Victorian Visual Culture

I discovered my love for Sherlock Holmes stories about a year ago. As an avid fan of mystery novels, Arthur Conan Doyle’s written adventures of a mechanical detective and his witty sidekick checked all the boxes in what I loved about the genre: cheeky investigative dynamics, elaborate plans, thrilling reveals, logical deductive reasoning. However, in every story that I read, men were at the forefront of it, while many of the women were placed delicately in the domestic background (Watson’s wife being a clear example of this). This was not surprising to me. Placing myself in the looking glass of Victorian literature, I had come to expect that men would always take up the capacity. That is until I first read “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

This one stood out to me immediately as being a bit different from anything I had read from Doyle before. Two major twists: Sherlock Holmes is outwitted, and he is outwitted by a woman. Irene Adler shattered my conceptions that I had created when looking at these stories. How was she occupying this space? How was she taking control of such an immense amount of power? The answers to these questions lies in the power of possession in a particular photograph. Therefore, I wanted to explore how the rise of photography impacted perceptions of women and feminism during the nineteenth century. 

In Chapter 1 of John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photography and History, he describes the rise of photography with the fluidity of social status and class, that “to ‘have one’s portrait done’ was one of the symbolic acts by which individuals from the rising social classes made their ascent visible to themselves and others and classed themselves and others and classed themselves among those who enjoyed social status” (Tagg 37). I would argue that the same could be said about women, that for a long time women were kept invisible by many societal norms: marriage, domesticity, patriarchal values. 

To be visible holds a certain power, a power that can be held in the connotations and context of a single photograph. Irene Adler uses this to make herself visible not just in the context of the scandal itself, but in the context of feminism. Her presence in a photograph is enough to have the King of Bohemia tied in knots to destroy it, to make her invisible from public perception. However, her wit allows her to remain in possession of not only the scandalous photograph but the possession of her identity, perception, and worth. In her final letter to Sherlock Holmes regarding the photo, she ends with: “I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future” (Doyle 14). The depiction of photography as a weapon is tangible power in the hands of a woman. Adler uses this weapon to slice through any misogynistic assumptions and cracks the lens of the great Sherlock Holmes, symbolizing a literal crack in the perception of women within the confines of society. She is rejecting the scenario where the man would have possession over her image and flips it on its head. She holds the image of a King, sending the message that she is more than capable of holding her own and controlling her own public perception. 

A lot of these ideas can be transferred to women in the present day. Especially in light of the recent #MeToo movement, keeping women visible is incredibly important in keeping these issues visible. Whether photos come in the form of evidence or simply used as a way of spreading awareness, the rise in photography has paved a path for women to fight for their rights from the oppressive forces of invisibility. The spread of these images on social media fires the flame and keeps female visibility alive. As John Tagg rightly points out, the photograph creates an “exercise of a new kind of power of the social body, generating new kinds of knowledge and newly refined means of control” (Tagg 59). 

Works Cited

Doyle, Arthur Conan. “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Stanford University, 2006. 
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988.