Subtext Interpretation... What Do You See?

[J.P.]

You mean - pengwing...

[Van Buren Supernova]

This is sanity? I must be missing the subtext again..... :P

Count me in, I though the sanity ship had sailed, found a new territory, exhausted all resources, and sailed again..

 

So far, we did not do the penguin line dance routine.

 

 

You mean - pengwing...

Definitely not sanity when we understand each Sherlock related term as fast as we do..

[Shadow Dweller]

[italic]Every special calling in life, if it is to be pursued with a certain measure of perfection, demands special qualities of intellect and temperament. When these are of a high order, and manifest themselves by extraordinary achievements, the mind to which the belong is accorded the term 'genius.' - Carl von Clausewitz[/italic]

 

It is satisfying to see Holmes vs Moriarty/Magnussen, competition between those with quick wits and agile mind.

[J.P.]

Gosch, I almost fell off the chair

There is not bigger subtext than THAT

 

[Boton]

Gosch, I almost fell off the chair

There is not bigger subtext than THAT

 

 

Heh.  Well, that's some unfortunate merchandising!

[J.P.]

Or someone in that shop is a "rabid" Johnlocker :D

[Inge l-w]

Yes, well, I tried that forum before finding a much safer haven in this one. You should see what happens in tumblr with what is called The loudest subtext on television!

[Arcadia]

Tumblr frightens me...

[T.o.b.y]

 

Gosch, I almost fell off the chair

There is not bigger subtext than THAT

 

 

Heh.  Well, that's some unfortunate merchandising!

 

 

Whether fortunate or unfortunate depends on how you look at it... I thought that photo was rather funny. :D

 

[joanneta1]

I don't have a Tumblr account either, but Ao3 is enough when it comes to subtext. In the past three days, an American college student has presented a skewed Johnloc theory of why the ACD canon originals were in a homosexual affair, taking the famous case of Charles Augustus Millerton, The Three Students, The Gloria Scott, and The Blanched Soldier as her premise and her thesis of 1895 being Holmes's best year, linked with the Wilde trials, without taking into account the historical context, the different social codes of behaviour, nothing except her own rose-tinted viewpoint. Another Ao3 member , under the name Black Lady, took the arguments apart one by one, I simply contented myself to pointing  out the problems in her premise, and then she went on to show that not only in HoB did the pair of them take a single room, whereas in Hounds, the innkeeper very clearly says that he is sorry he couldn't give them a room with a double bed, the underlying meaning being that it has two beds, but also in the original stories!

Education today!

[J.P.]

As I said - it's like talking to the Moon landing conspiracy theorists. Resistant to facts.

[Boton]

I don't have a Tumblr account either, but Ao3 is enough when it comes to subtext. In the past three days, an American college student has presented a skewed Johnloc theory of why the ACD canon originals were in a homosexual affair, taking the famous case of Charles Augustus Millerton, The Three Students, The Gloria Scott, and The Blanched Soldier as her premise and her thesis of 1895 being Holmes's best year, linked with the Wilde trials, without taking into account the historical context, the different social codes of behaviour, nothing except her own rose-tinted viewpoint. Another Ao3 member , under the name Black Lady, took the arguments apart one by one, I simply contented myself to pointing  out the problems in her premise, and then she went on to show that not only in HoB did the pair of them take a single room, whereas in Hounds, the innkeeper very clearly says that he is sorry he couldn't give them a room with a double bed, the underlying meaning being that it has two beds, but also in the original stories!

Education today!

 

I almost read that meta, but then I gave it a pass because I was afraid I'd go all "professor" on the author and point out the logic flaws.  I mean, at least he/she is trying to apply some textual analysis, even if there is a lack of understanding of historical context.

 

Meanwhile, if you really want to read something that reaches for the Johnlock in a very funny way (and I think it's supposed to be serious), try 

 

Watson was a Woman?

 

I'm not convinced that this is not apocryphal, but it's entertaining regardless!

[joanneta1]

Oh, dear me, Boton, what astonished me was that she has done a paper on it at her college, and then took it to Ao3, and she misrepresented one very basic point in her Charles Augustus Milverton analysis: you know the sequence "you are not coming", "then you are not going".  It was even used in HLV between Mary and John. Holmes says very clearly "We have shared this same room for years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell."

She made it into "the same room", while Holmes is clearly referring to their common sitting-room, living room, where the discussion is taking place, not a shared bedroom. And there were other such aggravating little points that made me seethe, but I kept to generalities.

