Feminism and the Role of Women in Conan Doyle's Domestic Novels
Feminism and the Role of Women in Conan Doyle's Domestic Novels is an article written by R. Dixon Smith published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 5, 1994).
This essay examines Arthur Conan Doyle's portrayal of women in Beyond the City and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, arguing that he championed women's professional and social rights despite opposing militant suffragism. Through close literary analysis and biographical context, it reassesses his complex position on feminism within late Victorian society.
Feminism and the Role of Women in Conan Doyle's Domestic Novels
For Madeleine M. Henry, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Iowa State University
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE was an ardent champion of women's rights. His fiction attests to that commitment, and nowhere is that more forcefully stated than in his domestic novels, Beyond the City and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus. Mrs Westmacott of Beyond the City is but one of a number of strong female protagonists whom Conan Doyle created to resist the repressive social milieu into which they were born, and the social injustices of which they were victims. But inasmuch as Conan Doyle came to be a leading spokesman for the anti-suffragist movement in the early years of the twentieth century, how came he to advocate the cause of women's rights?
The spring of 1891 found Arthur Conan Doyle turning out the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories that would begin appearing in The Strand Magazine in July of that year. 'A Scandal in Bohemia' was written during a three-day period and mailed to his literary agent, A. P. Watt, on 3 April; 'A Case of Identity' was completed on the 10th, 'The Red-Headed League' on the 20th, and 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery' on the 27th. Conan Doyle took to his bed with influenza on 4 May, and before his recovery two weeks later he had decided to give up medicine and rely entirely on literature for his livelihood. 'The Five Orange Pips' was sent off on 18 May. During the month of June, he and his wife and daughter moved from lodgings in Bloomsbury to a more spacious villa in South Norwood. (1)
Conan Doyle signed a contract with Good Words to write a short novel for their Christmas annual on 1 June. Beyond the City, which he wrote between 1 June and 8 July, appeared in Good Cheer the following December. It and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, which he wrote seven years later, reflect much of Conan Doyle's first years of marriage in Southsea and his subsequent move to No. 12 Tennison Road in the London suburb of South Norwood. (2)
In the opening pages of Beyond the City, Conan Doyle traces the development of Norwood in the early days when the nineteenth century was still young:
- From afar, when the breeze came from the north, the dull, low roar of the great City might be heard like the breaking of the tide of life, while along the horizon might be seen the dim curtain of smoke, the grim spray which that tide threw up. Gradually, however, as the years passed, the City had thrown out a long brick-feeler here and there, curving, extending, and coalescing, until at last the little cottages had been gripped round by these red tentacles, and had been absorbed to make room for the modern villa.
Into this idyllic world descends Mrs Westmacott, an attractive, short-skirted, muscular widow who smokes, drinks stout, and hefts fifteen-pound dumbbells. Her nearest neighbours are a retired naval officer and a widowed medical man with two daughters. Mrs Westmacott has just returned from the Marquesas Islands. In many respects, she informs her neighbours, those islands lead the world:
- 'In the relation of the sexes. ... The woman there is, as she should be, in every way the absolute equal of the male.
- 'I look upon the subservience of woman as largely due to her abandoning nutritious drinks and invigorating exercises to the male. I do neither.'
When asked whether she doesn't think that woman has a mission of her own, Mrs Westmacott drops her dumbbells with a crash upon the floor and resumes her torrent of words:
- 'The old cant! The old shibboleth! What is this mission which is reserved for woman? All that is humble, that is mean, that is soul-killing, that is so contemptible and so ill-paid that none other would touch it. All that is woman's mission. And who imposed these limitations upon her? Who cooped her up within this narrow sphere? Was it Providence? Was it nature? No, it was the arch enemy. It was man.
