Gender In Hound

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Recommended: Cultural construction of gender

For numerous modern-day literary scholars, the nature of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson’s homo-social relationship, established with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles and its contextual Victorian setting, still remains the subject of popular discourse. This discourse falls within a broader sphere of gender discussion. Some dialogues come in the form of female inclusion, whether it is in military institutions, professional sports, or any other popular male-dominated territory that has a history of gender segregation. An examination of the homo-social exclusion of women as demonstrated in Hound is but an extension of this dialogue. It is an examination that both predates, and is bound up, with social liberation. After all, the terms …show more content…

Bachelors, such as Watson, Holmes, and the Baskervilles, populate the world within Hound like a common denominator, but women are often interrupting or hindering men in that representation. The daughter of the yeoman interrupts Hugo Baskerville’s company of men during their “nightly custom” when she disobeys his will and escapes, setting forth a chain of events that causes several murders (14). Mr. Stapleton disguises himself as a bachelor in order to “offer [Laura Lyons] marriage on condition that [she] could get a divorce”, since revealing his married condition would have been ineffective for his nefarious design (142). Miss Stapleton interrupts Henry Baskerville’s attention, which causes him “considerable perplexity and annoyance” and creates suspicion around her husband (84). It is also Miss Stapleton who is “ready to warn Sir Henry…again and again”, once more creating hindrances for Mr. Stapleton’s disguise (164). It seems that women, at least in Hound, are obstacles to what could otherwise be a smooth unfolding of events in a story about men. Doyle can therefore justify reducing their involvement to secondary characters whose purpose only serves to enhance or moderate the plot. This, however, intimates that women can never sincerely become a part of

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