poor Watson
Jul. 24th, 2013 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I've been reading some professionally published Holmes pastiche short fiction, and it seems to me that Watson is rather frequently made a scapegoat for Victorian values. Has anyone else noticed this?
Watson is more conventional than Holmes in some ways (not in all--it's Holmes, not Watson, who's been known to scoff at the idea of intelligent women), but he's not a prig. Certainly I find it very unlikely that he would fulminate against birth control and insist that if the poor can't afford more children they must learn to practice abstinence, which is what he does in the story I'm currently reading.
Watson is more conventional than Holmes in some ways (not in all--it's Holmes, not Watson, who's been known to scoff at the idea of intelligent women), but he's not a prig. Certainly I find it very unlikely that he would fulminate against birth control and insist that if the poor can't afford more children they must learn to practice abstinence, which is what he does in the story I'm currently reading.
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Date: 2013-07-24 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-24 10:54 pm (UTC)I did read a couple of the Mary Russell books years ago. I remember being disappointed by the first one because there was no hint of Holmes/Watson, which I really think a modern pastiche ought to have or at least acknowledge the possibility of, and then skeeved out later by the romance between a girl in her late teens and a man in his sixties. Apart from his absence I didn't notice much about Watson in them at the time, but I've heard King writes him very badly/hatefully. What does she do to the poor man?
The thing I was reading today made me want to contact Kate Beaton and ask whether Jam Watson doesn't need a companion, Victorian Patriarchy Watson.
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Date: 2013-07-27 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-28 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-25 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-26 06:49 pm (UTC)