Femme Fatale (66 page)

1. Motherhood, or not, is a major element in this novel. It’s often been noted that protagonists in genre fiction like mystery traditionally don’t have parents, or very visible parents, or children. Why do you think parents and children might encumber such characters? Certainly Holmes and Watson were parentless as far as readers were concerned. Are there other favorite detectives you can think of who are singularly alone in the world? What kind of parents would you imagine Miss Marple to have had? Nero Wolfe? Is the environment in which the young Irene grew up surprising to you? The only facts Doyle gave about her were that she had been born in New Jersey, was therefore American, and had sung grand opera. What history would you invent for her, instead of this one? Why did the author choose this milieu?

2. Three women with varying personalities and goals are involved in tracing Irene’s history. Sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they compete, as is also the case with all three in relation to Sherlock Holmes as well. What characteristics do you admire in each of the three women? What do you not like? Motherhood, and avoiding it, are major elements of the plot and theme. Were you surprised that the nineteenth century had publicly known abortionists? How does the controversy today differ from the issues at stake over a hundred years ago? The character most capable of evolving over the course of the novels is Nell Huxleigh. Does she change in this novel, and does your opinion of her change as well? How does your opinion of Nellie Bly change? She plays an entirely different part in this novel.
The Drood Review of Mystery
observed of
Chapel Noir
: “Douglas wants . . . women fully informed about and capable of action on the mean streets of the their world.” How does
Femme Fatale
contribute to this goal?

3. New York City has always been a major American setting for fiction. Did anything about the depiction of it in this book surprise you? How many elements did you glimpse in their infancy then that have become staples of American life now? For instance, Joseph Pulitzer was just entering the newspaper business then, but he would leave a permanent mark, with the awards given in his name today the most prestigious in the country. How much can history teach us? Can history change our opinions of our own times? Do you like to read historical novels for the facts of the time period or the attitudes, and how much do you think you can trust such evocations in fiction? Often, historical novelists say, they’re challenged on the accuracy of facts that are absolutely true, but “seem” too modern for people of today. Are you encouraged to do more reading about the historical periods you encounter in novels?

4. The Spiritualism movement was very strong in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Do you think people were more gullible then than they are now? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became convinced that mediums could contact the dead and even believed in “fairies” photographed in a garden by two young girls who had manipulated the photos. What would lead a physician by training who created the eminently logical Holmes to such a change in viewpoint? Mesmerism is also a factor in these novels, including Irene Adler taking her last name from a little-known reference about a famous fictional mesmerist, Svengali. Trilby, the eponymous heroine of the George du Maurier (father of Daphne) novel that features Svengali, was hypnotized by him to sing beautifully although she was tone deaf. He married her and forced her to tour as a singer.
The Phantom of the Opera
by Frenchman Gaston Leroux arrived in 1911, more than a decade after de Maurier’s
Trilby
, and was far less popular at the time. It too featured a “monster” training a helpless young woman to sing. Why, besides the ever-popular Beauty and the Beast parallels, did this theme of women forced
to sing by taskmasters create two immortal characters, both of them men and villains?

5. Sherlock Holmes has been resurrected as a character by countless writers since Doyle’s death in 1930, but by very few women. Some writers say that he is a very hard character to change, that even Doyle did better with stories in which Holmes was not too dominant. How is Holmes’s character growing in this series? Which aspects of Holmes as you first encountered him in fiction or film do you feel are immutable, and which allow for change? Does his associating with these particular characters, the three women, two of them liberated American women, throw any different light on his character? There are three Englishmen who are important in the novels: Irene’s husband, Godfrey, Holmes, and Quentin Stanhope. How do these men differ from Holmes and each other? How do they all relate to the three women, and how is that different with each man?

6. Douglas has said she likes to work on the “large canvas” of series fiction. What kind of character development does that approach permit? Do you like it? Has television recommitted viewers/readers to the kind of multi-volume storytelling common in the nineteenth century, or is the attention span of the twentieth century too short? Is long-term, committed reading becoming a lost art?

For discussion of the Irene Adler series

1. Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to reevaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the recent copyright contest over
The Wind Done Gone
, Alice Randall’s reimagining of
Gone with the Wind
events and characters from the African-American slaves’ viewpoints? Could the novel’s important social points have been made as effectively without referencing the classic work generally familiar to most people? What other works have
attained the mythic status that might make possible such socially conscious reinventions? What works would you revisit or rewrite?

