A Scandal In Bohemia

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Recommended: Individual identity in literature

Characters’ identities are extremely important in terms of how readers relate to them. But what happens when the character suddenly alters his or her outward appearance? In “A Scandal in Bohemia” by Arthur Conan Doyle and The Convent of Pleasure by Margaret Cavendish, the use of costume and disguise sets the stage to transcend ingrained and oppressive societal ideas about sexuality and femininity. In Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” disguise changes clothing’s conventional function as an unambiguous marker of gender, sex, age, and class. Wilhem von Ormstein, the badly disguised king of Bohemia, wears a mask when he first comes to Holmes to foil Irene Adler’s attempt at blackmail. The King’s failure to effectively disguise his age, sex, or …show more content…

However, when reading a text, it is impossible to know who the person behind the disguise is before the moment of revelation. Although it may be comforting for the reader to be able to re-inscribe the memory of the costumed person with a new sex by saying, “she was a woman all along”, the re-inscription does nothing to dispel the notion that there may be gender non-conformists that go unnoticed, even by a rational masculine detective like Holmes. A “Scandal in Bohemia” shows us that non-normative configurations of sex, gender, sexuality and self-defined gender identity cannot simply be rationalized away. For Irene Adler, disguise is an occasional pleasure, but both her heterosexuality and her particular expression of masculinity are fixed no matter what she is wearing. As Adler tells Holmes and the reader, “male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives” (24). Adler’s assertion is contained in a note addressed to Holmes, positioning him as a reader alongside the readers of the story. Just like the reader, Holmes is reliant on the writer to give over all the information that would expose the lack of gender normativity. Irene Adler does not tell the reader what freedom and liberties she is able to indulge in using disguise, which leaves a lot to the

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