- 'I say that woman is a colossal monument to the selfishness of man. What is all this boasted chivalry-these fine words and vague phrases? Where is it when we wish to put it to the test? Man in the abstract will do anything to help a woman. Of course. How does it work when his pocket is troubled? Where is his chivalry then? Will the doctors help her to qualify? will the lawyers help her to be called to the bar? will the clergy tolerate her in the Church? Oh, it is close your ranks then and refer poor woman to her mission! Her mission! To be thankful for coppers and not to interfere with the men while they grabble for gold, like swine round a trough, that is man's reading of the mission of woman.'
Mrs Westmacott forms a local chapter of the Emancipation Guild. Admiral Hay Denver and Dr Walker find themselves reluctantly won over.
- 'She is quite right,' [Dr Walker tells the admiral]. 'The professions are not sufficiently open to women. They are still far too circumscribed in their employments. They are a feeble folk, the women who have to work for their bread-poor, unorganised, timid, taking as a favour what they might demand as a right. That is why their case is not more constantly before the public, for if their cry for redress was as great as their grievance it would fill the world to the exclusion of all others. It is all very well for us to be courteous to the rich, the refined, those to whom life is already made easy. ... If we are truly courteous, we shall stoop to lift up struggling womanhood when she really needs our help when it is life and death to her whether she has it or not. And then the cant about it being unwomanly to work in the higher professions. It is womanly enough to starve, but unwomanly to use the brains which God has given them.'
When Admiral Hay Denver needs additional persuasion, Mrs Westmacott transports him with her rhetoric:
- 'Advertise for a lady companion at ten shillings a week, which is less than a cook's wage, and see how many answers you get. There is no hope, no outlook, for these struggling thousands. Life is a dull, sordid struggle, leading down to a cheerless old age. Yet when we try to bring some little ray of hope-some chance, however distant, of something better-we are told by chivalrous gentlemen that it is against their principles to help.
- 'There is banking, the law, veterinary surgery, Government offices, the Civil Service-all these at least should be thrown freely open to women, if they have brains enough to compete successfully for them. Then if woman were unsuccessful it would be her own fault, and the majority of the population of this country could no longer complain that they live under a different law to the minority, and that they are held down in poverty and serfdom, with every road to independence sealed to them.
- 'Now look at that man digging in the field. I know him. He can neither read nor write, he is steeped in whisky, and he has as much intelligence as the potatoes that he is digging. Yet the man has a vote, can possibly turn the scale of an election, and may help to decide the policy of this empire. Now, to take the nearest example, here am I, a woman who have had some education, who have travelled, and who have seen and studied the institutions of many countries. I hold considerable property, and I pay more in Imperial taxes than that man spends in whisky, which is saying a great deal, and yet I have no more direct influence upon the disposal of the money which I pay than that fly which creeps along the wall.'
Close friendship and intimacy spring up between Mrs Westmacott and Dr Walker. But his daughters, Clara and Ida, doubt she could be endured as a life companion. To prevent their father making a tragic mistake, they conspire to show him what it would be like to live with an emancipated woman. In one of Conan Doyle's most inspired and delightfully humorous set pieces, Dr Walker's peace of mind evaporates as he discovers the full force of what he perceives to be the pernicious influence of the girls' mentor, Mrs Westmacott. The good doctor arises to find Ida conducting malodorous chemical experiments at the breakfast table; she also takes up the French horn, whose long, sad wail drives her father to distraction. Worst of all, both girls have begun experimenting with cigarettes, stout, and rum.
- 'They all drink it in the profession which I am going to take up,' [Clara informs him.] 'I am going to be a pilot.'
- 'Does Mrs Westmacott teach you that I am not the head of my own house?' [the doctor asks in shocked amazement.]
- 'Certainly,' [Ida replies.] 'She says that all heads of houses are relics of the dark ages.'
- 'Ida has a monkey,' [the doctor later relates,] 'which lives on the curtain-rod. It is a most dreadful creature. It will remain absolutely motionless until it sees that you have forgotten its presence, and then it will suddenly bound from picture to picture all round the walls, and end by swinging down on the bell-rope and jumping on to the top of your head. At breakfast it stole a poached egg, and daubed it all over the door-handle.'
