Powerful Women (Not) Beating Sherlock Holmes: BBC Sherlock’s Postfeminist Women

Abstract

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories have been adapted many times and new examples continue to appear every year. One recent adaptation, the BBC’s Sherlock, changes the setting of the stories from Victorian London to the twenty-first century, which has a more significant impact on its female characters compared to its male characters. The effects of this on women, both adapted and new characters, will be explored here by examining four characters: Mrs Hudson, Mary Morstan/Watson, Molly Hooper, and Eurus Holmes. The adapted characters will be compared to Doyle’s stories, and all four will be analysed through features of postfeminism. This term can be used to describe the entanglement of feminist and anti-feminist ideas that can be found in the media culture and everyday life of the 2010s. This entanglement can also be found in Sherlock through the increasing attempts at empowering its female characters, but ultimately never allowing them to be more powerful than main male character Sherlock Holmes.