FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  FOR DISCUSSION

  Related to Femme Fatale

  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?

  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, wai
ting 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.

  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, yes. 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 second Adler novel, The Adventuress (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 considered it simply a novel. Good Night, Mr. Holmes was almost on the shelves 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.

  About the Author

  “Highly eclectic writer and literary adventuress, Douglas is as concerned about genre equality as she is about gender equity,” writes Jo Ellyn Clarey in The Drood Review of Mystery.

  Carole Nelson Douglas is a journalist-turne
d-novelist whose writing in both fields has been a finalist for, or received, fifty awards. A literary chameleon, she has always explored the roles of women in society, first in daily newspaper reporting, then in numerous novels ranging from fantasy and science fiction to mainstream fiction.

  She currently writes two mystery series. The Victorian Irene Adler series examines the role of women in the late nineteenth century through the adventures of the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, an American diva/detective. The contemporary-yet-Runyonesque Midnight Louie series contrasts the realistic crime-solving activities and personal issues of four main human characters with the interjected first-person feline viewpoint of a black alley cat PI, who satirizes the role of the rogue male in crime and popular fiction. (“Although Douglas has a wicked sense of humor,” Clarey writes, “her energetic sense of justice is well balanced and her fictional mockery is never nasty.”)

  Douglas, born in Everett, Washington, grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and emigrated with her husband to Fort Worth, Texas, trading Snowbelt for Sunbelt and journalism for fiction. At the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul she earned degrees in English literature and speech and theater, with a minor in philosophy, and was a finalist (along with groundbreaking mystery novelist, Marcia Muller) in Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris writing competition (won earlier by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis).

  Chapel Noir resumed the enormously well received Irene Adler series after a seven-year hiatus and with its sequel, Castle Rouge, comprises the Jack the Ripper duology within the overall series. The first Adler novel, Good Night, Mr. Holmes, won American Mystery and Romantic Times magazine awards and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The reissued edition of Good Morning, Irene will be released as The Adventuress in January 2004.