This rollicking sequence is crowned by the dinner party the girls throw for their young men. Gentlemen, after all, give suppers; why not ladies? Amidst the oysters and champagne, Charles smokes his great yellow meerschaum, Harold a cigar, and the girls have their cigarettes.
- 'Clara, dear, put your feet upon the coal-scuttle,' [Ida remonstrates,] 'and do try to look a little dissipated.'
Beyond the City was Conan Doyle's tenth published novel, preceded by A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Mystery of Cloomber (1888), Micah Clarke (1889), The Firm of Girdlestone (1890), The Sign of Four (1890), The White Company (1891), The Doings of Raffles Haw (1892), The Great Shadow (1892), and The Refugees (1893). J. W. Arrowsmith, which had already published The Great Shadow in its Christmas annual for 1892, bought the book rights to Beyond the City, combined it with The Great Shadow, and brought both novels out in one volume in August 1893. But although seven further impressions were to appear during the next twenty years, Beyond the City failed to attract a following. (3)
When the Conan Doyles moved to Hindhead, Surrey, in 1896, one of the first bookmen the author met there was fledgling publisher Grant Richards. Conan Doyle signed a contract and set to work on A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus, which Richards published on 23 March 1899. (4)
A Duet is a simple story, simply told, of the early married life of a commonplace, young, upper-middle-class couple, Frank Crosse and Maude Selby. Conan Doyle carefully delineates the social life and customs of their class, as the following letter from Frank to Maude reveals:
- You have lived well, dressed well, a sweet home, a lovely garden, your collie, your canary, your maid. ... In the mornings, your music, your singing, your gardening, your reading. In the afternoons, your social duties, the visit and the visitor. In the evening, tennis, a walk, music again, your father's return from the City, the happy family circle, with occasionally the dinner, the dance, and the theatre.
Amongst the hansoms and the four-wheelers, the scurrying travellers, and the lounging cabmen, Conan Doyle paints a vibrant, pulsating word-picture of the bustling metropolis that was once the London of Sherlock Holmes. Particularly effective is his description of the couple's descent into the Underground:
- They were in the mephitic cellar, with the two long wooden platforms where the subterranean trains land or load their freight. A strangling gas tickled their throats and set them coughing. It was all dank and dark and gloomy.
On their last unmarried excursion, Frank and Maude spend a grand hour at Westminster Abbey, in what Conan Doyle calls 'Britain's Valhalla'. Frank expounds upon English history and culture: Peel, Pitt, Darwin, Newton, Jonson, Stephenson, Wordsworth, Arnold; Tudors, Stuarts, Cromwell, and Elizabeth. In Poets' Corner, Frank enthuses over Scott, Burns, Dickens, and Macaulay (Conan Doyle's favourites), as well as Chaucer, Tennyson, Browning, Dryden, and Thackeray-as striking an autobiographical reminiscence as Conan Doyle would ever give us.
Just before the wedding, Conan Doyle conjures up a reference to his own cricketing career and that of W.G. Grace. Maude's brother learns that Frank had once played for the Surrey Second, and immediately approves the match.
'You won't exactly be a Mrs W.G.,' he tells his sister, 'but you will be on the edge of first-class cricket.'
And then they become one, 'never more to part until the coffin-lid closed over one or the other.'
Frank and Maude spend their honeymoon in Brighton. When Frank suggests that they should appear to be marital veterans rather than newlyweds, Conan Doyle creates a deliciously comedic set-piece, wherein Frank announces boldly that they have travelled together in Switzerland, as well as on an Atlantic steamer. Their waiter, however, has just read the announcement of their marriage in The Times, and is shocked by Frank's boasting of their pre-marital adventures. When the waiter shows them their wedding notice, a chagrined Frank exclaims: 'But my reminiscences, Maude. The travels in the Tyrol! The Swiss hotel! The steamer!'
