Chapel Noir (54 page)

For Discussion

RELATED TO
CHAPEL NOIR

1. A theme of this novel is the double standard of sexual behavior expected of, or tolerated in, men and women then, and by implication, now. How do the moral codes, or lack of them, of various men and women in this book reveal character? How do they compare to modern times?

2. If Nell is a “Watsonette” and Irene Adler takes the leading Sherlockian role, how does this pairing illuminate the mores of the times? Would this interplay be possible if Nell were not such an innocent? Is innocence a handicap for a woman in any time period? Do you think that the “moral watchdog” role, as taken on by Nell and treated with some satire by the author, could be a much more pernicious trait than it is portrayed as here? Where is the middle ground for moral women in society today?

3. Masquerade is a key element in the novel and the series, which features several unrevealed characters, many of whom keep secrets from each other. Is mystery fiction a pretext for revealing the mysteries of character as well as of crime? The Pink Cochrane sections tell the literal truth of an actual woman’s life, yet would also explain how she became the “fallen woman” she seems to be. What attributes of the character made her take a pioneering path?

4. The character of Pink blends the worldly experience of Irene Adler with the innocence of Nell Huxleigh. Both Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes are knowing of the world, but apparently have not been corrupted by it. Do you think Holmes is a virgin? If not, what is his sexual history, and why? Does it matter, other than spawning decades of speculation and wishful thinking about Sherlock Holmes’s sex life? How does Mr. Spock of
Star Trek
fit into this literary mythos? Are women intrigued by logical, unemotional male figures, and, if so, why? How would this reflect inequality in society?

5. In the nineteenth century, Paris hosted several impressive world’s fairs and was known as a city of light and dark. Were you surprised by the city’s numerous tourist attractions and by the appetite for sensationalism in the displays of the wax museum and the Paris Morgue? How do these trends compare to the tabloid journalism and sex and violence in electronic media—novels, films, music videos—of today?

6. This novel shows women pursuing the killer of women. Does it differ from other novels featuring the Ripper murders you may have read? Were you surprised that the Irving/Stoker theatrical circle knew about the lustmurder studies of Krafft-Ebing? Did such knowledge influence Stoker’s Gothic fiction, particularly
Dracula?
How does the double sexual standard play into the notion of the supernaturally powerful man preying on women’s bodies and blood? Do you see parallels to the
Dracula
story and characters in this novel? Why has
Dracula
become such a popular cultural touchstone, along with Jack the Ripper? How does this novel reference scenes and characters from
Dracula
, such as the madman Renfield and the three brides of Dracula? Do you see a difference in the fictional way a woman author and women characters approach the violence of the Ripper case? Does the participation of Buffalo Bill and Red Tomahawk contrast or parallel the history of human savagery in New World and Old?

7. This story takes place on the brink of the 1890s, called the Mauve Decade, the Yellow Nineties, and the Decadent Nineties because of a cultural climate that was both artistically fruitful and yet celebrated evil and darkness. What elements of decadence appear in this novel, besides actions relating to the murders? Is our own culture experiencing an end-of-century/end-of-millennium appetite for dark entertainment? Is Hannibal Lecter the new Dracula?

8. Retellings of the Jack the Ripper crimes have made him into something of a heroic figure like Hannibal Lecter: cold, clever, and invincible, the center of endless fascination and even a kind of admiration for the very brutality of his deeds. Does this reflect an underlying misogynism in society? If the Ripper had butchered a series of men, would the crimes still be as famous?

RELATED TO THE IRENE ADLERO 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 that 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’s
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? Which would you 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 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. Why did Douglas choose 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 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? Why did this period produce not only
Dracula
and Doyle’s Holmes stories and the surviving dinosaurs of
The Lost World
, but also
Trilby
and Svengali,
The Phantom of the Opera, The Prisoner of Zenda
, and
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?

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. 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 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 terrains and bringing the sketchy women characters into full-bodied prominence.

Q:
What of “the husband,” Godfrey Norton?

