At the Beginning

In the beginning, Sherlock Holmes was only a tall tale. There were 4 novels and 56 short stories, each featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. The stories quickly took on a life of their own.

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s originals, Sherlock Holmes is the image of the masculine ideal. Written and set at the end of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes is arguably a response to the changing world. 

In Britain, women were fighting for their rights, the industrial revolution had just re-vamped the economy, and science was challenging faith’s place as the process for understanding the world (In Bed with Sherlock Holmes 129, Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero 136). 

Sherlock Holmes was a man of cutting-edge science, genius, uncompromising rationality, cold logic, justice and order - he was a hero for his time. He was a self-possessed man of action who could solve the greatest puzzles with ease, always righting the world with Dr. Watson at his side to document it all. He showed incredible mastery over any subject he deemed important. If the strength of faith, masculine power or empire were in question, Holmes was the perfect answer to shore up order in the West. Whether battling domestic criminals or foreign threats from America or Australia, Sherlock was a defender of the status quo, even though as a man of science he pushed the envelope. He is a man of his times, and yet also shows how little hegemonic masculinity has changed since the late 1800s. Today, hegemonic masculinity acts very similarly.

Portrait of a Man

Sherlock’s masculinity has long been held up as an example. He embodies many of the stereotypical strengths of masculinity, like rationality, intelligence, physical power, chivalry, and lack of emotion. Even today these features are highly associated with hegemonic masculinity. Sherlock Holmes is an ideal example of many of these qualities and he is also undiluted by feminine presence in his life, a true man's man. Sherlock appears to live in a man's world, filled mostly with other men, and the important people in his life - John Watson, his brother Mycroft Holmes, his arch-nemesis Moriarty, the detectives he works with at Scotland Yard - are all men. His only significant relationship with a woman is with his landlady, Mrs. Hudson, whose main role is to cater to him. Sherlock stands apart from femininity in almost every way.  

Disregarding the "Weaker" Sex

Although Holmes has many women clients, his relationship to women and femininity is rather strained at times. There is an on-going debate about whether Sherlock Holmes displays misogynistic attitudes towards women, but I think it is sufficiently settled that Holmes does not view most women as his equals. In fact, positive opinions of women are often based on a lady's ability to be unfeminine, like Irene Adler's capacity to disguise herself as a man to beat Sherlock Holmes at his own game. Holmes is chivalrous and paternalistically protective at his best and damaging and disrespectful at his worst. The best argument for Sherlock's complete disregard for women and their feelings is Charles Augustus Milverton, where a disguised Holmes callously becomes engaged to a servant in order to trick her into allowing him access to the house of her employer. After the case, he leaves her in a lurch without a thought and even Watson is horrified by this behaviour. However, this does not appear to compromise Sherlock's good name.

More often, Sherlock's role is a chivalrous one in most cases, stepping in to assist a helpless maiden. There is no shortage of damsels in distress in the canon, women who take their problems to Sherlock Holmes in hopes that he might put their world right again. In fact, in Charles Augustus Milverton, Sherlock is acting to save an upper class woman from social ruin. Holmes may hold that, "women are never to be entirely trusted - not the best of them" (Sign of the Four) and admit to never being a "whole-souled admirer of womankind,"(The Valley of Fear) but he has usually been a "chivalrous opponent" (In Bed with Sherlock Holmes 91). He will save women, act as a gentleman, but he always keeps them at arms length. Their irrationality is just too unpredictable! His chivalry is arguably a nod more to paternalism and his own performance of masculinity than any particular quality of women. His main action towards women is to arbitrate their conflicts and dole out justice, a masculine hero of the justice/social order.*

Emotions

John Watson depicts Sherlock as the enemy of emotion. He says that, "all emotions were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind." (Scandal in Bohemia) He goes further, writing:

"He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer -- excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. (Scandal in Bohemia)

Love is a foreign concept to the man, not because he is incapable but because he is beyond the petty expression of emotion. "Love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things," says Sherlock in The Sign of the Four. He is too rational to love: "Women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart." (The Lion's Mane). He does not need other people. He avoids any kind of emotional weakness like the plague, and although many would argue that he lapses into emotion on occasion, Sherlock's philosophy is to reject it in favour of the work (his cases) and reason. He takes the stereotypical male refusal to deal with feelings to an entirely new level. 