Once settled in their new home, The Lindens (which corresponds to Bush Villas in Southsea), the couple draw up a set of 'Maxims for the Married':
- Never be cross at the same time. Wait your turn. ...
- Never cease to be lovers. If you cease, someone else may begin. Permanent mutual respect is necessary for a permanent mutual love.
- Let there be one law for both. ...
- The man who respects his wife does not turn her into a mendicant. Give her a purse of her own.
With consummate irony and great charm, Conan Doyle severs the shackles of Victorian hypocrisy as Frank and Maude discuss earlier attachments:
- 'Did you ever love any one before me?' [Maude asks]. 'Who was she, Frank?'
- 'Which?'
- 'O Frank, more than one!'
- 'Don't be cross, Maude. I had never seen you at the time. I owed no duty to you.'
- 'I had no idea you were such a-such a Mormon,' [Maude gasps]. 'Twenty?'
- 'Well-rather more than that, I think.'
- 'Thirty?'
- 'Quite thirty.'
- 'Forty?'
- 'Not more than forty, I think.'
- 'Let me see,' [Maude figures;] 'you are twenty-seven now, so you have loved four women a year since you were seventeen.'
- 'If you reckon it that way, I am afraid it must have been more than forty,' [Frank confesses].
- 'I have had my little experiences too,' [counters Maude].
- 'You!'
- 'I won't deny that I have been interested deeply interested-in several men.'
- 'Several!'
- 'It was before I had met you, dear,' [Maude purrs]. 'I owed you no duty.... The truth is, Frank, that a healthy young woman who has imagination and a warm heart is attracted by every young man. dark men always had a peculiar fascination for me. I don't know what it is, but the feeling is quite overpowering.'
- 'Is that why you married a man with flaxen hair?'
- 'Well, I couldn't expect to find every quality in my husband, could I?' [Maude teases.]
And so it goes, until finally Maude tells him of her first experience of the sort.
- 'It all came through my being left alone with a gentleman who was visiting my mother. ... I may have shown him what I felt, for he suddenly-'
- 'Kissed you!'
- 'Exactly. He kissed me. ... I kissed him back.'
- 'You-you kissed him back!... Good God! why did you do that?' 'Well, I liked him. ... Then he kissed me several times. ... He asked me if I would sit upon his knee.'
- 'Yek!'
- 'Why, Frank, you are croaking like a frog.'
- 'You yielded to his very moderate and natural request. You sat upon his knee.'
- 'Well, Frank, I did.'
- 'You mean to sit there and tell me in cold blood that you sat upon this ruffian's knee!'
- 'What else could I do?'
- 'You could have screamed, you could have rung the bell, you could have struck him — you could have risen in the dignity of your insulted womanhood and walked out of the room.'
- 'Well, I wasn't very good at walking at that time,' [Maude confesses mischievously]. 'You see, I was only three years old.'
After Frank and Maude explore Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management — all 1,641 pages of it-Frank waxes rhapsodic about his literary favourites (again, Conan Doyle's): Holmes' Autocrat, Gibbon's History, Macaulay's Essays, Carlyle's Life, and Pepys' Diary. Maude's joining the local Browning Society echoes similar autobiographical tones, reminiscent of Conan Doyle's joining the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. In the book's closing pages, the duet becomes a trio with the birth of their infant son.
