Playing with the rules, not by them: Irene Adler

Where Moriarty's interesting trait was his absence, Irene Adler is interesting because she’s too present. She’s on Serpentine avenue, turning men's heads; singing on the operatic stage; haunting Ormstein's past, present, and future; in the church getting married; in a young man's ulster coat; and, finally, in the infamous photographs (one as a tool for blackmail, the other as a memento). By being present in so many ways and so many places, Adler strains against and breaks the social codes that governed Victorian society.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,”Adler has a photograph, evidence of an affair between Adler and King Ormstein of Bohemia, which she threatens to reveal shortly before his wedding to a Scandanavian princess. Ormstein gives no details of the tryst, but his association with someone who isn't nobility like himself is scandalous enough. This is more than an illicit love affair. It crosses social class and nationality as well. The social anxieties introduced in “Bohemia” deal with sexual, social, and international borders. If there's a line to be crossed, Adler crosses it.

This was, of course, at a simpler (and I say that with sarcasm, not nostalgia) time, when women were seen in one of two lights: the housewife or the harlot. It's easy to classify Adler as the harlot because of her illicit relationship with a king, whether or not it was sexual. However, there's more to it than that. The housewife, also called the “angel in the home”, was supposed to stay and keep the house in order while men went out into the world. The border-crossing Adler leaves the domestic sphere for the professional one, putting her femininity on display, “turning the heads” of the men on Serpentine Avenue and in the opera house as a professional contralto. Adler's threat is to social structure and hierarchy. Rather than adhere to the rules that maintain order, she toys with and passes right over them, just as she crosses the Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Europe or social boundaries by romancing a king.

So why not cross even more boundaries? While Holmes is trailing her, he witnesses Adler's church marriage to Mr. Norton, a lawyer. In doing so, Adler, technically, goes from the scandalous harlot to the domesticated housewife in the eyes of civil law, divine law, and, much to his chagrin, Holmes himself. Holmes changes the way he reads her and judges her behavior. Holmes relies on people to fit in rigid social codes and uses these codes to deduce where people came from and how they'll behave.

While most of the people Holmes encounters adhere to these expectations, Adler doesn’t. So, because she was married in a church, Holmes expects her to be a dutiful Victorian bride and so uses maternal instincts to justify his conclusion for where the photograph is. What Holmes does not anticipate is her crossing the gender barrier to confirm her suspicions she's being tailed by Holmes, Adler disguises herself as a young man by donning an ulster coat to follow Holmes and Watson to Baker Street, and, even though she wishes Holmes good evening, he doesn’t recognize her, allowing Adler and her husband to escape with the photograph.

Adler is pervasive. She appears on many different layers, crossing the finely defined social borders that governed Victorian society (and we're still dealing with today). She's like Moriarty in that people can be more, and even something quite contrary, to what they appear to be, but where we can take Moriarty and decide conclusively that he is a villain, Adler is harder to identify. Her pervasiveness makes her elusive because it is difficult, even impossible to assign labels to her, labels she is perfectly comfortable switching around to suit her needs.

Lurking in Respectability: Professor Moriarty

It's hard to talk about Moriarty or “The Final Problem” without mentioning that Doyle really wanted to retire Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had grown tired of the character: it was all he was associated with. A popular magazine at the time, Punch, actually printed a picture of Doyle fettered to Holmes (pictured below). But Doyle knew merely retiring Holmes wouldn't be enough: he needed to kill Holmes by pitting him against a villain so nefarious, that Holmes would give own life to beat him. The result is both men, locked in mortal combat, plummet to their deaths.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fettered to Sherlock Holmes, from Punch.

From this, you'd expect there to be a wealth of possibilities for study and interpretation, but the stories are a little sparse. Professor Moriarty isn't all that interesting. He plays a role in three stories: “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, and The Valley of Fear (he is mentioned in “The Illustrious Client” and “His Last Bow”, but has no bearing on these stories), but in each, his appearances are minimal. In The Valley of Fear, the fourth Holmes Novel, Moriarty is a topic of discussion in the opening chapters and is mentioned at the end, but never appears in the main narrative even though Holmes claims Moriarty was behind the crimes he investigates. In “The Empty House”, which is Holmes' return, Moriarty's dead and the story is about capturing Moriarty's lieutenant, Sebastian Moran. Moran actually has more influence on the narrative than Moriarty did in House, Valley, and even his own story, “The Final Problem”, where Moriarty is, at most, spotted from a distance or unrecognized. Moriarty's primary characteristic is not his resemblance to Holmes, but rather his absence.

By being absent, Moriarty represents what we don't see or understand, and while Moriarty's appearances may be brief, this idea of unseen evil is common in Holmes stories.

In “The Bruce Partington Plans”, Holmes mentions “the thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, ” and in “A Case of Identity”, he states,

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outr ́e results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

And, of course, it's Holmes' job to seek out these chains of events and bring the crimes and evils of his society to light as he preserves Victorian respectability. Or as he says in “Copper Beeches” after Watson remarks on the beauty of country homes,

You [Watson] look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there...It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

And it's here Moriarty becomes interesting. He doesn’t threaten our property or our bodies, but our very sense of having a secure society, like the picturesque houses that by their beauty hide the evils lurking within. He’s an educated and deeply intelligent man who turned to crime while still maintaining a positive image. Moriarty doesn't correlate with a specific kind of social anxiety, but all social anxieties and crime. Rather than outright committing crimes, he facilitates whatever crime is necessary or requested of him. He represents the idea that crime and evil could be anywhere, especially where it is least expected.