By Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Like me, Miller sees film and fiction during the fin de siecle period as being inseparable. She really cannot say one thing about female criminals in literature without also acknowledging how the development of film as technology and entertainment also has implications for her discussion. More specifically, she talks about how Victorians and Edwardians thought of film as reality, or rather as a perfect imitation of reality -- but only for the "yokels" and "bumpkins" who were not cultured enough to grasp realism and fictional representation.
"In 1901, R.W. Paul, one of Britain's first filmmakers, released The Countryman and the Cinematograph, a film that reflexively "explains" cinema just five years into this new narrative form. It depicts a countryman at the movies, who mistakes cinematic illusion for real-world phenomena: he attempts to dance with a lovely on-screen dancing girl and flees a filmic train seemingly moving his direction. Bewildered by these images, he tears down the film screen, only to fin the projector and operator behind it. Movies that mocked the ignorant or uninitiated film viewer were common at the turn of the century; they served as elementary primers on cinema spectatorship, disseminating a culture and ethics of audience behavior for a new form of narrative entertainment"(Miller 1).
"In recent years, crime and criminality have been pervasive topics in studies of late-Victorian literature, but these studies have failed to recognize the distinctiveness of the female criminal as a narrative figure, often overlooking her altogether"(Miller 4).
"The series format as employed by Conan Doyle had a profound influence on film and other twentieth-century narrative forms"(Miller 228 - footnote).
Miller argues that Holmes' theory of observation is consistently thwarted by the female body ("the female body's resistance to interpretation" (Miller 26)); he can apply it to the male body but then the female body confuses him. He doesn't recognize Irene Adler when she, cross-dressed, walks by his front step in "A Scandal in Bohemia."
"...Holmes prioritizes visually mediated knowledge" (Miller 27).
"Victorian narrative often seems to parallel or even predict developments in visual technology, as recent critics have explored with regard to photography and realism. [See, for example, Christ and Jordan, Armstrong (Fiction), or Meisel.] ... In the years surrounding the emergence of cinema in 1896, detective series expressed with particular force a burgeoning shift toward a visually oriented culture of knowledge, and their magazine format was part of this expression" (Miller 27).
"Holmes' deepest cultural impact, however, was in many ways a specifically visual one. Conan Doyle provided his audience with an unusually visible fictional world. Many critics have discussed the "iconic" status of Holmes, the crystallization of his image in early theatrical and filmic productions, the accumulated visual detail in Conan Doyle's brand of realism, the stories' emphasis on observation and surveillance, Holmes's particularly visual mode of detection, and the author's own special interest in visual perception. Trained as a physician, Conan Doyle had received advanced preparation in ophthalmology, and as an eye specialist he was highly attuned to the human capacity for visual perception and misperception. It is hardly surprising, then, that the stories challenge the foundations of vision and knowledge amid newly imagistic and consumerist cultural terrain; nor is it surprising that the stories exhibit, as I argue, a profound ambivalence about the image-centric culture that they seemingly showcase" (Miller 29).
quote from "The Gloria Scott": "Holmes had remarkable powers, carefully cultivated, of seeing in teh dark"
in "Empty House" Holmes mentions atavism indirectly: "I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors"
A lot of the interpretations of Jekyll/Hyde I do (connecting atavism with Hyde's description, for example) also happens in a lot of the Holmes narratives, apparently. Miller lists several, including a description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem." She also argues, or rather points out that, female criminals, unlike male criminals are beautiful rather than deformed and grotesque.
"The central predicament of the case also emphasizes the primacy of visual knowledge: the king's former lover, Adler, possesses a photograph of the two together, and he fears she will blackmail him on the even of his impending marriage. Holmes treats photography in this case as fetishized or idealized form of reality and an utterly transparent window into history. His conversation with the king presumes the superiority of imagistic signification over writing: "If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?" (Miller 42).
She describes discrepancy between image provided by magazine illustrator of "clue" (a shoe) and the description of it in the text ---she concludes this indicates visual perception as a framing as opposed to reliably objective method.
The Holmes stories very obviously demonstrate textual representation's subjectivity, but Miller argues that with women specifically they also raise awareness of visual representation's subjectivity as well (VERY IMPORTANT FOR ME - USE THIS TO RESPOND TO HOW DOYLE SEEMS LESS INTO REALISM AS EXPERIMENT THAN THE OTHER AUTHORS.)
Miller says, "Throughout the series, Conan Doyle suggests that women present a challenge to conventional Western conceptions of truth as associated with public space, visibility, and transparency" (Miller 49).
"...Conan Doyle's stories put forth a far more compound and ambivalent theory of gender, vision, and the public than has been previously acknowledged; they support the authority of the gaze and locate ontology in image, except when depicting women criminals. In these instances, Conan Doyle's detective fiction prefigures filmic genres like film noir, in which femme fatales reveal a great "truth" about the visual landscape of modern urban culture: that the unknowable is not signified by the invisible, but by a peculiarly modern disjunction between the visible and the real" (Miller 69).
OTHER SCHOLARS: Kate Flint and Jonathan Crary ("crisis in perception")
OTHER SOURCES: Havelock Ellis's The Criminal (English version of Lombroso's Criminal Man), Andre Bazin "ontology of the photographic image"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment