AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.

The fingerprint of the foreigner: colonizing the criminal body in 1890s detective fiction and criminal anthropology.

ELH

| September 22, 1994 | Thomas, Ronald R. | COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)Copyright

In December of 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing The Memoirs of Sherloc Holmes, the second in his great series of detective stories that took the reading public of England by storm during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Among the first of The Memoirs to appear in The Strand Magazine were "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box" and "The Adventure of the Yellow Face." True to form, both cases required Holmes to identify someone: in the first, a presumed murder victim and in the second a presumed blackmailer. "The Cardboard Box" presents Holmes with a singular piece of evidence: a package received by his client containing only two human ears. In one of the most remarkable demonstrations of his interpretive powers, Holmes accurately reads in those ear the identity of two murder victims and the man who murdered them. "The Yellow Face" tells rather a different story. It is one of the rare cases in which the usually infallible Holmes "erred," Watson tells us, in his effort to determine the identity of the person in question. In what would seem a less daunting interpretive challenge than the previous one, the detective fails to properly identify the strange figure with the uncanny yellow face, the mysterious someon who appears at the window of a house visited in secret by the wife of Holmes's anxious client. And yet, despite the detective's failure, Watson assures us, "the truth was still discovered" as a result of Holmes's intervention.(1) Together, these two cases chart the impressive reach of Holmes's powers to read the criminal body and map his limits as well. But they also do much more. Like the flood of scientific writing on criminology that appeared in England during the 1890s, these fictions of criminality link questions of personal identity an physiology with questions of national identity and security in ways that redefine the relation of an individual's body with the body politic.

This essay asks the question of how a designated figure of social authority--th literary detective--gains the power to discover "the truth" by acquiring the right to tell someone else's story against his or her will, and how the emergence of the immensely popular genre of detective fiction may be related to specific national needs and interests. Indeed, for all their differences, both "The Cardboard Box" and "The Yellow Face" begin as tales of domestic intrigue but end with lengthy, coerced confessions that raise larger national issues. It might be argued that the elevation of detective fiction to the pitch of sensational popularity it enjoyed in 1890s England signals the emergence of a narrative of authoritarian containment to compete with and discipline the dominant nineteenth-century narrative of self-determination represented best by the period's fascination with autobiography. The work the literary detective performs is an act of narrative usurpation in which he converts stories told by subjects about themselves into alibis proffered by suspects. The force of this narrative of social intervention as a monitoring and disciplining agency is demonstrated in the confessions Holmes extorts from the suspects in these cases confessions that make clear that the most private domestic scandals also often bear the imprint of the most public national policies. The disembodied ears at the end of "The Cardboard Box" and the discarded yellow face at the end of "The Yellow Face" silently remind us that Holmes establishes himself as the source o truth about the body and the identity of culprit and victim alike in these tales. As he unravels the mystery and makes his accusation, he speaks for them as he speaks for the nation.

Whatever else Sherlock Holmes may have claimed to be, he should be understood a the literary personification of an elaborate cultural apparatus by which person were given their true and legitimate identities by someone else. Holmes is referred to by Watson in the very first of The Adventures as "the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has ever seen"; and his methods are presented to us as unassailable because they are machine-like in their scientific objectivity, uncontaminated by the detective's emotional involvement or cultural bias.(2) Watson's first encounter with Holmes takes place in the master detective's chemical laboratory, a place he often frequents during his investigations, lending an air of scientific precision and exactness to his work. Watson, having just returned to England to nurse a wound he suffered in the colonial campaign in Afghanistan, may be read as representing the British imperial policy in need of rehabilitation by Holmes's self-proclaimed science o detection. In that first encounter, Holmes not only surmises the fact that Watson is a veteran of the Afghanistan conflict, he also correctly recognizes that a perfect stranger they see on the street is a retired Marine sergeant, further demonstrating to Watson his remarkable powers of identification. The detective then informs the doctor that with his specialized knowledge, he can accurately infer the whole history of a man by observing such things as his fingernails, his facial expression, and the callosities of his forefinger and thumb. In the tales that Watson proceeds to pen about the master detective, Holmes will indeed read the history of individuals as representatives of the nation and will then rewrite their relationship to it. In fact, Holmes's emergence as an authoritative cultural hero in the 1880s and 1890s corresponds to a transformation of Britain's national identity during the same period. Notably, during the first few years of the 1890s, Britain's identity as a nation--in its own eyes and the world's--was being radically redefined with respect to its vast global empire. Once an embattled and suspect pursuit, a "Ne Imperialism" became equated once again with morality and patriotism in England, rising to the status of a national cult also referred to as the "Pax Britannica."

