ELH

In December of 1892, Arthur Conan Doyle began publishing The Memoirs of Sherlock 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 ears 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 someone 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 and physiology with questions of national identity and security in ways that redefine the relation of an individual’s body with the body politic. [End Page 655]

This essay asks the question of how a designated figure of social authority — the 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 of 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 as the literary personification of an elaborate cultural apparatus by which persons 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...