A: In my novels, Irene’s husband, Godfrey Norton, is more than the “tall, dark, and dashing barrister” Doyle gave her. I made him the son of a woman wronged by England’s then female-punitive divorce law, so he is a “supporting” character in every sense of the word. These novels are that rare bird in literature: female “buddy” books. Godfrey fulfills the useful, decorative, and faithful role so often played by women and wives in fiction and real life. Sherlockians anxious to unite Adler and Holmes have tried to oust Godfrey. William S. Baring-Gould even depicted him as a wife-beater in order to promote a later assignation with Holmes that produced Nero Wolfe! That is such an unbelievable violation of a strong female character’s psychology. That scenario would make Irene Adler a two-time loser in her choice of men and a masochist to boot. My protagonist is a world away from that notion and a wonderful vehicle for subtle but sharp feminist comment.

Q:
Did you give her any attributes not found in the Doyle story?

A: I gave her one of Holmes’s bad habits. She smokes “little cigars.” Smoking was an act of rebellion for women then. And because Doyle shows her sometimes donning male dress to go unhampered into public places, I gave her “a wicked little revolver” to carry. When Doyle put her in male disguise at the end of his story, I doubt he was thinking of the modern psychosexual ramifications of cross-dressing.

Q:
Essentially, you have changed Irene Adler from an ornamental woman to a working woman
.

A: My Irene is more a rival than a romantic interest for Holmes. She is not a logical detective in the same mold as he, but is as gifted in her intuitive way. Nor is her opera singing a convenient profession for a beauty of the day, but a passionate vocation that was taken from her by the King of Bohemia’s autocratic attitude toward women, forcing her to occupy herself with detection. Although Doyle’s Irene is beautiful, well-dressed, and clever, my Irene demands that she be taken seriously despite these feminine attributes. Now we call it “Grrrrl Power.”

I like to write “against” conventions that are no longer true, or were never true. This is the thread that runs through all my fiction: my dissatisfaction with the portrayal of women in literary and popular fiction—then and even now. This begins with
Amberleigh—my
postfeminist mainstream version of the Gothic revival popular novels of the 1960s and 1970s—and continues with Irene Adler today. I’m interested in women as survivors. Men also interest me of necessity, men strong enough to escape cultural blinders to become equal partners to strong women.

Q:
How do you research these books?

A: From a lifetime of reading English literature and a theatrical background that educated me on the clothing, culture, customs, and speech of various historical periods. I was reading Oscar Wilde plays when I was eight years old. My mother’s book club meant that I cut my teeth on Eliot, Balzac, Kipling, Poe, poetry, Greek mythology, Hawthorne, the Brontes, Dumas, and Dickens.

In doing research, I have a fortunate facility of using every nugget I find, or of finding that every little fascinating nugget works itself into the story. Perhaps that’s because good journalists must be ingenious in using every fact available to make a story as complete and accurate as possible under deadline conditions. Often the smallest mustard seed of research swells into an entire tree of plot. The corpse on the dining-room table of Bram Stoker, author of
Dracula
, was too macabre to resist and spurred the entire plot of the third Adler novel,
A Soul of Steel
(formerly
Good Morning, Irene
). Stoker rescued a drowning man from the Thames and carried him home for revival efforts, but it was too late.

Besides using my own extensive library on this period, I’ve borrowed from my local library all sorts of arcane books they don’t even know they have because no one ever checks them out. The Internet aids greatly with the specific fact. I’ve also visited London and Paris to research the books, a great hardship, but worth it. I also must visit Las Vegas periodically for my contemporary-set Midnight Louie mystery series. No sacrifice is too great.

Q:
You’ve written fantasy and science fiction novels, why did you turn to mystery?

A: All novels are fantasy and all novels are mystery in the largest sense. Although mystery was often an element in my early novels, when I evolved the Irene Adler idea, I just considered it a novel.
Good Night, Mr. Holmes
was almost published before I realized it would be “categorized” as a mystery. So Irene is utterly a product of my mind and times, not of the marketplace, though I always believed that the concept was timely and necessary.