A Cartesian Man

Sherlock is arguably most masculine in his preference for the mind over the body. Men have typically been associated with the former and women with the latter, which further clarifies why Sherlock might prefer men to women. At this time, women were not considered rational, thinking beings.

"The signifier ‘Holmes’ stands for a series of rational intellectual processes that would attain perfection only when set apart from the body; or, to put in another way, they still seem invested in a classical framework that reaches back to Greece: to a platonic ideal of abstraction, a perfection only obtainable at the expense of transcending the body.” Francesca Coppa (Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom 212)

This urge to pull the mind free from the body is seen in the Greeks, the Age of Reason/Enlightenment, and arguably continues today (Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero 302). Sherlock Holmes is a man with a masculinity so wrapped up in the power of the mind over the body that he will refuse to eat or sleep until a case ("the game") is finished, much like an athlete may play through injury. Both display a macho effort to deny the body. Along with a habit for excessive tobacco use (even for his time), cocaine and heroine use, it is clear that Sherlock Holmes values the mind to the exclusion of the body. He is defined by the (assumed to be) masculine characteristics intelligence and his reasoning.

Physicality
Finally, Holmes' appearance does not disrupt an ideal masculinity. Although Sherlock Holmes is not described as traditionally handsome, the illustrations by Sidney Paget accompanying many editions of the original stories established his good looks despite the text. In addition, he is a man of action, adept at fencing and hand-to-hand combat. Sherlock's physical presence does nothing to detract from his masculinity.

Missing Element?
One piece of the hegemonic masculinity puzzle that is missing is demonstrated heterosexuality. Sherlock has so distanced himself from emotion and love that a romantic partnership is out of the question. John Watson is the only constant companion that Sherlock seems to need. Heterosexuality is present in most presentations of ideal masculinity, however, and so this absence arguably sets Sherlock apart.

'Fortunately,' John Watson's interest in women is well established and therefore is expected to settle the matter. In fact, Watson is seen as a bit of a "lady killer" and I argue that Watson's role in supporting Sherlock's masculine performance is in providing a sort of straight alibi, or heterosexuality by association. Conveniently, Watson is both a symbol of heterosexual masculinity and a lesser man that Sherlock can be held up against in comparison. Less rational, less intelligent, more sentimental, far more romantic, Dr. John Watson's masculinity is not a perfect ideal. Holmes is not slow to point out these facts, critiquing Watson's inability to properly observe evidence and his penchant for adding romance to his retellings of their adventures. This qualifies him for role of sidekick and biographer, secondary to the hero of Sherlock Holmes. Although a soldier, ladies' man and doctor, Watson is never up to the Sherlockian standard and his masculinity 'failures' highlight Sherlock's successes.

Sherlock's Reasoned Masculinity

Sherlock Holmes' power as a character is specifically masculine because his characteristics exclude women and femininity either explicitly or implicitly. In the Victorian era, women were not reasoning, intelligent, logical beings, at least not to the same extent as men. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is reassuringly masculine, both for the Victorian era and (as we will see in the other sections) going forward to today.

"The 1890s were widely perceived as embodying an acute 'crisis of masculinity... many factors contributed to the male malaise, among them the waning Victorianism, the emergence of the 'New Woman,' and continuing impact of industrialization, urbanization. These changes meant that standards of masculinity, like many other dimensions of Victorian culture, were in a state of transition. Crimes of detective fiction have recognized as one of its functions the provision of a sense of order, control and stability for the culture of this period." (Sherlock's Men 11)

Sherlock is an answer to this crisis as the perfect phallogocentric hero, an ideal portrayal of masculinity. His companion, Watson, even acts to support his performance as a heterosexual prosthetic, thereby allowing Sherlock to avoid the weakness of women and love, but maintain heterosexual(-like) standing. However, as masculinity can be increasingly accessed and/or admired by those of any gender and/or sexuality, there is space for a queer masculinity, which we see creeping into the most recent, popular renditions.



* In fact, in his position as omniscient deducer, and often both the judge and jury for a criminal, Holmes enacts powerful masculinity on men as well in this capacity as hero of justice (Victorian Sleuth to Modern Hero 311).