Thanks for the link, I think Rex Stout was writing tongue in cheek, but it's still much better done by a proper writer. It's like your fiction, pleasant and humorous and convincing.

She, on the other hand has not even been taught how to do proper research. Two of her sources should have been Asa Briggs and Ronald Pearsall, not to mention the collection of essays Hidden from History.

[T.o.b.y]

Regardless of other people doing good or bad research, I do see the potential case of subtext in the original. Because hey, Victorian era: Playing with hair was as close as you could get to saying that a woman was using her body to attract a man, and "fallen woman" was as blunt as you could be about a prostitute. Things needed to be referred to in such a roundabout way - how on earth would anyone have written a gay couple? Not much different than the men are written...

 

My main argument why it's extremely unlikely that this was what Doyle was getting at is that from all I know about him, he was a man of his time who would have found the idea of a same sex relationship abhorrent. Also, if he thought his characters could be interpreted that way, he'd have been much more cautious - never would have written a scene where they're at the Turkish Bath together, for example, or so much as mentioned sharing a bedroom while traveling (strange nightly whispers about going insane included).

 

Sometimes I do wonder whether somebody else gave Doyle a hint, though, that "there might be talk" and that's why he wrote Irene Adler and Miss Morstan in, but then it's probably more likely that he thought his books would sell better if they had love stories in them.

 

Of course nowadays they seem to tell you that a text should be interpreted on its own regardless of what you know about the author or any other context, but since I never studied literature or anything like that, my common sense tells me that's kind of silly and I do it anyway.

[Arcadia]

Of course nowadays they seem to tell you that a text should be interpreted on its own regardless of what you know about the author or any other context, but since I never studied literature or anything like that, my common sense tells me that's kind of silly and I do it anyway.

Hear hear. Maybe the people who say it should be interpreted regardless of context are the ones who don't want to be bothered to figure out what the context is...? :p

[jadpdr]

Seriously? No text can be examined without putting it into its proper historical and societal aspects! Sometimes I wonder what future generations will think about our social media and forums, and input like ours, but when doing research I should think context is vital. Our own Cardinal Richelieu had a very long-drawn out fight with the Grands ( the high noblemen of his time) but none as bad as with the Duc d'Epernon, governor of Guyenne. Should you read their letters to each other out of context, they would seem friendliness itself, while they heartily detested each other. Talk about drama queens: those two had Sherlock and John beaten without even trying! The Cardinal was entitled to be addressed as "Your Eminence" , the Duke thought they were equals as peers of France, so he never did him that favour, always addressing him as Your Excellency". Every time the former received a letter from the latter, the secretaries knew there would be an instant dramatic reaction. Take it out of context, it seems petty and unimportant, but it caused all manners of havoc.

[Boton]

 It's like your fiction, pleasant and humorous and convincing.

 

 

Just wanted to say think you very much for saying this!! 

[Boton]

Regardless of other people doing good or bad research, I do see the potential case of subtext in the original. Because hey, Victorian era: Playing with hair was as close as you could get to saying that a woman was using her body to attract a man, and "fallen woman" was as blunt as you could be about a prostitute. Things needed to be referred to in such a roundabout way - how on earth would anyone have written a gay couple? Not much different than the men are written...

 

 

 

Plus, if Conan Doyle were "bohemian" enough to make his heroes "gay," he probably wouldn't have thought of it that way or made nearly the issue of it we do.  I'm not a historian of the Victorian era, but I've read a bit of commentary (mostly when I was in my Downton Abbey phase) that the idea of sexual identity is very much a modern one.  Victorians would have distinguished between public and private behavior but not so much among inherent sexual orientations.

 

For example, our John openly declares himself "not gay."  It's a modern idea to make sure that your behavior fits with your concept of yourself and with the way you present yourself to the world.  He's upset not because there's anything socially wrong with being gay (especially compared to the Victorian era), but because he's being perceived by others as something that he doesn't feel about himself; he's protesting being treated in a way he feels is not consistent with his own self-identification.  So, it's important to be "authentic" when you present yourself as gay, straight, bi, or any other orientation (demisexual, asexual, etc.).