A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus was Conan Doyle's sixteenth published novel, preceded by those mentioned previously as well as The Parasite (1894), The Stark Munro Letters (1895), Rodney Stone (1896), Uncle Bernac (1897), and The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898). Critical response was generally unfavourable, and one reviewer in particular, Dr Robertson Nicoll, the editor of the Bookman, provoked Conan Doyle's ire when he panned the book twice under two different pseudonyms. Some readers, moreover, found Frank's confrontation with his former mistress, Violet Wright, offensive and in poor taste. Wrote Conan Doyle:
- I did not set out to write a fairy tale, but to draw a living couple with all the weaknesses, temptations, and sorrows which might come to test their characters and to overshadow their lives. (5)
But following the serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles in The Strand Magazine (August 1901-April 1902), A Duet enjoyed renewed popularity, and six subsequent impressions followed. (6)
The novel reflects to a considerable degree both Conan Doyle's and his wife's common yearning for domesticity after years of travel in search of suitable climates, which, it was hoped, might ameliorate Louise's worsening tuberculosis. (7) Some years later, Conan Doyle had the manuscript bound and presented it as a gift to Jean Leckie, his second wife. (8)
Contemporary critics were especially unkind to those chapters that might best be described as literary digressions-the visits to Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey and No. 5 Cheyne Row, where Carlyle had lived, and the section on Pepys'
Diary and suggested that the author was merely padding out slender material. Even Andrew Lang, a Conan Doyle admirer, had this to say in the July 1904 number of Quarterly Review:
- We cannot pretend to be interested in Frank and Maude. ... It may be a vulgar taste, but we decidedly prefer the adventures of Dr Watson with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Watson is indeed a creation. ... (9)
It is only now, a hundred years on, that critics have begun to take a fresh look at Beyond the City and A Duet, and to reassess the evaluations that have prevailed for a century. In the July 1914 issue of the Bookman, Arthur Bartlett Maurice asked of Conan Doyle's devotees:
- How many of them will recall readily Beyond the City, or The Doings of Raffles Haw? Yet it is in these comparatively neglected books, and not in the Sherlock Holmes stories, that Conan Doyle's best work has been done. (10)
But that opinion was ahead of its time. It would take another seventy-five years for Ely M. Liebow to venture forth and call the Pepys' chapters in A Duet 'exquisite' (11) Read today, these digressions, to which the early critics so strenuously objected, emerge as the novel's most compelling sections, rivalling in their charm Conan Doyle's delightful volume of literary essays, Through the Magic Door (1908).
Beyond the City and A Duet are Arthur Conan Doyle's least-often-read, least-appreciated works of fiction, ignored by virtually all Sherlockians and, alas, by almost as many Doyleans. Even Pierre Nordon, who wrote perhaps the best literary biography of Conan Doyle, devoted only a handful of sentences to the two novels. Rediscovery beckons.
Beyond the City and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus are, moreover, doubly instructive for what they reveal of Conan Doyle's attitudes towards feminism and the role of women in Victorian society. Beyond the City, the more important of the two works, gives us an early, pre-twentieth-century view of women's rights. In Mrs Westmacott we find a strong female protagonist-indeed, one of the most volatile protagonists Conan Doyle ever produced. She is nothing less than an earlier version of Professor George Edward Challenger-a muscular, female Challenger. Note, for instance, the circumstances under which both characters are first encountered. In The Lost World, Challenger is introduced as he accosts Malone, forcibly ejecting the newspaperman from his premises. Similarly, in Beyond the City, Mrs Westmacott makes her entrance as she pummels a cabman for a perceived affront. Both scenes serve the same purpose: to introduce robust, larger-than-life protagonists, each broadly drawn with great comedic skill. Both are Falstaffian figures of fun, but never are we intended to take them or their purposes-less than seriously. After only Brigadier Gerard, Professor Challenger, and the great Holmes and Watson themselves, Mrs Westmacott may well be the fifth greatest character Conan Doyle ever created.
Consider the topic of women in the professions-specifically, that of women doctors, a subject in which Conan Doyle took a major interest. Comparatively few of his fellow physicians were prepared to admit them, and yet Conan Doyle was. Thus he created Mrs Westmacott, a pugnacious champion of women's rights in the professional ranks. Nor was this the only time that Conan Doyle spoke through his fiction for the acceptance of women into the profession of medicine. In April 1894 'The Doctors of Hoyland' appeared in The Idler, and was published in book form, in Round the Red Lamp, on 23 October of that year. In it, the village of Hoyland, in the north of Hampshire, gains a new physician, Dr Verrinder Smith-who happens to be a woman. The community's established physician, Dr James Ripley, pays a courtesy call to welcome his new colleague.
