Vow)
An important component of Rosenberg’s “Conan Doyle Syndrome” is the gender reversal of a character. In the simplest example, we expect a character to be a man, and that character turns out to be a woman (e.g., A Scandal in Bohemia), or vice versa (e.g., Shoscombe Old Place). These two examples involve cross-dressing, but it can be something more subtle (e.g., a man with womanly hands in The Red-Headed League). This event is associated with the confrontation between Holmes and the criminal he pursues, but the character who is literally or symbolically gender-swapped need not be the criminal.
Another important component of the syndrome is the reading of a written message, which can take any form: a book, letter, note, etc., that suggests some sort of sexual misconduct. Among other examples, Rosenberg points out that in A Study in Scarlet, while Holmes is off trailing a recent visitor to 221B (who turns out to be a man disguised as a woman), Watson spends a couple of hours reading a copy of Henri Murger’s 1851 story collection, Vie de Bohème (properly, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème). You might also find Murger’s work under “Henry” Murger, because he switched out the I for a Y early in his career.
These stories were originally published as a serial in the French magazine Le Corsaire (the appropriately gender-ambiguous French word for “pirate”) in 1845, and have been adapted many times over, perhaps most recognizably as Puccini’s opera La Bohème, the musical Rent, and Baz Luhrmann’s film Moulin Rouge.
La Vie de Bohème 1945 film poster
... petticoats, pirates, and parental ambivalence (of a sort) under the cut.
We find Watson reading Vie de Bohème (in the original French, evidently; as far as I can tell, the first translation to English was in 1888) very soon after he and Holmes moved into 221B together – and how appropriate, given that its stories are primarily about the relationship between Bohemian roommates Marcel and Rodolphe. As Doyle did with Watson, Murger based Rodolphe on himself. A Study in Scarlet was Doyle’s own Vie de Bohème, which is revealing, given the double meaning of “Bohemian”. The Bohemians believed in “art for art’s sake”, a phrase which was used by Murger in the preface to these stories, was often associated with Oscar Wilde, and was alluded to by Doyle multiple times. It is how Holmes describes himself:
"I play the game for the game's own sake," said [Holmes]. "But the problem certainly presents some points of interest, and I shall be very pleased to look into it. Some more facts, please." (The Bruce–Partington Plans)
“The attack upon Mr. Warren further shows that the enemy, whoever they are, are themselves not aware of the substitution of the female lodger for the male. It is very curious and complex, Watson."
"Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?"
"What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson.” (The Red Circle)
Rodolphe is a struggling writer (much as Murger and Doyle were); he is working on a play called Rache Vengeur, or “The Avenger”, which he has tried and failed to sell to the theatres of Paris. By chance, he happens to meet an uncle who makes him an offer: a large advance to write something serious, a manual on the construction of chimneys, instead of this silly play. Rodolphe happily takes the money, but doesn’t do the work.
“Uncle Rudy took care of things.” (The Final Problem)
Angry, the uncle imprisons Rodolphe in his apartment, taking away his cigarettes and his clothes and leaving only a “Turkish disguise” for him to wear. Rosenberg, in his excitement to translate cross-dressing in La Vie de Bohème to cross-dressing in the Holmes tales, conflates two stories in Naked is the Best Disguise: he insists that Rodolphe was given women’s clothes to wear, including “petticoats”. The petticoat in this story actually belonged to Rodolphe’s friend Schaunard:
“To protect himself against the biting north-wind, Schaunard slipped on in haste a pink satin petticoat with spangled stars, which served him for dressing-gown. This gay garment had been left at the artist's lodging, one masked-ball night, by a folie, who was fool enough to let herself be entrapped by the deceitful promises of Schaunard...” (La Vie de Bohème)
Nonetheless, the costume Rodolphe’s uncle leaves him with is feminine enough to keep him indoors.
“The following morning, by means of a masculine disguise, which Sidonia procured for him, Rodolphe was enabled to escape from his uncle's lodging.” (La Vie de Bohème)
The English equivalent of the name Rodolphe is Rudolph, which shortens to Rudy. Regardless of the provenance of the petticoats, it seems likely to me that Sherlock’s Uncle Rudy is a direct reference to Vie de Bohème ‘s Rodolphe.
