Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” didn’t seem particularly gothic on the surface to me, but looking at it more closely, it seems to check a lot of the gothic motif boxes (from the British Library’s website). One of the most noticeable was, like in Dracula, the entrance of an interesting-looking man from eastern Europe into England. Because of this similarity, I was surprised where Holmes’ story went. In Dracula, the Harkers, Seward, Quincey, Van Helsing, and Arthur seek to dispel the foreigner and save England, so when I read that the Bohemian king wanted to steal a photograph from a woman living in England, it surprised me that he was seen as the good guy or victim. But maybe that should not have surprised me given Holmes’ apathetic misogyny toward women, described by Watson in the beginning of the story (1), and the assumptions Holmes makes throughout the story; that “women are naturally secretive ” (14); “a married woman grabs for her baby [and] an unmarried one reached for her jewel-box” (16); and that he immediately takes the side of the king and assumes all the blame falls on Irene. Irene was the young woman, and the king was the sexual transgressor who engaged in a relationship with an inappropriate power imbalance (another gothic motif).
Holmes taking the side of the king made me think of Moretti’s “Capital Dracula” and his argument about Quincey being a vampire (435-436). Irene is also an American, and she ends up not in England by the end of the story, which effectively happens to Quincey as well, with his death. Moretti mentions the vampiric/American desire to take over the “Old world” (437), which I can see being a message in “A Scandal in Bohemia” as well. Irene’s potential blackmail “‘may have an influence upon European history’” as the king says (5). This seems like an interesting subversion to the idea from “Gothic Motifs” that the past comes back to haunt the present (Clashing time periods), since England is portrayed as the past, being connected to the “history of Europe” and the U.S. as the present/future, being the place where Irene goes off to start a new life. So, in this Sherlock Holmes story, it’s the future that comes to threaten the past instead of the other way around.
Reading the story with this in mind gave a reason for why Holmes was on the king’s side from the start (why else would he mention that she was born in New Jersey? It doesn’t seem like it should have any importance to the plot). It also seems to sort of excuse Holmes’ failure to solve this mystery, since Irene doesn’t really belong to the society Holmes is used to. She’s a New Woman and an American, and Holmes seems to be stuck in the past regarding his ideas about women.
https://blogs.dickinson.edu/britishlit/files/2023/09/Dracula-Critical-Articles.pdf