I've been getting this question a lot; ostensibly, it is because I have been complaining a lot about my frequent and seemingly-interminable library days. And, as I am nearing the end of another one of those days, it occurs to me that writing about my research is better than writing my research itself. Lo! A blog post is born.
I turned in a paper yesterday that was about The Nursery "Alice", which is a Lewis Carroll work. It was published 25 years after the initial publication of Alice in Wonderland, and it does what it says on the tin: it is a nursery version of Alice, designed to be read to children aged 0 to 5. Its publication history is quite complicated--for example, Carroll condemned the entire first print run as "too gaudy" and condemned them for sale in America--and it took a long while for this adaptation to come to fruition. The text itself is absolutely adorable: it often references its own illustrations ("Don't you see how [the rabbit's] trembling? Just shake the book a little, from side to side, and you'll soon see him tremble.") and it includes some lovely random stories. Anyway, my essay--which is for my bibliography and theories of text class, and is therefore not a literary essay but a biblipgraphical one--is about this work's publication history and also about some issues related to self-adaptation: the importance of illustration, the author's willingness to toy with usual conventions regarding physical publication, narrative structures that lend the tale to being spoken aloud rather than read silently.
And now! I am working on a quite different vein. This current paper is for my "Science, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, 1880-1910" class. I'm writing about Sherlock Holmes, which is fun. When Doyle was writing, Darwinism was a big frickin' deal, and it was seen as being solely about competition. Therefore, when the concept of symbiosis (for those of you who only vaguely remember high school biology, that's when two (or more) organisms live with, in, or on each other for the benefit of one or both constituent members) was coined in 1877, it was quickly defined (read: simplified) by popular culture as being in opposition to Darwinism: one was about competition for the goal of survival, the other dealt with cooperation for mutual benefit. So I'm writing about how Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty have a relationship best characterised by pop-Darwinism--they compete constantly and they know that the end is death for one of them; in so doing, they 'evolve' in the sense that they both sharpen their skills. Meanwhile, Holmes' relationship with Watson (why yes it is difficult not to make references to the fact that they were probably totally gay, because they totally were) is one that mirrors symbiosis: they live together and work together. They provide various services for one another; they need each other. Most importantly, Homes/Watson is as opposed to Holmes/Moriarty as symbiosis was to natural selection, though each relationship is a means for the characters to evolve--rather, to grow.
So that's what's up! And now the library is closing in fifteen minutes, and a man wearing the loudest shoes on the planet is scurrying about closing all of the windows--so I ought to sign out.
Just thought I'd share. For the, you know, one person who might be interested in my boring essays.
xx
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
"what are you writing about?"
Posted by Corinne at 6:47 PM
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6 comments:
Oooooo I am that one person!!!
First, let me say that the Nursery Alice essay sounds doubly-intriguing, and I request that this essay be added to the "things-I-have-written-that-my-friends-might-like-to-one-day-read-so-let-me-make-sure-I-hold-on-to-a-copy-of" list (if you have contemplated creating such a thing)
Secondly, what makes you think Holmes and Watson were (or are?) gay?
I am open to being convinced of it, and I would not be terribly surprised to find out one day that Doyle was closeted (or maybe he wasn't even closeted, I don't really know)and that was in fact his intent.
I just feel like there is a growing trend to see two men (or women, for that matter) in some earlier literature with any sort of compassionate relationship and read it as gay, which I submit is a tendency towards over-generalization, potentially harboring the underlying assumption that straight men are incapable of mutual, non-sexual attraction, which I might find a bit insulting, if such is the case.
All defensive run-on sentences aside, what makes you think they're gay? Just curious. I've been enjoying listening to most of the audio-books of Sherlock Holmes everytime I visit my dad, and I haven't heard anything yet that could not just as easily be understood as a close friendship bound tighter by near-death experience and mutual appreciation for expertise as it could two gay geniuses (or one genius and one bright British doctor) with a fetish for mystery and deductive reasoning.
Both sound like delightful essays that one could easily learn to despise after countless hours in a library! Glad you got some good blogging out of them as well!
I'm a second person...but then again I'm one of the ones that has been asking this questn.
Back in the day, did Lewis Carroll go on anything like a book tour? Read the books to kids and sign copies, stuff like that? Personally, I would pay extra for the "gaudy" edition, which I suppose makes me a typical American.
Chris--I will add it to the list. Actually I turned it in Monday, so you can have it now if you want.
So I'm not sure I *actually* think they're gay, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised. Watson gets married a couple of times (most notably to that Mary lady he meets in The Sign of the Four), but he never mentions her. In fact, when she dies, the only sentence about it reads: : “In some manner he [Holmes] had learned of my own sad bereavement, and his sympathy was shown in his manner rather than in his words”...that's how we find out she's dead. In a sentence about the state of Holmes' affection. In the middle of a paragraph about how much Watson misses Holmes, actually.
Watson marries again; again, he only mentions his wife as it serves to underscore his separation with Holmes. Holmes makes general disparaging comments about women, which isn't hugely atypical of Victorian men, but his aren't judgemental of women's strength or intellect--he just honestly has no interest in them: "I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson," he says.
When Holmes dies Watson calls it "a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill"...yet he doesn't seem too perturbed when his wife kicked the bucket. He just moved back in with Holmes and resumed being the lesser half of an awesome London crime-fighting duo.
So maybe they're not gay...I'm totally up for them just being friends (symbiotic friends, as it were!). But certainly neither shows much interest in relationships with women. At one point a complete stranger recognises Watson and says, "We thought that it was probably you, as your friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes is so well known." In an age where male homosocial order was the most important (as in, men were supposed to only be friends with other men and that camaraderie was a social guarantee), their friendship is still somehow special. I can see that being read as a reference to there being more to the story.
I think it's kinda a more beautiful friendship if they're gay. They fall in love not just with their work but one another, and can only really express it by throwing themselves ever harder into their work--but that's just me. So maybe I just want them to be gay. (:
Dad--all of Carroll's friends were little girls (yes. It's weird.), so he sent all his friends copies of his books. There were book-tour type things, but I don't think children's writers did that sort of thing. Dudes like Charles Dickens did, I'm pretty sure.
Hmm, all fair arguments. And it is a bit odd how quickly Watson gets over it when a wife dies. and yet, it also seems a bit weird that he would continue to fool with getting married like that if he weren't interested in women.
I think women of Holmes's era either didn't live in a time when they had access to the type of upbringing to make them intellectually interesting to Holmes (except, perhaps, Irene Adler) or he fell victim to the social assumptions of women in that time and assumed none of them would interest him, even if they would have.
Also, I think it's possible that Doyle just had no interest in writing about romance, so he mentioned the deaths in passing and that was that.
Either way, they are awesome, and such a fantastic example of symbiotic relationship is certainly one to be envied!
Also, stockpile all interesting reads until April when I have time for distractions more involved than the odd blog post. Thanks!
I also revamped pretty much the entire essay, no big deal.
I demand a blog report of your travels!
That is all.
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