Adapting Victorian Masculinities: Oliver Parker'sDorian Gray(2009) and Guy Ritchie'sSherlock Holmes(2009)

Abstract

This article explores the construction of masculinities in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray (2009) in the context of neo-Victorian adaptational strategies. Sherlock Holmes enacts a version of adaptation characterised by a recombination of citational fragments taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Character provides a unifying force, with Holmes and Watson acting as nodal points. Their latent homoeroticism negotiated via homosocial triangulations and the deferral of pleasure within male social bonds is a powerful means of ensuring consumer retention. In that it constitutes a reproduction of Wilde's novel with a difference, Parker's Dorian Gray lives up to a more traditional version of adaptation. It renders sex between men explicit, but tames Dorian's homosexuality in a psychodrama of childhood abuse and the ‘healing’ influence of the New Woman. Within different adaptational strategies, both films reconstruct late-Victorian masculinity by displaying the male characters' physicality, bodily sensuality, and libidinal energies.