However, in the pursuit of pop culture adventures I’ve recently found myself spending some time with Mary Russell, the heroine of a series of books by Laurie R King which also feature Sherlock Holmes as her mentor, and later her husband. Like Holmes, Russell (her preferred moniker) is intelligent, logical, brave, unconventional and excellent at fighting, with a superb aim and a talent for disguises etc etc. She is Jewish, British-American, and studies theology at Oxford. She also dresses in men’s clothes.

What drew me to the books was the fact that Russell is a self-described feminist. Although she mentions her political beliefs in the first book, 1994’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the second is all about feminism. Well, feminism and theology. And murder. It’s even called A Monstrous Regiment of Women. I enjoyed it immensely, despite many silly moments and patchy writing. Incidentally the majority of the writing is pretty good, and I feel that the voice of Holmes rings true most of the time, which is no mean feat.

The author says of the series:

Mary Russell is what Sherlock Holmes would look like if Holmes, the Victorian detective, were a) a woman, b) of the Twentieth century, and c) interested in theology. If the mind is like an engine, free of gender and nurture considerations, then the Russell and Holmes stories are about two people whose basic mental mechanism is identical. What they do with it, however, is where the interest lies.

I find this intriguing, and I’m tempted to read the books again with that genderless mental mechanism in mind. For Holmes, the mind as an engine is his proclaimed ideal; flawless logic and cool rationality. Watson (in Conan Doyle’s A Scandal In Bohemia) famously describes Holmes’ low opinion (and fear?) of those “softer passions” which “might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.”

Of course, it’s Holmes’s human deviation from this mechanical ideal that is often most interesting to readers and fans. (See also: Mr Spock.) Russell is more well-adjusted; that is to say she acknowledges her emotions, and her desire, although grudgingly. Whether this is because she is a woman, because she is a citizen of the 20thC or because we as readers have more access to her thoughts than we do Holmes’s I couldn’t say.

She’s also very androgynous, something I enjoyed reading in a historical setting. But her masculine traits made me wonder if a feminine female Holmes is an impossibility. Would the character be in a permament spasm of contradiction or would they make a better go of reconciling femininity and reason than Holmes seems to be able to? Perhaps Conan Doyle came closer than most himself with Irene Adler, often positioned as Holmes’ female counterpart. While she is formidably intelligent, she is also impulsive, emotional, and sexual.

The thing I found most difficult to deal with, like many readers I suspect, is their May to December romance. When they meet, he is 52. And she is 15. When they marry they are 58 and 21 respectively. And for added creepiness, after their first (awful, awful) kiss: “By God,” he murmured throatily into my hair. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment I laid eyes upon you.” What is there to say except *vom*?

Thankfully, the first hint of anything sexual between them arrives right at the end of the second book in the series when Russell is 21. Holmes just spends most of the first novel in which she is a teenager stroking her hair in a fatherly fashion. Still, there are some unsettlingly groom-y undertones which means the novels rely very heavily on the reader’s trust in Holmes as the embodiment of honour.

The other bothersome thing for me is Russell’s unavoidable Mary Sue-ness. As well as acting as an avatar for the author (also a Jewish, British-American, feminist theologian) she ticks lots of the boxes: succeeds at everything, is effortlessly friends with everyone, has a dramatic and tragic backstory, no flaws that aren’t endearing, and so on.

Arguably though, as far as being a freakish overachiever goes she is no more of a Mary Sue than Holmes himself. I think there’s a lot of truth in the argument that Mary Sue and her counterpart Marty Stu face double standards, and that successful, powerful female characters are dismissed or undermined through accusations of being a Mary Sue. Rhiannon at Feminist Fiction writes:

…once the words “Mary Sue” have been uttered, all productive conversation is shut down. It says that the character is not worth talking about, not worth analyzing, because she’s somehow incomplete… She’s not a character but a projection of female fantasy, and therefore innately, indisputably bad. Any character who falls into this category might be somewhat one-dimensional, lacking the depth and flaws needed for a really compelling character, but the term goes beyond that, throwing on implications of worthlessness (at best) and a kind of superior disgust at girlish dreams and ambitions (at worst). Because “Mary Sue” only refers to female characters.