 

Victorian Watson, on the other hand, may not have worried all that much if he were attracted to Holmes, beyond recognizing that there was both a social taboo and a legal structure that made him keep things quiet. (And that was plenty to worry about, and very serious.)  But his worry would have been to make sure no one knew about his private behavior because of consequences, not because being "closeted" made him in some way untrue to his fundamental nature.  Watson behaved publicly as expected:  he met and married a nice woman, and if legend has it right, attempted to have a child with her.  The fact that he was widowed wasn't his fault, but his marriage was proof that he tried to behave publicly as expected.  Whether or not he had other, private feelings was beside the point.  

 

In one account I read, the author contended that the Victorian era was one of the very best times in history to be lesbian, other than, of course, the modern era.  The author's idea was that two "spinsters" could fairly easily take up residence together, and everyone would have thought how nice it was that two women who never found husbands could be a comfort to each other as they grew older.  Meanwhile, the ladies could have been swinging from the chandeliers in private, and no one would have dared admit to thinking about their sex life in public society.  As long as they presented themselves publicly as two spinsters, social form was being observed.  (Helped along, of course, by the idea that Victorian women had no sex drives, so there would be no possibility of sexual attraction between women because women aren't built to experience sexual desire.)

 

(Disclaimer:  Not in any way trying to minimize the struggle of having a non-majority sexuality in different periods in history.  Just throwing this out that Conan Doyle may have indeed considered his fictional characters' private sexuality to be somewhat beyond the point in stories that mostly dealt with their public exploits.)

[Inge l-w]

Dear Boton, I too, like your humorous stories, especially the one about them dancing.

You must know why male homosexuality was punished but not female one, right?

When the time came for her ministers to explain to the widowed Queen Victoria ( a reigning and governing monarch) the two "aberrant acts", she did comprehend and grasp the concept of penetration making buggery, as it was called in the law courts, a criminal act, even what would now be considered intercrural sex she understood, but she could not grasp the many possibilities of Lesbian acts, and none of the men had the gumption to explain further, so from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing men were punished, women could do as they d#*#*%* well pleased. Equality of the sexes not always a one-way street, because the law was left as it was for nigh on eighty years, and her successors could have changed it to include the ladies, but they either ignored it or it was never brought to their attention, what with two world wars and the like! It's absolutely the funniest thing, picturing them all hemming and hawing and not coming up with a coherent answer before this tiny slip of a woman.

[Boton]

Dear Boton, I too, like your humorous stories, especially the one about them dancing.

You must know why male homosexuality was punished but not female one, right?

When the time came for her ministers to explain to the widowed Queen Victoria ( a reigning and governing monarch) the two "aberrant acts", she did comprehend and grasp the concept of penetration making buggery, as it was called in the law courts, a criminal act, even what would now be considered intercrural sex she understood, but she could not grasp the many possibilities of Lesbian acts, and none of the men had the gumption to explain further, so from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing men were punished, women could do as they d#*#*%* well pleased. Equality of the sexes not always a one-way street, because the law was left as it was for nigh on eighty years, and her followers could have changed it to include the ladies, but they either ignored it or it was never brought to their attention, what with two world wars and the like! It's absolutely the funniest thing, picturing them all hemming and hawing and not coming up with a coherent answer before this tiny slip of a woman.

 

I didn't know that!

 

Now I have this wonderful picture of Queen Victoria just sort of looking blankly at her advisors and saying, "Nope, still don't get it."  And them wriggling around uncomfortably while they tried to figure out whether it was worth explaining further!  

[Inge l-w]

Yep! The Earl of Somerset and Lord Rosebery were "not amused" at all!

Please, go to the Glamour UK website and vote for Benedict! Please, pretty please!

[J.P.]

Why? :P

[Arcadia]

For what? :p

[Inge l-w]

Dear Arcadia and J.P., "We are not amused" is a famous phrase allegedly spoken by Queen Victoria when during a formal dinner one of her equerries told a ribald story, but it has never been verified. The two gentlemen mentioned above were members of her Cabinet who presented the so-called Labouchere amendment to same-sex offences, but the Queen could not grasp what two women could get up to in order to achieve mutual sexual gratification. Male homosexuals got two years hard labour, treadmill and all the other hardships, female ones could "swing from the chandeliers" as Boton so aptly put it without any repercussions.

If you go to Glamour UK, you will find out,SherlockedCamper has posted the link in the Benedict Cumberbatch News thread, and apparently, it registers as many votes as you want, no e-mail required, like the Radio Times one.

[J.P.]

I actually meant Inge's second line. Sorry for not being clear (again).