Gender Roles In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventure Of The Speckled Band

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In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, Sherlock Holmes and his assistant Mr. Watson are tasked with helping a middle-aged woman, Helen Stoner, find the truth behind her sister’s untimely death. A theme of men being the subject, or the doer, and women being the object, or the observer, persisted throughout the course of the short story. I believe this shines a light into a broader picture of what the gender roles were in society in Victorian England, the period in which the story takes place. Womanliness in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” can be described as helpless, frightened, and not self-sufficient. That is, Helen, her murdered twin sister, Julia, and dead mother had no important plot role …show more content…

Whereas women are, for the most part, mitigated to be obedient and locked away until marriage, Rossetti advocates an entirely different path. The title of the poem refers to promises, presumably of monogamy and commitment while in love, like pie-crust in the sense that they are easy to forge, but also easy to break. Rossetti places an emphasis on liberty, advocating that both the man and woman “keep … both our liberties, … free to come as free to go.” This kind of thinking acknowledges that feelings are not static and love can and will die out in some cases. This laid back attitudes about the sexual empowerment, particularly of women was completely unheard of at the time, challenging the entire Victorian system. When she says, “If you promised, you might grieve / For lost liberty again”, she is referring to the fact that monogamous commitment can lead to unhappiness and feeling trapped. She goes on to say it is healthier for both friendships and relationships to have a bend-but-don’t-break air about …show more content…

He begins by cited the statistic that 30% of women and 25% of men remain unmarried and acknowledges that society ‘must frankly accept the new state of things and educate women and modify trade in accordance therewith, so as to make the condition of celibacy as little injurious as possible’. He goes on to call marriages of ‘interest’, ‘wealth’, ‘position’, ‘rank’, and/or ‘support’ to be “the sources of misery and sin, not of happiness and virtue.” By acknowledging that marriage is not the universal end-goal for all women, he is bucking restraints of tradition in favor of rational and pragmatic argument. Ultimately, it would be Cobbe’s general position on the role of women and marriage that would prominently prevail, as is seen around us in the world today. Women are being self-sufficient, independent, and pursuing their own happiness as they see fit. If that involves marriage and domestic duties at home, so be it. If that involves a following a career with little regard to marriage and family, so be it. The point is that women and men are equal now to choose their own path to happiness in life and not be confined to the societal oppression and stigmas about being single in Victorian

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