I often come across people on the internet complaining that Stephen Moffat is pretty off-message about gender/sexuality in his work, and last night’s Sherlock (‘A Scandal In Belgravia’) was a particularly good example of that. Basically (for those who don’t want this spoiled, look away now, although frankly the episode had all the dramatic tension of someone opening a window, so you can still enjoy it just as much not knowing what happened imo) a beautiful, sexually aggressive, dangerous and irrational young lesbian, who works as a dominatrix and is known in her professional life simply as ‘The Woman’, is foiled in her criminal (but, it is important to note, apparently unmotivated by any sort of clear interest) schemes because she accidentally fell in love with Sherlock Holmes.

So obviously this was quite problematic for a lot of people, who were offended by the notion that this powerful lesbian would turn straight and weak-kneed basically just because she saw the big male detective swing his dick around some, and thus everything she planned came to nought. And I’m not denying that on the surface, it looks bad (not that I especially care either way, I have bigger priorities when watching TV than political correctness). But I do want to elaborate a way in which this event, and the gender/sexuality associated with it, was important to what the episode presented us with. What we end up with is no more ‘correct’, as far as the feminist, LGBT ally party line goes, but it is certainly I think more interesting, so if you’re going to get mad about something, I would argue that you should get mad about this instead.

From a dramatic perspective, last night’s episode of Sherlock never really accelerated past third gear, but it is interesting in a way, not necessarily to watch but rather to analyse. What appeared to be the central mystery, something about some pictures on a cameraphone and then a plane the government has stuffed with dead bodies, turned out to be a complete MacGuffin, because the real investigation Holmes undertook was into Irene Adler, the dominatrix lesbian, ‘The Woman’, and this was why the mystery culminated in him unlocking her phone, on the final try, with the first four letters of his name (as she had fallen in love with him, so obviously he himself was the password). This ultimately made for kind of boring entertainment, because it was basically a complex psychological drama that wasn’t (partly due to the constriants of the medium) done all that well. But it is interesting to analyse nonetheless.

This is because: what do detective stories do? Detective stories are ultimately about interpretation. But whereas in real life, most of us can only at best hope to offer one valid interpretation among many, the detective’s interpretation always fits exactly with all the clues he is offered, is unquestionably the correct one. This imagery of ‘fitting’ is pointed: in literary theory (I get this from Jeremy Tambling’s 2010 book on Allegory) there is a distinction drawn between ‘symbol’ and ‘allegory’. To be brief: the etymology of the word ‘symbol’ from the Greek ‘symballein’, ‘to throw together, to bring together, to collect, to compare’. What we can call a ‘symbolic’ theory of meaning is that meaning we can find ‘fits’ with the metaphysically real world. By contrast in allegory “anything can stand for anything else”, there is no such symbolic fit between meaning and the world, so in an allegorical theory of meaning, meaning functions like this, there is no explanation for why any particular meaning might be applied to any bit of the metaphysically real world, no fit. The detective in the stories navigates the world searching then for what we might call ‘the symbolic’ as opposed to the ‘the allegorical’, the perfect fit of the fragments left to the mystery to the real event. And, in the stories, he almost always of course finds them: this is what detective stories offer us, really, the comforts of symbol.

So with this in mind, I want to explain how last night’s episode of Sherlock was in fact an allegory (in the other, more everyday use of the word ‘allegory’, not implying meaning functioning like an allegory) for this search for symbolic meaning that the detective undertakes. In this allegory, the Irene Adler character stands for the threat of meaning being undermined, that is: the absence of symbolic meaning. Nothing Adler does in the episode particularly made sense, or at least there was no higher motivation for any of it beyond sensual pleasure: to her life is just some sort of nihilistic game. This is up to the point where she ‘falls in love’ with Sherlock. Until then Sherlock cannot make any sort of meaning he might apply fit with her. This is why he cannot open her cameraphone. Each time he thinks he has the trick figured out, but fails to unlock the phone. He even tries to trick her into revealing herself with a false phone, but she is wise to that. And there is also a code that would make the phone self-destruct, hence the lack of discernable meaning is presented as dangerous. But finally he does discern the meaning, it is her love for him that is the one thing he can pin down, and then anything is solved, the phone unlocks, symbolic meaning has been found.

It is at this point that the gender/sexuality issue becomes interesting/important. Irene Adler stands for the threat of the breakdown of meaning. She is a woman. Apparently, she is an intelligent woman. She is also sexually confident and aggressive and, more than that, sleeps with both men and women (and tells Watson she is “gay”). And she is an irrational libertine. Sherlock, by contrast, is male, rational, virginal, unemotional. It is actually Adler’s emotions that end up trapping her into the very context of meaning she is apparently trying to void. Incidentally, the other thing that traps her is her body: near the start Sherlock figures out the keycode to her safe from her measurements.

So essentially, Moffat chose, in allegorising the process of the search for meaning in the The Detective Story Itself, to use a woman (in fact, literally, ‘The Woman’) to portray the possibility of the breakdown of symbolic meaning. This is why it might be troubling from a gender/sexuality point of view. But it does make sense of why Adler should have been a lesbian who then falls for a man. The whole episode is about someone wilfully denying the ‘male’, ‘rational’ context of symbolic meaning: if she were not a lesbian, she would still appear to be participating in this context from the off, she would not be a threat, she could just be controlled by some dude right from the start. By falling for Sherlock she ends up being brought into this ‘male’ context. This why she had to be a lesbian who ends up falling for a man. The episode wouldn’t have worked as well without it.

Of course, just to make clear, absolutely if you want to say Stephen Moffat is off-message about gender, I am willing to agree with you. I just want to elaborate how what he is doing is off-message in a more *interesting way* than he might otherwise be given credit for. For example, we can learn much about the way patriarchy functions in contemporary society from Doctor Who’s triumvirate of idiot eunuch male Rory, who precisely due to his lack of testicles is allowed to fuck ‘strong, sexy’ Amy; both controlled by the all-powerful male Doctor who controls them/reality (but that’s a different blog post).