Re-Visioning the Detective Flâneur: Sherlock Holmes to Charlotte Holmes

In Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, Srdjan Smajić reflects on the flâneur’s thrill of reading people as texts (94) – a thrill coded as masculine and epitomized in characters like C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. This connection between flâneur and detective gives the flâneur purpose, per Isabel Vila-Cabanes: “The flaneur’s likely identification with the detective has a positive effect on the social perception of the type, for it legitimises the stroller’s apparent laziness” (Vila-Cabanes 2008: 205). I undertake to scrutinize this masculine legitimization in my presentation through an examination of Sherry Thomas’s Neo-Victorian Lady Sherlock novel series. As a Neo-Victorian character, Lady Charlotte Holmes directly challenges social and cultural conventions through her mastery of the patriarchal ‘masculine script’ (Kestner 1997: 2), including the role of flâneur. Specifically, as a transgressive woman, Charlotte’s presence in London is an infraction against prescribed Victorian gender codes and re-visions the flâneuse, a figure not fully realized in the nineteenth century (Vila-Cabanes 2008: 221). Charlotte decisively loses her virginity to avoid marriage, renounces her noble title, moves into a residence with a former actress, and starts up a consulting detective agency under the guise of Sherlock Holmes. Given such radicalism, I argue that Thomas’s historical setting revisions the relationship between detective and city. Moreover, Thomas’s Lady Sherlock novels challenge the Neo-Victorian New Woman’s superficial engagement with radicalism. As Karen Sturgeon-Dodsworth argues, the Neo-Victorian New Woman embodies “an entirely illusory radicalism” (165) not in keeping with the historical New Woman. Instead, Thomas’s novels echo Conan Doyle’s own attention to the New Woman in characters such as Irene Adler and Violet Hunter. Thus, while appropriating Conan Doyle’s consulting detective, Thomas plays to conventions in the Sherlock Holmes canon and gives voice to the flâneuse.

Annette Wren obtained her doctorate in December 2019. Titled “Now Watson, the fair sex is
your department”: Gender and Sexuality in Post-2010 Sherlock Holmes Adaptations, she
examines gender and sexuality in transatlantic post-2010 adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. She
has spoken about adaptation studies at conferences and has a forthcoming book chapter in an
academic collection on the sidekick in detective fiction. An examination of Dr. John Watson in
adaptation, Wren’s chapter argues that popular psychology’s use of I.Q. and E.Q. has shifted the
role of a detective’s sidekick.