- 'How do you do, Doctor Ripley?' said she.
- 'How do you do, madam?' returned the visitor. 'Your husband is perhaps out?'
- 'I am not married,' said she simply.
- 'Oh, I beg your pardon! I meant the doctor-Dr Verrinder Smith.'
- 'I am Doctor Verrinder Smith.'
Dr Ripley is about to receive an education of an entirely different sort from that he obtained in medical school.
In numerous other short stories, Conan Doyle frequently reminded his public of the victimisation of women. Time and again, females in the Sherlock Holmes adventures are taken advantage of socially, economically, sexually, and maritally. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the problems that beset Violet Smith, who was pursued by 'The Solitary Cyclist', for her plight concerns the theft of her inheritance through fraudulent and forced marriage-which is to say, intended rape.
Conan Doyle later became active in the Divorce Law Reform Union, which was founded in 1906. He served as its president from 1909 until 1919, urging that degrading and abusive marriages be dissolved. His Divorce Law Reform: An Essay (1909) was instrumental in creating the Royal Commission whose recommendations were published in 1912. In these matters Conan Doyle worked tirelessly to change the law when it seemed designed to work against the underprivileged. British divorce law was weighted in favour of men, and so Conan Doyle opposed it. On the other hand, he opposed women's suffrage, although he excepted women tax-payers, and he never faltered in his convictions. When the suffragists took to the streets and began smashing West End shop windows, they took careful note of his opposition and poured vitriol into his letter box at Windlesham, Crowborough. (12)
Was Conan Doyle a feminist? No, he was not, but he was a strong advocate of women's rights. There is a difference. As Ely M. Liebow observes:
- Some Conan Doyle biographers have made much of his strong stand against the suffrage movement, but that was not until 1913, and it concerned the movement's violent tactics as well as the issue of voting rights... his defence of women's rights in professional life... is strong and unambiguous, regardless of contradictory evidence of other kinds. Obviously Conan Doyle was wrestling with contradictions between his personal views of women, his mother's effective exhortations in favor of chivalry as a code of behavior, and the conventions of his era. (13)
Conan Doyle's commitment to women's rights was buttressed by Mrs Westmacott's convictions and by Frank Crosse's maxim, 'Let there be one law for both, which forcefully demolished conventional Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Beyond the City and A Duet champion rights whose generation-and century — had not yet come.
Social historians strive to re-create word-pictures of ages and days long past our immediate grasp. They frequently succeed. But Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle bring the customs, mores, and injustices of their society to life and make them breathe. Conan Doyle did this in his Sherlock Holmes stories, as well as in some of his longer works of fiction, Beyond the City and A Duet, with an Occasional Chorus best of all. What Frank Crosse said of Pepys, we too might say of Conan Doyle: ... he tells of his daily doings, and gives us such an intimate picture of life in those days, as could by no other means have been conveyed.
And in so doing, he had struck a shrewd blow for the cause of woman.
References:
1. Green, R. L. and Gibson, J. M.: A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983; p. 59. See also Green, R. L., 'Introduction' in Conan Doyle, A., The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1993; pp. xiii-xiv.
2. Green and Gibson, p. 70.
3. ibid.
4. ibid., p. 114.
5. ibid, pp. 114-115.
6. ibid., p. 115.
7. ibid
8. Nordon, P.: Conan Doyle: A Biography, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967; p. 180.
9. Lang, Andrew: 'The Novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle' in Orel, H. (Ed.): Critical Essays on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Hall & Co., New York, 1992, p. 232.
10. Maurice, A. B.: 'Notes on Conan Doyle' in Orel, p. 242.
11. Liebow, E. M.: 'Experience Veiled in Pseudonyms' in Lellenberg, Jon L. (Ed.): The Quest for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1987; p.31.
12. Green and Gibson, p. 273. See also Pearsall, R.: Conan Doyle: A Biographical Solution; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1977; pp. 124-126.
13. Liebow, pp. 32-33.
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
