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.