Although I picked up the first book because of the fandom, I found myself wishing the Mary Russell books had simply been a series of novels about a feminist woman detective in the early 20thC. I think Russell would make a fine addition to the ranks occupied by Miss Marple and Mrs Bradley, being a little less genteel and younger, more impulsive, and more of an action detective in the manner of Holmes, employing disguises and fisticuffs as necessary. They’re good stories, and although Holmes is in the background I’m not sure he needs to be there at all.

VITRIOL

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.

William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)

This Corrosion.

Vitriol is more properly known by its scientific name: sulphuric acid. Or additionally, ‘Any of various sulphates of metallic elements, especially ferrous sulphate.’ The only reason I get to do it for V is because the late c13th had a rather fanciful approach to science (no offence guys), and dubbed this chemical vitriol, from the Latin vitreus (= ‘of glass, glassy’). Cos, in certain states, sulphuric acid looks ‘glassy’. Geddit?? Ahem. Actually, there’s nothing whimsical about vitriol in its everyday life: it’s extremely corrosive (hi, GCSE Chemistry), and has an exothermic reaction with water, basically meaning it dehydrates anything it comes into contact with… but then liberates extra heat through the very process of reacting with water, causing more burns. Nasty.

Catherine de Medici, attributed to Francois Clouet, c.1555

Of course, like its sibling term acid, vitriol is also a lovely little example of a word whose literal and figurative meanings have almost equal prominence in modern English. Thus, around 1769, vitriol started meaning ‘Acrimonious, caustic or scathing speech, criticism or feeling’ and – naturally – this sense was in figurative relation to sulphuric acid’s ‘corrosive’ qualities. These are the same corrosive properties that made sulphuric acid every murderer’s friend throughout criminal history – every Wikipedia fan given to perverse procrastination knows about John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who dissolved the bodies of his victims in a bath full of acid (but was eventually dobbed in by a couple of stray gallstones and part of a denture)… Shudder.

My pain, your thrill.

Anyway, vitriol has apparently been around since ancient times, but came into prominence during the late c19th, owing to its use as a cleaning product. Of course, since it was suddenly considered fine for trying at home, it was easily purchased at your local chemist by every housewife on her weekly shop.

In this context, I’ve always thought of vitriol as a pendant to arsenic, a household poison used for pest-control, cosmetics and suicide (if you’re French, bourgeois and in a Flaubert novel). Particularly suggestible Victorian women would mix this one with chalk and vinegar to improve their complexion, with occasionally fatal consequences for their hapless spouses. History is correspondingly full of tales of malevolent arsenic-armed females, including the eighteenth-century Mary Blandy, who put it in her father’s tea so she could marry her lover. (In a little pendant of my own: she continued to take tea herself in prison – and to receive visitors for tea – apparently unencumbered by squeamishness, or the leg-irons she had to wear as a murderess on death row).

Vitriol throwing in Le Petit Journal - image from http://theatredamned.blogspot.com/

These cases are part of a long tradition of female poisoners going back to Catherine de Medici and the Emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, both politically powerful women who were the subject of (probably apocryphal) rumours of poisonous ingenuity. Livia supposedly killed Augustus by poisoning figs that were still on the tree (the last in a line of such crimes, if you like a bit of I, Claudius. As everyone should.) and that old gossip-monger Alexandre Dumas describes how Catherine de Medici used to poison casual household objects – ranging from books and gloves to lipsticks – to relieve herself of Inconveniences who just happened to be breathing.

