<b>Detective Stories from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel</b>

Authors

  • Feryal Çubukcu Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi

Keywords:

detective genre, masculinity, Holmes,

Abstract

Detective Stories from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel

Abstract

The Victorian period in England was one of the most influential and important epochs in history. During Queen Victoria’s reign, England was arguably the most powerful nation in the world, setting standards for social, economic and industrial development. Among the rules of Victorian society were stringent codes pertaining to what was acceptable for men and women. Men were expected to hold decent jobs, marry respectable women, and create the next generation of proper British citizens. Women were raised to marry, breed virtuous English children, and live quietly in the confines of the household. As Elaine Showalter (1987) says Victorian households had different spheres for men and women. There were certain behavioral norms for men and women that were standard practice for asserting one’s proper gender codes. In his 1995 book Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies, within Victorian men’s writing, a method of constructing masculinity that opposes the dominant English model of manliness based on bourgeois domestic matrimony. During the first half of the Victorian period, normative masculinity required a man to master his psychic energy by establishing a bourgeois domestic identity founded on matrimony. However, this concept translates into the bachelordom plot, wherein male desire finds an appropriate outlet in a sidekick rather than a wife, thus, under the terms of popular middle-class belief, permanently affirming masculinity. When we come to 2010s a bestseller Whitechapel hinges on the same lone detective trying to pursue the killers and criminals. The purpose of this paper is to probe and grapple with the similarities and dissimilarities the detective genre from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel by focusing on the detective himself, the crime types, criminals- their motives and ethnic origins-, masculinity, and male-male bonding.


Author Biography

Feryal Çubukcu, Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi

dilbilim, dil eğitimi, edebiyat kuramlari, eleştiri kuramları

References

Caine, Barbara (2007). Bloomsbury Masculinity and Its Victorian Antecedents The Journal of Men’s Studies, 15, 3, 271-281.

Cawelti, John G. (1976). Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Artand Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. (2003). The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. I. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics. The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot, 461–79; The Adventure of the Speckled Band, 307–25. The Crooked Man, 491–503; The Sign of Four, 97–184. London: Wildside Press.

Kestner, Joseph (1996). Real men: Construction of masculinity in Sherlock Holmes Narratives, Studies in the Literary Imagination 29, 1, 73-88.

Knight, Stephen (1980). Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Leppert, Richard (1988). Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Raheja, Lauren (2006). Anxieties of Empire in Doyle’s Tales of Sherlock Holmes, Nature, Society, and Thought, 19, 4, 417-426.

Riley, Brendan (2009). From Sherlock to angel. The Journal of Popular Culture, 42, 5, 908-922.

Showalter, Elaine (1987). The Female malady. London: Penguin Books.

Sussman, Herbert (1995). Victorian Masculinities. Cambridge: CUP.

Tosh, John (1999). A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Yuen, Karen (2008). Bound By Sound: Music, Victorian Masculinity and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Critical Survey, 20, 3, 79–96.

Downloads

Published

2015-12-23

How to Cite

Çubukcu, F. (2015). <b>Detective Stories from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel</b>. Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 4(2), 1-11. Retrieved from http://kutaksam.karabuk.edu.tr/index.php/ilk/article/view/421

Issue

Section

Articles