The character of Irene Adler first appeared in the first of Aurthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and has since caught the popular imagination, becoming a legend in her own right. Rightly so, for she is supposed to be The Woman, The One Who Sherlock Holmes Could Not Beat, ruthless, cold, beautiful and brilliant.
Since then, she has appeared in several adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in mainstream cinema, and I’ll use this space to examine the evolution (ha) of her character through two such examples: the 2009 film by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Rachel McAdams as Adler, and A Scandal in Belgravia, an episode of Sherlock, the television adaptation of Conan Doyle’s work, directed by Steven Moffat with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and the lesser known Lara Pulver as Adler.
In Guy Ritchie’s version, Irene Adler works for her secret employer who she’s intimidated by, later revealed to Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s nemesis. Holmes eventually rescues her from a warehouse where she is chained to a hook, gagged, and heading towards a bandsaw. The movie ends with a shed tear, a small kiss, a subtle confessions of her feelings.
While Steven Moffat’s version starts off with the basic premise of the Arthur Conan Doyle’s version (her possessing compromising picture of an important man, which Sherlock seeks to extort), it builds up on that in a much more interesting manner. She is a dominatrix, appearing completely naked when Sherlock and John confront her at her home, challenging Holmes to guess the code to open the safe, which turns out to be her measurements (which obviously he (should) have had noticed).
Sherlock eventually does end up unlocking the phone which holds the compromising pictures (among other important information), and the password is “SHER” (so that its screen reads “I am Sher-locked“), a final indication of how she has fallen for him. The episode ends with him saving her life from a terrorist cell in Karachi.
See any problems with these versions? Whatever happened to her outwitting him and escaping, going on to live her own separate life the way she wanted to, having gotten what she’d wanted? Whatever happened to the only person ever known to have beaten Holmes?[1]
This nagging stream of thought always troubled me, and apparently I’m not the only one. Jane Clare Jones, in her blogpost on the Guardian’s site, feels the same. Ditto for the blogger Another Angry Woman (rightly so).
“Moffat undermined her acumen and agency … Not-so-subtly channeling the spirit of the predatory femme fatal, Adler’s power became, in Moffat’s hands, less a matter of brains, and more a matter of knowing ‘what men like’ and how to give it to them … Her masterminding of a cunning criminal plan was, it was revealed late in the day, not her own doing, but dependent on the advice of Holmes’s arch nemesis, James Moriarty.” [2] That’s right. Irene Adler goes from being the fierce, resourceful, clever woman to being somebody who had to ask a man for help in order to succeed. She is not allowed to be brilliant in her own right, only through the advice from a dude who has some tension with the main dude in the show. In the space of a few lines, Adler is reduced from an active force to a passive pawn in Moriarty and Holmes’s ongoing cock-duelling.[3]
“More troubling still, Moffat’s Adler blatantly fails to outwit Holmes. Despite identifying as a lesbian, her scheme is ultimately undone by her great big girly crush on Sherlock, an irresistible brain-rot that leads her to trash the security she has fought for from the start of the show with a gesture about as sophisticated – or purposeful – as scrawling love hearts on an exercise book. As a result, Moffat sends Adler out into the world without the information she has always relied on for protection, having made herself entirely vulnerable for the love of a man. Lest we haven’t got the point yet, Holmes hammers it home. “Sentiment,” he tells us, “is a chemical defect found in the losing side.”” [4]
“We are shown what had appeared to be moments of affection between her and Holmes were actually him checking her pulse and pupil dilation, and concluding that she loves him. This is in spite of the fact that Adler has previously pointed out to Watson that she is gay. Holmes being Holmes, he is right. Holmes is such an uber-dude that a lesbian has fallen in love with him and thoroughly fucked up all of her security arrangements by the password to the only thing keeping her safe being an allusion to her crush.”[5]
“And then there was the jaw-dropping finale,….(where) All those troubled by female sexual power – or the persistent punctuation of orgasmic text alerts – were treated to the sight of the vamp laid low, down on her knees, about to have her block knocked off by a great big sword. And, at the same time, our hero miraculously appeared to save his damsel in distress. Medusa and Perseus, Rapunzel and her prince, all wrapped up in a potent little bundle. Symbolically speaking, it was really quite impressive. But for those of us crazies who like to think that women are, y’know, just regular human beings, it was, politically, really quite regressive. “[6]
“In the course of the episode, Adler goes from being a genuinely awesome female character to a damsel in distress who is propped up entirely by men. While the original story was written over a century ago, none of this bullshit happened. Adler is consistently portrayed as strong and bright. Yes, she does what she does so she can get married, but here’s the crucial point: she does it all herself.” [7]
“Not so for the recent adaptation. In this, we are shown that as women, we’re always going to need a man to rescue us. We just can’t do it on our own: were we to try, we’d end up losing vital documents and on the headless end of a jihadi-beheading. Once again, Moffat has managed to put women in the place he want them.”[8]
Enough said, methinks. Irene Adler is Not a damsel-in-distress, does Not need Moriarty to devise a brilliant plan, and definitely does Not fall for Holmes. And that’s what makes her The Woman. It is worth worrying when contemporary cinema needs her to fit into such patriarchal stereotypes to make an eye-catching movie.