After the death of General Gordon at Khartoum in 1885 had been transformed in the popular imagination into a glorious martyrdom, the gradual silencing of the Liberal critique of imperialism was virtually secured in England. The policies of empire seemed to have weathered the storm of mid-century popular indifference, colonial uprisings, and left-wing criticism. By the time of the elections of 1895, a Conservative-Unionist coalition swept to a decisive victory, bringing with it the triumph of this New Imperialism and the silencing of the conscience of the old imperialism which had been personified in Gladstone, who would die in the year following Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Importantly, the advent of the New Imperialism did not really represent a new imperial policy, so much as it did a new popular attitude toward that policy. Granted, the new competition for international power from rising states like Germany caused some stiffening of economic and military aggression in British imperial pursuits during the 1890s, especially in the "scramble for Africa" tha followed the Berlin Conference convened by Bismarck in 1884 to partition the dark continent. As a consequence, however, by the time of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the historian James Morris claims, "The idea of Empire had reached a climax," and the celebration of sixty years of Victoria's reign was a much an international celebration of the idea of the New Imperialism as it was tribute to the venerable queen.(3)

My focus is on the domestic rather than the international acceptance of this phenomenon, a development that I will link directly to the powers and popularit of literary figures like Sherlock Holmes and to the prestige of scientific authorities like Havelock Ellis and Francis Galton. I will argue that together their work helped to transform reluctant approval, indifference, and direct criticism for imperial policies into general reverence, enthusiasm, and even hysteria in the British popular imagination. Certainly there were other factors contributing to this development, and one may look (among other places) on almost any page of magazines like The Strand for popular explanations. The widely-enjoyed profits of empire back home and the general economic and militar success that attended British expansionism abroad during this period are eviden in virtually every article about military conquest and every adventure story dealing with exploration that appeared in The Strand during these critical years. One such series that ran concurrently with The Memoirs of Sherlock Holme was called Shafts from an Eastern Quiver, tales of British adventurers who took part in strategic military and scientific projects and narrowly escaped from th clutches of devious and dangerous oriental tribesmen. Still another series provided first-person accounts by British military men from around the Empire, relating the tales of bravery that earned them the coveted Victoria's Cross. Appropriately enough, the installment from this series that appeared in the first volume of The Strand tells the harrowing story of the very battle in Afghanistan in which Dr. Watson was purportedly wounded, forcing his return to England and his meeting up with Sherlock Holmes.

But the triumph of the New Imperialism was also enabled by more subtle domestic forces than these dramatic and exotic mixtures of fact and fiction. The newly conceived national identity enjoyed by England abroad in these essays and stories was made palatable and popular by a vigilant policing of the personal identity of the average British citizen back home. I will examine three of the agents of that policing in the early 1890s from very different discursive field with the aim of exposing the links between the disciplinary power of a popular form of escapist literature, the new academic discipline of criminal anthropology, and the military discipline practiced in the "new" British imperialism. The first such agent, as I have already suggested, is Britain's increasing enthrallment with detective fiction, a genre raised to its most popular status and perhaps its most accomplished form in Doyle's Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, both of which volumes first appeared as individual stories in the newly established Strand Magazine between 1891 and 1893.(4) The second is Britain's involvement in the emerging science of criminal anthropolog through Havelock Ellis's landmark work The Criminal, first published in 1890. The third contribution I will consider is Sir Francis Galton's successful advocacy of a new method for archiving criminal records detailed in his book, Finger-Prints, a volume that was introduced in 1892. In addition to their almos simultaneous publication, these three texts--the first a form of popular literary entertainment, the second a work of theoretical science, and the third a practical technique for law enforcement--have a number of things in common. All three are concerned with criminality--how to detect it and how to arrest it Moreover, in every case, criminality is often associated with, and even defined by, the identifiable foreignness of the suspect's body. Criminal deviance becam increasingly understood as an issue of national security, and, at the same time criminal identity became inextricably linked with physiology and nationality. The authors of these texts are all scientists by training and practice, and therefore all are interested at some level in offering incontrovertible, empirical evidence for their conclusions. In all of them, however, science conveniently comes to serve the interests of politics.

