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Femme Fatale or Not? (Comparing Irene to Christie characters)
Bear with me because this IS Sherlock-related, but I'm going to start with another series, for comparisons' sake:
Agatha Christie wrote several novels where she initially appears to set one character up as a femme fatale archtype: beautiful, supposedly irresistable to men, often with a career on the stage or as a model, notorious for her affairs, and for supposedly "breaking up marriages" and for "corrupting" men in other ways...and then Christie would subvert expectations (as she always did) by showing the character to be...NOT responsible for the evil, but also not "misunderstood" and not "with a heart of gold"...but the VICTIM of the men.
One or more of the supposed male "victims" of the femme fatale would be shown to be taking advantage of her, often beyond using her for sex. They might be cheating her out of money, and, in some cases, the notorious female is the murder victim, murdered by one of the men she thought she was seducing...with her being much more in love with him than the other way around.
And in another famous case, the man was a chronic womanizer, and he let his newest, less-experienced-than-most mistress believe he loved her enough to leave his wife for her...all so he could use her as a model for his painting....the guy's a jerk but it's made clear he cares about his wife more than anyone else. (This may have been "wish fulfillment" on Christie's part, because she WAS dumped for a younger woman.)
As Hercule Poirot says about one such woman, "She didn't fatally attract men, men fatally attracted her." Her sexuality made her, not evil perhaps, but weaker rather than stronger.
I think this kind of twist is sort of what Mofftis (and perhaps, Doyle as well) were going for with Irene. In the end, BBC-Sherlock fatally attracted his Irene more than she did him. And also, she may not have been in love with Moriarty or any other male villain, but she certainly got in over her head working with them, all the while thinking she was clever and powerful.
In canon, Holmes' royal client, the King of Bohemia, tells us Irene is going to ruin his marriage to a princess by revealing the past affair he had with her. Apparently the princess is so puritanical she'll dump the King over this (should that be our first clue that the King is not on the up-and-up with Holmes?)
Weirdly, Irene has supposedly told him exactly WHEN she is going to do this...which seems not-so-smart of her, because it makes things easier for Holmes. You wouldn't think a woman could blackmail a man over an affair, frankly - you would think she would be at risk of disgracing herself more than him.
But we never hear a threat in Irene's own words (it's told to Holmes second-hand by the King), and by the end she says she won't bother him anymore, because she's now married to "a better man" who is a commoner. But she describes the King as having "cruelly wronged" her.
So, on the one hand, she IS unconventional and clever, (says she gains freedom by dressing up as a man, and she escapes Holmes' detection by doing this), but in her sexual adverturing (such as it is) she seems to be more "foolish woman used by the womanizer" than "femme fatale who uses the man."
And there's a suggestion that she's "settling down" with her new husband.
Canon-Irene is also very much NOT a criminal, at least from what we see of her. I think she's one of the bravest, kindest, wisest human being in canon. 
Ironically, in trying to modernize her, Mofftiss through a way a lot of what was admirable about the original.
If you knew Sherlock Holmes mostly from movies and TV, you could be excused for thinking she is the female lead of canon; in fact, she only appears in one story, but you could see where she could be the heroine of her own series, and in fact, Carol Nelson Douglass has written such a series.
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Re: Femme Fatale or Not? (Comparing Irene to Christie characters)
An interesting analysis which goes some way at least towards explaining why Irene Adler was 'The Woman'.
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Re: Femme Fatale or Not? (Comparing Irene to Christie characters)
I agree that the canon Irene Adler is a much more likeable character than BBC Irene. She is clever and manages to escape. She tricks Holmes and the funniest moment imo is when Holmes is accidentally made the best man during the wedding of Miss Adler and Godfrey Norton.
Holmes descibes it:
It was the most preposterous position in which I ever found myself in my life, and it was the thought of it that started me laughing just now.
Reminds me a bit of the wedding in TSoT.
- SherlocklivesinOH
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Re: Femme Fatale or Not? (Comparing Irene to Christie characters)
However, Holmes is amused by the wedding and points out that Irene's being in love with another man solves his client's (the King's) problem. Which doesn't sound like Holmes has any envy for the man who marries Irene.
On the other hand, notice that the KING's reaction is, "She can't possibly be in love with [Norton]," even though this would solve his problem. The King raves over Irene's cleverness several times and even says, "What a queen she would have made!"
I think HE'S still hot for her...I almost want to think HE was the one trying to sabotage her new relationship! (Wouldn't you think that if she made their affair known, she would be more disgraced than the King? Wasn't there a double standard in those days? The King would have us believe it would be bad for his reputation and his princess would dump him, but I'm not sure I trust that. I thought royal women were conditioned to accept their men doing that kind of thing?
)
How you interpret Irene may depend on what you think "adventuress" means. In that era it almost surely wasn't a compliment...but to the modern reader it sounds glamorous.
Irene is an actress...which was also enough to give a woman a dubious reputation in that day (though it was a step up from Shakespeare's day because there WERE female actresses...the parts weren't all played by men.)
In the Indian in the Cupboard series, (by Lynn Reid Banks) the modern protagonist (boy living in the 1980s or 1990s) reads the diary of an ancestor who was a stage performer in the Victorian/Edwardian era. Her father tells her he'd rather see her dead than on the stage; her sister and brother-in-law limit her contact with their daughter; her (out of wedlock) son is ashamed of her, and she gets the reputation among later generations as "wicked." She says that she's basically poor and an outcast her whole life, but that she's proud of that career nonetheless. She is, however, terribly jealous of her sister, with tragic results. Now, most modern female readers would rather be her than the happily-married sister. I do not, however, get the impression of Irene being an outcast in society to that degree. Her reputation is dubious, yes, but she's hardly universally shunned or reviled.
The King is embarrassed by having been involved with her, but he does have admiration for her, and she apparently has many other admirers. His not being able to marry her seems to be more about class differences than her personal virtue.
The Lynn Reid Banks actress character does say, "Actors were not respectable, but they were much talked about." And it wasn't all that long afterword that Hollywood became glamorous, at least in the U.S. Maybe it did have some glamor, even in Holmes and Irene's day? There are a few famous names from that era, like Sir Henry Irving.
And apparently, it was socially acceptable to ATTEND the theater, sincen Holmes and Watson frequently do.
There are Sherlock Holmes adaptations where Irene's acting ability is shown to be one of the good things about her...there is a musical called Baker Street where she and Holmes both don disguises to trap Moriarty. (There's a song where they're getting ready and she's kind of acting like she's going on a date with Holmes - but he's more excited about "the hunt.")
The writers of that musical, and other adaptations who make Irene a female lead, have forgotten that she fled the country at the end of canon-SCAN.
That fleeing seems like she doesn't feel that victorious...and it may hint that she fears the King could do something drastic to shut her up. PERHAPS her fate in BBC-SiB is Mofftiss's nod to that?
There are actually quite a few Holmes stories that turn on inter-class romances. None of them end exactly happily, but the reasons differ. Hard to tell whether Doyle thought people were making a mistake by going outside their class, or whether he was trying to call attention to the injustice of their being kept apart.
Edited to add: Oh, and one more thing to remember about canon-Irene: the King actually OFFERED money in exchange for the photo and other evidence of their affair...and Irene REFUSED. Really, you wonder how much of an "affair" they ever really had...because how could someone like Irene have gone for someone like him in the first place?
Last edited by SherlocklivesinOH (April 14, 2014 1:26 am)
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