Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

I’m sick of Sherlock Holmes.

Let me clarify.

I fell in love with this character several years ago when I began reading the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon. Do you ever have those moments when you discover a character or a book and you think: this was created for me? I had that with Sherlock Holmes.

I loved him even with all his flaws, sexism, and drug addiction. I loved the world he inhabited, I loved Watson, and I was madly in love with Irene Adler. Even the stories where Conan Doyle was clearly phoning it in, I enjoyed. And for a while, I loved the fact that pop culture had rediscovered this character and seemed to create new renditions of him every year.

I am now sick of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome. I am sick of eccentric, often neurotic, always brilliant white men who see things that we mere mortals cannot see. I’m sick of the mass media’s apparent belief that mental issues, depression, anxiety, psychopathy and neurodevelopmental disorders are magic. I’m also sick of the blanket use of autism, often incorrectly, as a signifier for Otherness and as a vague superpower.

The Curious Case of Irene Adler

Art by Sidney Paget

Irene Adler has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

She usually is, of course, what with being one of my top favorite female characters in literary history. I fell in love with her when I first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (which can be read in its entirety here) several summers ago and much like Sherlock Holmes, she is always The Woman to me.

Therefore, it is repeatedly disappointing that I have yet to see a film or television adaptation of “A Scandal in Bohemia” or Irene Adler that exhibits her full agency, her intelligence, her refusal to play by strict gender roles, and of course, her fierce independence.

Like most fangirlish Americans, I’ve been watching and re-watching the BBC production of Sherlock on PBS and with the premiere of “A Scandal in Belgravia” a few weeks ago, Irene Adler and our reactions to her have been dancing around my head. I was originally put off by this episode for several reasons, the most overt being that my beloved Irene Adler was updated into a dominatrix.