...

Related articles from newspapers, magazines, journals, and more
Thinking the Unthinkable: Reopening Conan Doyle's "Cardboard Box".(bibliography...
Magazine article from: The Midwest Quarterly METRESS, CHRISTOPHER January 1, 2001 700+ words
...December 1892. The second story, "The Cardboard Box," appeared in January 1893. By the...s wishes, Newnes excluded "The Cardboard Box" from the new collection, and the...the mysterious disappearance of "The Cardboard Box" has generated a good deal of speculation...
Cardboard Box & Container Manufacturing in the US.
Press release article from: M2 Presswire June 22, 2009 700+ words
...June 2009-Companies and Markets: Cardboard Box & Container Manufacturing in...M2 COMMUNICATIONS RDATE:22062009 Cardboard Box & Container Manufacturing in...replacement for the October 2008 edition of Cardboard Box & Container Manufacturing in...
Cardboard Box Added to Toy Hall of Fame.
News wire article from: The America's Intelligence Wire November 12, 2005 700+ words
...castle, haven to daydream in, the cardboard box was enshrined Friday in the National...and unpretentious it may be, but the cardboard box has fostered learning and creativity...wooden crates," Bensch said, and the cardboard box "makes a point that you don't have...
Cardboard box joins Toy Hall of Fame.(QUICK TAKES)
Magazine article from: Weekly Reader, Edition 4 (including Science Spin) January 27, 2006 700+ words
...They thought of the box itself! The cardboard box was recently added to the list of all...Museum, in Rochester, New York. The cardboard box is a natural fit for the Toy Hall of...imagination is key when it comes to the cardboard box. A shoebox, for example, can be...
Cardboard box leads police to murder suspect in case involving headless body.
News wire article from: Europe Intelligence Wire December 20, 2004 700+ words
(From Athens News Agency) The cardboard box used to dispose of the victim's headless...bags, which he then placed inside the cardboard box Police on Monday reported that the...in the Thessaloniki area, inside a cardboard box bearing the logo of Turkish stove manufacturer...
A life reduced to a cardboard box on the side of the road.(City/Region)
Newspaper article from: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) January 20, 2008 700+ words
...through the brush when I noticed a cardboard box sitting alongside the disused shoulder...historical record in this weatherbeaten cardboard box. And then what? Did Bill die? What...Some father's life compressed into a cardboard box and dumped alongside the road like...
America's Toy Hall of Fame gets humble new entry: the cardboard box.
News wire article from: The America's Intelligence Wire November 12, 2005 700+ words
...comes in can be much more fun. The cardboard box _ whether the imagination turns it...and unpretentious it may be, but the cardboard box has fostered learning and creativity...wooden crates," Bensch said, and the cardboard box "makes a point that you don't have...
Family of deceased man outraged: BODY ARRIVES NAKED IN A WET CARDBOARD...
News wire article from: Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, KY) March 4, 2007 700+ words
...arrived in Frankfort packed in a wet cardboard box. Groves' family is still trying to...and placed in a crate enclosed in a cardboard box. Instead, his naked body was covered...with some plastic and put in a flimsy cardboard box tied down by two pieces of nylon...
The cardboard box book.
Magazine article from: Children's Digest September 1, 2006 700+ words
The Cardboard Box Book by Danny, Jake, and Niall Walsh Watson-Guptill Publications...house, or even a rocket with empty boxes and a little help from The Cardboard Box Book. Whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, transform an...
Company boss injured in cardboard box bomb attack.
News wire article from: Asia Africa Intelligence Wire April 27, 2003 700+ words
...The owner of a sheet metal plant here was injured after a cardboard box abandoned on the premises exploded Sunday morning, police...of the Nakata Bankin sheet metal company found a strange cardboard box in the premises of his factory in the Madarame district of...
For more facts and information, see all results
©2009 Gale, a part of Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
About us | FAQs | Contact us | Privacy policy | Terms and conditions
Other Gale sites: Encyclopedia.com | HighBeam Research | Acquire Content | Books & Authors | Goliath | MovieRetriever | Smart QandA