So, I think the ties between Vie de Bohème and A Study in Scarlet are deeper than Rosenberg realized, but his point is still entirely valid: Watson reading this book foreshadows Holmes’ discovery that his suspect was cross-dressing, and also the consistent trend of gender reversal that would continue throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories (and many of the apocryphal Holmes stories).
“What Uncle Rudy began, I thought it best to continue.” (The Final Problem)
But look what else Sherlock has done with this Vie de Bohème reference: it’s not just a gender reversal, it’s a generation reversal. They’ve turned powerless nephew Rodolphe into his own powerful uncle. Why?
I don’t think this is just about Mofftiss being coy about their source for Uncle Rudy. I think this an example of something they’ve been doing systematically throughout the series. So systematically that Moffat dropped a reference to it in the Doctor Who episode Knock, Knock (an intertext for The Lying Detective).
“He isn’t your father... Eliza, he’s your son.” (Doctor Who: Knock, Knock)
Why do they want us to notice the confusion between generations among these characters? I think mainly because Sherlock is all about the life of one man, Arthur Conan Doyle, who had trouble distinguishing the roles of a woman in his own life: his mother, Mary Josephine Elizabeth Doyle.
"I always liked Mary."
"Yeah, me too. I used to." (The Six Thatchers)
We’ve talked a fair bit about how Doyle wrote a Sherlock Holmes character and a John Watson character into many of his stories, under different names. The most blatant of these stories, The Stark Munro Letters, is ubiquitously referred to as an “autobiographical novel”, in which J. Stark Munro is a thinly veiled A. Conan Doyle and James Cullingworth is a thinly veiled George Budd. @sherlock-overflow-error wrote a terrific meta about this already (really, go read that if you haven’t), but the highlights relevant here are:
-- Doyle, Munro, and Watson are the same person.
-- Budd, Cullingworth, and Holmes are the same person.
-- In The Stark Munro Letters, Munro’s mother interferes in Munro and Cullingworth’s friendship; she writes letters encouraging Munro to drop Cullingworth. When Cullingworth discovers these letters, he abandons Munro.
If this novel really is autobiographical, then Mary Doyle came between Doyle and Budd, just as her namesake, Mary Morstan, would come between Watson and Holmes. Whether or not he did it consciously, Doyle wrote his own mother into the Sherlock Holmes stories, as John Watson’s wife.
“Beauty is a construct built entirely on childhood impressions, influences, and role models.” (The Sign of Three)
Yeah, John knows that, Sherlock. He really knows.
Doyle also gave Mary a Mor- surname, the hallmark of a villain in the Sherlock Holmes stories. But his feelings were conflicted: just as Sherlock’s John Watson did, Arthur Conan Doyle named his own first child Mary. Perhaps more significantly, in The Sign of the Four, he also named Mary Morstan’s absent father... Arthur. Mary was his mother, his wife, and his child, all at once. Both his writing and his life appear to have been utterly consumed by her.
I think that the publication of The Parasite, during the period between the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, may have been an acknowledgement of this. And I think that the takeover of Sherlock by Mary in S3–S4, is essentially a meta-textual reference to all of Doyle’s mother issues.
I don’t want to go into this at length, partly because I don’t feel I’ve read enough about Doyle to do so (will a lifetime be enough?), and partly because I’d like to write a longer piece on this later, but I thought this would be a good way to introduce these generational parallels, which it appears we are intended to see in Sherlock, given how often they recur.
“Sherlock? Well? You were always the grown up. What do we do now?” (The Final Problem)
Good question.
Other parts of this series:
Part I: Thoughts on Naked is the Best Disguise: An overview of Rosenberg’s good and bad ideas.
Part III: The Devoted Friend: Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde – Death, Resurrection, and Sacrifice.
Samuel Rosenberg’s Naked is the Best Disguise: The Death and Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes (1974) was the first book published specifically about subtext in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. It’s problematic on many levels, but it contains some very good insights that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Because of its important role in the Great Game, the book is referenced in a few ways within Sherlock, the most obvious being Irene Adler’s otherwise inexplicably effective disguise in A Scandal in Belgravia.