2. Religion and morality are underlying issues in the novels, including the time’s anti-Semitism. This is an element absent from the Holmes stories. How is this issue brought out and how do Nell’s strictly conventional views affect those around her? Why does she take on a moral watchdog role yet remain both disapproving and fascinated by Irene’s pragmatic philosophy? Why is Irene (and also most readers) so fond of her despite her limited opinions?

3. Douglas chose to blend humor with adventurous plots. Do comic characters and situations satirize the times, or soften them? Is humor a more effective form of social criticism than rhetoric? What other writers and novelists use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

4. The novels also present a continuing tension between New World and Old World, America and England and the Continent, artist-tradesman and aristocrat, as well as woman and man. Which characters reflect which camps? How does the tension show itself?

5.
Chapel Noir
makes several references to
Dracula
through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before the novel actually was published. Stoker is also a continuing character in other Adler novels. Various literary figures appear in the Adler novels, including Oscar Wilde, and most of these historical characters knew each other. Why was this period so rich in writers who founded much modern genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late nineteenth century produced not only
Dracula
and Doyle’s Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of
The Lost World
, but
Trilby
and Svengali,
The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda
, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among the earliest and most lasting works of science fiction, political intrigue, mystery, and horror. How does Douglas pay homage to this tradition in the plots, characters, and details of the Adler novels?

A
N
I
NTERVIEW WITH
C
AROLE
N
ELSON
D
OUGLAS

Q:
You were the first woman to write about the Sherlock Holmes world from the viewpoint of one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s women characters, and only the second woman to write a Holmes-related novel at all. Why?

A:
Most of my fiction ideas stem from my role as social observer in my first career, journalism. One day I looked at the mystery field and realized that all post-Doyle Sherlockian novels were written by men. I had loved the stories as a child and thought it was high time for a woman to examine the subject from a female point of view.

Q:
So there was “the woman,” Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes, waiting for you
.

A:
She seems the most obvious candidate, but I bypassed her for that very reason to look at other women in what is called the Holmes Canon. Eventually I came back to “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Rereading it, I realized that male writers had all taken Irene Adler at face value as the King of Bohemia’s jilted mistress, but the story doesn’t support that. As the only woman in the Canon who stirred a hint of romantic interest in the aloof Holmes, Irene Adler had to be more than this beautiful but amoral “Victorian vamp.” Once I saw that I could validly interpret her as a gifted and serious performing artist, I had my protagonist.

Q:
It was that simple?

A:
It was that complex. I felt that any deeper psychological exploration of this character still had to adhere to Doyle’s story, both literally and in regard to the author’s own feeling toward the character. That’s how I ended up having to explain that operatic impossibility, a contralto prima donna. It’s been great fun justifying Doyle’s error by finding operatic roles Irene could conceivably sing. My Irene Adler is as intelligent, self-sufficient, and serious about her professional and personal
integrity as Sherlock Holmes, and far too independent to be anyone’s mistress but her own. She also moonlights as an inquiry agent while building her performing career. In many ways they are flip sides of the same coin: her profession, music, is his hobby. His profession, detection, is her secondary career. Her adventures intertwine with Holmes’s, but she is definitely her own woman in these novels.

Q:
How did Doyle feel toward the character of Irene Adler?

A:
I believe that Holmes and Watson expressed two sides of Dr. Doyle: Watson, the medical and scientific man, also the staunch upholder of British convention; Holmes, the creative and bohemian writer, fascinated by the criminal and the bizarre. Doyle wrote classic stories of horror and science fiction as well as hefty historical novels set in the age of chivalry. His mixed feelings of attraction to and fear of a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him to “kill” her as soon as he created her. Watson states she is dead at the beginning of the story that introduces her. Irene was literally too hot for Doyle as well as Holmes to handle. She also debuted (and exited) in the first Holmes-Watson story Doyle ever wrote. Perhaps Doyle wanted to establish an unattainable woman to excuse Holmes remaining a bachelor and aloof from matters of the heart. What he did was to create a fascinatingly unrealized character for generations of readers.

Q:
Do your protagonists represent a split personality as well?

A:
Yes, one even more sociologically interesting than the Holmes-Watson split because it embodies the evolving roles of women in the late nineteenth century. As a larger-than-life heroine, Irene is “up to anything.” Her biographer, Penelope “Nell” Huxleigh, however, is the very model of traditional Victorian womanhood. Together they provide a seriocomic point-counterpoint on women’s restricted roles then and now. Narrator Nell is the character who “grows” most during the series as the unconventional Irene forces her to see herself and her
times in a broader perspective. This is something women writers have been doing in the past two decades: revisiting classic literary terrain and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.