Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes Stories: The Case of Irene Adler

Abstract

Irene Adler is the only female character to outsmart Sherlock Holmes in A.C. Doyle’s fiction (‘A Scandal in Bohemia’) and this chapter explores how she is portrayed in the episode of the BBC television series Sherlock (2012), CBS television series Elementary (2012–2016) and the two Guy Ritchie films, Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). The analysis compares these screen renditions to the appropriation of Adler in the neo-Victorian mystery novel Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas ( 1990) and several earlier screen adaptations. The chapter demonstrates the imbrication of Adler’s on-screen afterlives and the contemporary postfeminist media’s use of the naked, sexualised, female body as the source of women’s power and agency—a linkage that is rendered additionally titillating through its association with the proverbially prudish and restrained Victorian text.