Rosenberg had a gift for pattern recognition, and used it in different ways throughout his career. He worked for the military, as a photograph analyst, and for MGM, analyzing scripts for similarities to prevent plagiarism. His skill also led him to recognize many parallels between Doyle’s stories and other writings. Based on the way he described his discoveries, I don’t think he had a literary background per se, and when he started spotting parallels in Doyle’s work, he didn’t have a good grasp of the Sherlock Holmes stories either. What he did have was a keen eye, an excellent memory, and a growing fascination with the puzzle of Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
Sound familiar? Rosenberg was like many of us: rapidly expanding our reading lists to solve the puzzle. He quickly came to a number of conclusions about Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes stories, and then set about finding more examples to support those conclusions. Unfortunately, he tended to cherry-pick his data. He ignored examples that didn’t support his ideas, and so, I think, missed or misinterpreted the most important themes. He was also a little bit in love with his own theories; a number of his conclusions about Sherlock Holmes ran on themes he’d written about in the past in non-Doyle contexts, including Frankenstein and the story of Lot’s wife. Rosenberg died in 1996; his obituary was written by Richard Lancelyn Green, possibly my favourite figure in the history of the Great Game, and in it Green drags Rosenberg pretty hard for finding spurious allegories in Doyle’s writing.
A few things that are relevant to Sherlock leapt out at me while reading this book, so I’m going to do a short series about these (maybe four?). Among other things, I think Sherlock has based the character of Uncle Rudy on ideas from this book.
“The siren call of old habits. How very like Uncle Rudy... though in many ways, cross-dressing would have been a wiser path for you.” (His Last Vow)
First, I want to write a bit of an introduction to Rosenberg’s theory and its pros and cons, to keep the later pieces more focused.
More on this self-revealing allegorist under the cut.
The Conan Doyle Syndrome
Within the Sherlock Holmes stories, Rosenberg spotted what he called a “syndrome”; a cycle of events that recurs within many of the stories. This is not a new idea; Ronald Knox made his own such list in the context of the cases. Rosenberg’s list is more focused and more personal: a subtexty subset of cyclical case events. @jenna221b wrote about this syndrome here, relating it to the events of The Abominable Bride.
The Abominable Bride is so perfect an illustration of Rosenberg’s Conan Doyle Syndrome that I think Mofftiss were referencing Naked is the Best Disguise in that episode, rather than any real trend in Doyle’s stories. This is the problem with an intensely layered series like Sherlock: we’re given references to Doyle’s life, references to the Sherlock Holmes stories, and references to well-known interpretations of either of those. It’s difficult to disentangle this skein, because its scarlet threads are necessarily intertwined.
The complete Rosenberg syndrome involves the following events (the numbering system is mine):
1. Holmes sets a trap for the criminal.
2. Holmes and Watson wait in the dark for a violent person who is unknown or known only to Holmes.
3. There is a printed-word reference to some kind of sexual misconduct (i.e., a note, book, writing on wall, etc.).
4. There is a reference to murder.
5. The arrival of the unknown violent person is accompanied by a gender reversal. In its most explicit form, someone male will be revealed to be female, or vice versa, but it can also be more subtle. This person is not always the unknown person Holmes and Watson are awaiting; it may be someone unrelated to the case.
6. Combat between Holmes (and sometimes Watson) and the unknown person, if the criminal is a man. If the unknown person is a woman, there is no combat.
7. Sherlock Holmes punishes those responsible for sexual misconduct. This conclusion to the syndrome makes Holmes a strict enforcer of Victorian morality codes. Rosenberg is very clear on this point.
At this point, you’ve probably figured out why I think Rosenberg was wrong about some things.
Regardless of my thoughts about Rosenberg’s overall conclusions, I personally think he was right about the consistency of two types of events in the Sherlock Holmes stories: subtextually-coded written notes/messages/books and gender reversals. The latter is not limited to cross-dressing, although it does often take that form. Here are a few other personal opinions about his conclusions, leaving out specific allegories that I’ll write about separately:
Rosenberg’s good ideas:
-- Two-story houses hold secrets: they contain two levels of truth.
-- Book titles are carefully selected, and subtextually relevant.
-- Sherlock Holmes was portrayed as a Christ figure.
