![\"Irene](\"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/files\/2016\/02\/adler-300x169.jpg\")
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Irene Adler is one of the few \u2018criminals\u2019 against whom Sherlock Holmes is unable to exact some sort of punishment. She is an intellectual match for Holmes, even causing the man to hold off \u201c[making] merry over the cleverness of women\u201d after he is bested by her (19). However, this supposed female equal to Holmes only has one line in her own words in the entire story of A Scandal in Bohemia <\/em>\u2013 \u201cSurely. Bring him into the sitting-room. There is a comfortable sofa. This way, please!\u201d (15). These are the only words Adler utters in her own voice: otherwise Holmes retells her words and the reader is given a mere sense of her voice in the letter she leaves for Holmes.<\/p>\n Adler\u2019s character is conveyed through the opinions of the men who come into contact with her. Holmes file on Adler reveals her American birth and operatic career (7). The King tells the detective pair that \u201cshe has the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men\u201d (8). Holmes decides while following Alder that \u201cshe is the daintiest thin under a bonnet on this planet\u201d and \u201cshe was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for\u201d (10 \u2013 11). Watson remarks on \u201cher superb figure\u201d as she watches the crowd tends to the injured Father Holmes, and calls her a \u201cbeautiful creature\u201d (15). Adler is revealed to the reader piece by beautiful piece through the eyes of men; she is an object of which they discuss its merits, usually with the King wishing that she was of a higher birth because she would \u201chave made an admirable queen\u201d (19).<\/p>\n This Holmes adventure is an example of the male gaze at work. Laura Mulvey discusses the male gaze in her piece \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,\u201d showing that the camera takes on the role of a man looking at a woman. This is why sex scenes usually focus heavily on the females face because that is what the male audience wants to see. It is a moment of scopophilia, or gaining pleasure in looking \u2013 basically a peeping Tom situation (Mulvey 835). \u00a0This scenario is repeated in Doyle\u2019s work \u2013 all three men name Adler as an extremely beautiful creature and they are all after a photograph of her with the King.<\/p>\n The photo, however, complicates this narrative. A picture is something that can also be looked at and allow the viewer to gain pleasure from it. But this photograph, this potential source of scopophilia, is possessed by a woman, which means it must be wrong. Adler having the picture of her and the King opens the doors for a female to gaze at an image of a man for her own gain, and her only crime is threatening to let another woman look at said picture. The King claims that she is black mailing him to ruin his reputation and marriage, but Adler never has the chance to divulge her motives \u2013 who says she wasn\u2019t trying to save another woman from an unhappy union to a man who she knows has done wrong? Adler has a set of man\u2019s clothes, her \u201cwalking-clothes,\u201d that she uses in order to be able to move about freely, and this guise is even convincing enough to fool Holmes as she passes him at his apartment, which shows that she understands the limited power women have over their own lives \u2013\u2013 so why would she not be willing to help a woman who was being forced to marry a man without knowing his true character? (18)<\/p>\n The men see the photograph as a weapon that would hinder the proper social order: the King marrying a worthy princess to continue the royal bloodlines in Europe, but Adler views it as a weapon to safeguard herself \u201cfrom any steps which [the King] might take in the future\u201d (19). In this case, she is able to retain her weapon of protection, and in its hiding place she leaves another \u201cwhich [the King] might care to possess\u201d \u2013 this \u201cphotograph was of Irene Adler herself in an evening dress\u201d (18 \u2013 19). In this sense, Adler gets the last laugh because she willingly gives the men an attractive picture of herself in the midst of foiling Holmes\u2019 plan. She is proving that she is not an unwilling object being viewed, but a person worthy of merit, even if she does fulfill the stereotypical marriage plot in the end, maintaining the original status quo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Irene Adler is one of the few \u2018criminals\u2019 against whom Sherlock Holmes is unable to exact some sort of punishment. She is an intellectual match for Holmes, even causing the man to hold off \u201c[making] merry over the cleverness of women\u201d after he is bested by her (19). However, this supposed female equal to Holmes … Continue reading The Pleasure of Viewing Irene Adler<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2516,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2516"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/britishlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}