The Adventuress (50 page)

The Adventuress
is the second Irene Adler novel. It opens in 1888 in Paris, where the newly wedded Irene and her barrister husband Godfrey have fled after eluding the King of Bohemia and Sherlock Holmes in London. Irene’s loyal companion—spinster and parson’s daughter Nell Huxleigh—has joined the couple in their rural retreat near Paris. While the worldly Irene relishes her new Paris home, Nell remains true to the time’s limited expectations of a Victorian woman and fears the corrupting Parisian influence on British rectitude. However, the mystifying and the murderous follow Irene wherever she goes, or she finds them.

This time the two women are present when a body is fished from the Seine, a body that harks back to the past. The puzzle of this anonymous seaman’s death draws Irene and her cohorts into lethal mysteries in both Paris and the exotic gambling kingdom near the south of France, fabled Monaco. The case has the trio brushing shoulders with Irene’s new friend, actress Sarah Bernhardt; the first beautiful, blonde American princess of Monaco, Alice Heine of New Orleans; and with Prince Albert I, oceanographer and great-grandfather to the current Prince Albert of Monaco. They will also encounter thugs, sailors, and a certain consulting detective from London who is making an international name for himself, Sherlock Holmes.

  
1
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The new title is taken from how Watson refers to Irene Adler when discussing her with Holmes in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In
Good Night, Mr. Holmes
, the first Irene Adler novel, Holmes challenges Watson’s use of the word.

“How unfair it is that enterprise is called a harlot when it wears a female face... You call her an ‘adventuress’ as well. Two centuries ago the word designated a woman who lived by her wits. Today it has been debased to describe a woman who lives by her willingness—especially in regard to men of influence and wealth. I believe you misjudge Madam Irene there.”

The adventuress of the title would seem to refer to the intrepid Irene Adler Norton, but aren’t all the women in this novel adventuresses of a sort? How do each of them assert themselves, or not, in a world dominated by men? Irene Alder, as a serious performing artist, has disdained to use her stage glamour to seduce and mistress wealthy men, which makes her atypical of the performing sisterhood of the time. Where does her personal morality come from? What has Alice Heine (or Grace Kelly, for that matter) paid for being a desirable commodity on the “marriage market” of European nobility? Which of the women in this book would you most wish to be? Why, or why not?

   
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What do the parallels between Alice Heine and Grace Kelly say about each woman’s time, and our own? While many small European principalities have been subsumed into bigger countries over the centuries, the House of Grimaldi has survived as a mini-principality through their princes marrying commoners from wealthy families and making Monte Carlo into a pre-Disney “tourist attraction” built on celebrity and a certain dark underbelly, which is the lure, risk and despair of gambling. What does this say about the culture then and now? And the role of woman as goddess and victim? Film goddess, heiress... or pawn of princes and politics?

“What has love got to do with it?” as Tina Turner sang. This modern music diva emerged from an abusive marriage/performing partnership. Is Alice Heine, married at seventeen to a French duke, a victim, or a manipulator? Do victims, having no other power, become manipulators? Is that why the manipulating woman is both despised and feared in so much of classic American noir fiction and film?

   
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This novel also links Prince Albert’s dedication to oceanography with its 20
^th
century fruition: the Jacques Cousteau media odyssey to educate the world about the delicate balance between earth and sea and the humans who inhabit, and exploit, them. Without Prince Albert’s commitment, there would have been no explorative quest of the
Calypso
and no ecological counter-revolution in the sixties and seventies of our own day. What can people of privilege give to the world? How are their nineteenth-century attitudes admirable... and dangerous? Who today is benefitting the planet by using fame and money and influence? Hollywood stars? If the
National Enquirer
were reporting on the characters in this novel, what would the headlines say?

   
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  Art and science are both elements in the novel. Are they perhaps antithetical? Is Alice Heine drawn to science? Or competitive with it? Holmes as the man of logic, of science, has traditionally had scant use for women, or respect for their intellect or intentions. Until Irene Adler. Is this a classic left brain/right brain model that separates the sexes? Why does Irene Adler appeal to the ultimate scientific man? Why does the scientific man (oceanographer or doctor) consistently appeal to Alice Heine?

  
 
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  Irene dons the persona of a young man to fight a duel in this novel. Is this believable? Boys played women in Shakespeare’s plays, and his plots encompassed women passing as boys. Irene’s operatic voice is “difficult” to cast in most conventional operas because it’s too “dark.” She is more than the angelic soprano who is the prima donna. Her voice has too much character. So she would naturally play “trouser roles.” We once were told that women are not nightly anchors on the evening national network news because their voices are “too light” and lack authority. How are the biological differences between the sexes used to pigeon-hole men and women? What attributes do you have that are generally considered masculine? Feminine? How have they affected your life and work? Why is the man of science and no emotions, Sherlock Holmes, so attracted to the woman of art, beauty, and integrity, Irene Adler? Can Mr. Spock resist a renaissance woman?

    
6
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  Doyle made Irene Adler bright, beautiful, and daring... and promptly killed her in the literary sense, for the story that celebrates her also introduces her as “the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” Douglas had to resurrect her and explain the apparent death to continue her story, and her relationship to Sherlock Holmes. Does the fact that Irene Adler is an renaissance woman—intelligent, artistically gifted, courageous—make her less appealing? Is she any less or more extravagant in her gifts than Sherlock Holmes? Do people resent in women what they accept in men? Do women particularly do this to other women? Is that why Nell Huxleigh, the more conventional recorder, is a reader favorite? And why Watson is regarded with more affection if not admiration than Holmes? Do superheroes whether Holmes or Adler, Mr. Spock or Xena the Warrior Princess, need sidekicks we can identify with to humanize them? What other superheroes does our culture offer? How many are women as opposed to men? Do you have any?

FOR DISCUSSION OF THE IRENE ADLER SERIES

    
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Douglas mentions other authors, many of them women, who have reinvented major female characters or minor characters from classic literary or genre novels to re-evaluate culture then and now. Can you think of such works in the field of fantasy or historical novels? General literature? What about the 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?

   
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  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?

   
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  Douglas chose to blend humor with the 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 can you think of who use this technique, besides George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain?

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

  
 
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Chapel Noir,
the series’ fifth novel, makes several references to Dracula through the presence of Bram Stoker some six years before his 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 modem genre fiction, like Doyle and Stoker? The late-nineteenth century produced not only
Dracula
and Conan 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,
and H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
,
The Invisible
Man
and
The War of the Worlds,
some of
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?

AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

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 and fear toward a liberated, artistic woman like Irene Adler led him “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 terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.