-- Doyle frequently wrote case details specifically based on his own struggles as a writer.
Rosenberg’s bad ideas:
-- Sherlock Holmes was most definitely not gay.
-- Sherlock Holmes guarded people from and/or put a stop to “immoral” sexual behaviour (by Victorian standards), and punished those who had engaged in it.
-- Doyle was not conscious of the queer nature of the stories.
-- Doyle genuinely hated Sherlock Holmes, and wanted him dead.
The canon really does not support these latter conclusions. Rosenberg has to ignore an awful lot to get here. For one thing, if Doyle wanted Holmes dead, why spend so much effort linking him to resurrection figures Christ and Dionysus, as Rosenberg argues at length that he does? This makes no sense. For another, the allegories to queer figures that Rosenberg presents seem generally to be admiring, not judgmental. So... I don’t think it’s fair to say that Doyle was condemning himself. However...
“I can slip in and out, whenever I get the urge.” (The Lying Detective)
... when I read this list of bad ideas, I’m reminded of Sherlock’s John, who appears to have created Culverton Smith as a representation of what he considers his darkest urges, and who needs to be saved – by Sherlock Holmes. Whether or not Doyle fits Rosenberg’s profile, maybe John Watson does, in some respects.
Surprisingly, Rosenberg doesn’t say much overtly about the events of Doyle’s private life, although he does spend a fair bit of time on the poem The Inner Room, a somewhat darker companion piece to The Blind Archer. But the inference throughout this book is that Doyle had deeply suppressed, unconscious urges that necessitated the creation of Sherlock Holmes for his own protection from sexual vice. In other words, Rosenberg thought Moriarty, Watson, and Holmes were all parts of Doyle, struggling for dominance.
And heyyy... that last statement actually sounds quite a bit like the subtext of the 1988 play that Jeremy Brett commissioned from Granada writer Jeremy Paul: The Secret of Sherlock Holmes. Paul and Brett didn’t incorporate elements of Rosenberg’s syndrome into the play, because it contained no cases, but you can bet they’d read this book and considered its theories, even if they disagreed with the ultimate conclusion (and I think they did).
Subsequent parts of this meta will be linked here. I’m tagging people who have written about Naked is the Best Disguise before; please let me know if you’d like to be taken off the list (or added). Discussion is welcome!
Other parts of this series:
Part II: What Uncle Rudy Began: Gender reversal in A Study in Scarlet and Henri Murger’s La Vie de Bohème; generational reversal in Sherlock
Part III: The Devoted Friend: Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde – Death, Resurrection, and Sacrifice
MWW Artwork of the Day (2/24/17)
Samuel Rosenberg (American, 1896-1972)
Eviction (1935)
Oil on canvas
Private Collection
The Occupy Movement is pouring old wine into new bottles with its Occupy OurHomes initiative. Back in the last Great Depression of the 1930s foreclosures and evictions were also a daily event. Small farms were particularly at the mercy of the banks and as the wave of foreclosure crested in early 1932 the desperate farmers took action. When word got out that a neighbor's farm was up for auction farmers from all over the county would come and intimidate prospective bidders, then buy back the farm for their neighbor for a few dollars. The legislators took due notice of the popular discontent and quickly passed foreclosure moratorium laws, thereby confirming that a true "government of the people" is one where the government is afraid of the people, and not one in which people fear the government.
In the cities, financially-strapped homeowners and tenants were not so fortunate. Rosenberg's painting "Eviction" -- showing a couple and their children huddled in a doorway while men haul their furniture out onto the snow -- graphically depicts the plight of a Pittsburgh Hill District family that he'd witnessed being forcibly removed from its home on a cold winter day.
Rosenberg, "Pittsburgh's Painter Laureate," flourished as a realist painter during the socially turbulent middle years of the twentieth century. "Some of my paintings would be a protest against the kind of place we live in," he told a reporter in 1935. Widely respected and influential as a teacher, he was on the art faculty at Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1927 to 1964, where he once famously intervened to keep one of his students, a certain Polish-American lad named Warhol, from getting expelled.
This artist's work appears in the MWW exhibit/gallery:
* We the People - Lawrence, Shahn & Other Artists of the 30s