The logic behind this tradition seems clear enough: unaccustomed to the brutalities of war and macho posturing, the female murderer is nonetheless skilled in the arts of household management, food preparation and cosmetics. Her arsenal is correspondingly domestic, and widespread reporting of female poisoners presumably relates to a kind of fear of the unknowably deadly potential of the home (and all it represents), not to mention the oft-observed ‘fact’ that the female of the species will tend towards silent attack, backstabbing and general wiliness when settling her battles. The bitch! Thus, like vitriol, poison too has a transferred sense: to be poisonous is to be ‘deeply malicious, malevolent’ – ‘sly’ – in a way which is almost antonymic to simple ‘brutality’.

Don’t look back in anger.

But in the late 1800s something changed, and there was an apparent epidemic of vitriol throwing in addition to arsenic poisoning – so much so, that it got its own verb: to vitriolize was to ‘throw sulphuric acid at a person with intent to injure’. Thankfully, this verb is now ‘rare’ (although on this, see more below), but its usage was overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. Moreover, a cursory look at newspaper records reveals these were overwhelmingly perceived to be female crimes against an erstwhile lover or a rival. A ‘crime of passion’, in fact, in a way that poisoning (slow and subtle) is not. My pal Stewart has recently started resurrecting the Parisian Grand Guignol, a Parisian theatre of horror whose depiction of acid-throwing was only one of many acts of mutilation presented onstage between 1897-1962, and I’m quoting him quoting Anne-Louise Shapiro:

In the 1880s, vitriol began to acquire the symbolic associations traditionally linked to poison; l’empoisonneuse was joined by a new rhetorical (and actual) figure, the vitrioleuse. […] Women who were dangerous through their very domesticity – who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing – underscored not only female duplicity but male dependency.

Anne-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in fin-de-siecle Paris

The Grand Guignol play La Baisir dans la Nuit hinges around a disfigured acid victim exercising (literal) eye-for-an-eye revenge on the lover responsible for his wretched state. This sort of thing is perhaps to be expected in a ‘theatre of horror’, but vitriol throwing also appears in the broadly passion-free Sherlock Holmes stories, most fully in the Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924) where the crime in question is perpetrated by a Fallen Woman on her Base Seducer – over ten years after the frequency of cases had prompted calls to make the purchase of vitriol more difficult.

Anyway, this ‘Kitty Winter’ is full of vitriol of both kinds: as Watson puts it, ‘there was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain’, and her hysterical ranting and raving against the ‘instrument of her demise’ is – throughout the story – placed in opposition to the calm and aristocratic air of her Don Juan’s next victim. Throughout the story it is made clear that vitriol throwing is the sort of thing possible only for a woman full of a special kind of fury – and, as Watson makes clear, that fury is something ‘man never can attain’. The lambs.

The interesting thing here, of course, is the transition from silent, wily domestic poisons to public acid attacks that hinge around the old adage that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ (a misquote from Congreve that endures to this day). This, of course, is a woman armed with vitriol of one kind or another, and the idea was clearly much-repeated, because by the mid-century we also had the word vitriolic, meaning… well… ‘like vitriol’. That said, it is frequently unclear whether this is vitriol in a literal or figurative sense: in 1919 the Sarah Palin of the nineteenth century, Mary Kilbreth (President of the American National Association to Oppose Woman Suffrage), questioned Emmeline Pankhurst’s patriotism on the grounds that Pankhurst and the Suffragettes had led a ‘reign of terror’ that involved ‘bombs, kerosene and vitriol throwing‘, but whether she meant words or household cleaner remains tantalisingly unclear.

Unfortunately, for many around the world today vitriol is all too literal. This article has been interested in exploring the criminal female in history but – in the UK and abroad – acid attacks are still common, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of a culture of ‘honour violence’ directed against women. While it would be disingenuous to suggest exclusivity on either side, it does seem that these are increasingly male-on-female attacks in contrast to the apparent gender-split in the nineteenth century. This article has a rather good summary of the current situation, and recommends places you can find out more, including the Acid Survivors Trust.

NEXT WEEK: W is for Widow