poor Watson

[kindkit]

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.

Comments

[starlady]

People definitely hate on Watson (possibly because Holmes actually likes him, canonically? IDK). You can see it in the steadily declining portrayal of him in media. I haven't been able to read the Mary Russel Holmes books because of the author's raging hatred of Watson, in point of fact.

[kindkit]

I know there are a lot of terrible film and TV Watsons. I've been lucky in not having seen much of them: I love the Granada Watson (especially when played by Edward Hardwicke, but I don't mind David Burke), Martin Freeman's Watson in Sherlock, and Jude Law's sexy!Watson.

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.

[starlady]

I actually never finished the first book, but I remember very clearly that what I did read made me convinced that King hated him (I may possibly have read the ending, though). Mostly because the portrayal of him seemed to be that he was pretty thick. Which is definitely not canonical Watson.

[kindkit]

I think I may have read the first King book before I had read much of the actual Holmes canon, though I was aware enough of it (I think I'd seen a little of the Granada series) to want Holmes and Watson to be a couple. So at the time I was more disappointed by lack of gay than by the characterization of Watson, because I didn't have much basis for comparison.

[lilacsigil]

I *could* believe Watson taking those viewpoints (after all, they're still sadly popular viewpoints and were even more so then) but the author would have to work for it, and have reasons other than "Because Watson is a bit of a thickie."

[kindkit]

Yeah, I could see Watson believing, for example, the birth control is immoral. But I think it would be more a matter of him never having really thought about it. I think if he encountered someone who believed in birth control, he'd at least be willing to listen rather than rant about it. In the story I read, he was aggressively rude and unsympathetic to a young woman who'd been arrested for distributing birth control leaflets. I think the author just wanted a way to write Watson out of the story, actually.