Here’s hoping that the next Sherlock Holmes adaptation has the vagina (and not the balls, thanks fifth years!) to stick to the original version, ‘cos, Jane said it
“While Conan Doyle’s original is hardly an exemplar of gender evolution, you’ve got to worry when a woman comes off worse in 2012 than in 1891.”[9]
[1] As Watson states in ‘A Case of Identity’
[3] http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/irene-adler-how-to-butcher-a-brilliant-woman-character/
[5] http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/irene-adler-how-to-butcher-a-brilliant-woman-character/
[7] http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/irene-adler-how-to-butcher-a-brilliant-woman-character/
Cherchez la Femme 
Hi my friend! I wish to say that this article is awesome, nice written and come with approximately all vital infos. I’d like to peer extra posts like this .
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Thanks 🙂
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Hello. I must confess, your post made by reflect on the ‘Sherlock’ episode in an entirely new light. However, I am somewhat curious regarding certain things, and I hope to find some insight about them from here.
First of all, what should be the line between ‘acceptable creative license’ and ‘outright sexism’? I’m interested in your opinion on if Moffat could have twisted the character to fit into his own creative vision (such as invoking Moriarty merely to increase the ominous foreboding before the eventual showdown between the two men)? Yes, it was hardly true to the original, but does that necessarily make it sexist?
If we imagine the character to have been an original Moffat creation (merely for argument’s sake), and not a modern day rendition of a Doyle classic, would it have affected how the character was perceived, with perhaps more creative license to mold the character according to the director’s needs?
And also, what changes the portrayal of female characters into something which can be called sexist? Disregarding any instances of historical portrayals and all, would something which seems to agree with a patriarchal mindset be automatically sexist? How far can artistic liberty go, and how does it relate with sexism?
Again, thanks for the post. 🙂
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Sorry about the re-post, but could you recommend any good sources to read about feminism as an ideology, or any other good blogs about it? Thanks, and sorry for the trouble.
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Again, I claim no competence with respect to feminism, it is more of an instinctive interest for me. But I think my knowledge of it has been very very eclectic. From Woolfe’s A Room of her Own to Hilary Clinton’s autobiography, there have been endless books that have made me understand what it really is like to be a woman. Newspapers are a huge eye opener: endless cases of abuse against women, how feminism interacts with politics in terms of women politicians, even (lol) How-to-Win-a-Guy-in-Five-Days type articles that are so regularly featured in supplements: once you open your eyes, sexism is everywhere.
I visit a lot of blogs every day to find out as much as I can, and most of these are through the feminist pages I like on facebook: that way you get access to a broad range of interesting views. Also, a general reading up on feminism and the different varieties of it that exist helps.
But then again, it’s a constant learning curve: we literally have to learn to start to think again, away from all the stereotypes that we are so used to.
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Hey 🙂 Thanks for the compliment.
I should clarify from the onset that whatever I say henceforth is my own opinion, and I confess to be no authority on feminism and the arts, I am just a rather curious law student.
With that caveat, let me try to answer your queries.
Creative license is a broad term, and really, it can include anything and everything, if you think about it. I think my personal criteria here is that I need to Know, as an audience, what I’m being subjected to. So, for example, if I realize that all Disney princesses have these perfect, unattainable bodies, then it is okay for me to enjoy Beauty and the Beast. But the problem here is that as a society, we are so brainwashed by sexist popular culture that we can’t spot what is unfavorably influencing us. We all found the different Barbies perfect, beautiful, that was our standard of beauty, and I do think that this thinking gets subconsciously ingrained in us.
What is the solution, then? Awareness, most importantly. And maybe we can hope for the mainstream culture and cinema to embrace different types of women and different types of bodies, personalities. A heroine need not be a certain way. A normal teen star in ‘That’s So Raven’ is as lovable as Lizzie Maguire, and I will confess that there has been a move towards incorporating the different kinds of women into entertainment, but, the extent is still worrisome.
This is only one side of the story of course. But a full-fledged answer may require a research paper here. 🙂
The fact that Moffat’s version was not true to the original obviously does not make it sexist. This post was almost personal: Sherlock is seen as the guy who beats them all, and in as early as the early nineteenth century when Doyle created a woman character who defeats him (and this time period does not show us many strong heroines, none of them an apt counterpart to Sherlock, definitely), it meant something to me, it was like a personal victory on the behalf of a gender who has not had much of a chance to be the hero.
I took offence to the tweaking of the story to remove the most important aspect about Adler. She was supposed to be indomitable, the one exception to the brilliant Sherlock. But now, she’s another damsel in distress. We live in sexist times…. The biggest heroes, the superheroes, they’re more often than men, while the actress gets to play the pretty girlfriend whose love they win over. Sad.
What makes a female character sexist? Difficult question. There are certain traits, I think, that have become synonymous with women in the popular culture. A certain kind of body figure, a certain kind of charm, a certain kind of demeanor. It’s a hard characterization to make. But I think a good test would be to look at a character, and think how far she is from most ordinary women you know. And then look at whether those ordinary women want to be like that character, as that character seems oh-so-desirable to men. For example, most women hate wearing high heels, but they also think it is hot to do so, as amply depicted in all popular culture through the various er sultry sirens.
(As a sidenote, you might also want to look up the Bechdel test. It is fun, but also an eye opener.)
But then, I think it is more about knowing the difference between sex and gender. I am born with my sex, gender is what the society imposes upon me. It’s the difference between vagina and skirts. When gender is molded in a way that is not You, that is not natural to You, that you may not be comfortable with, then more often than not, patriarchy is at play.
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