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smoljohnlock · 6 years

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Sherlock Holmes as a romantic character

I’m writing this because I’ve been just revising the romantic movement for an exam and it happens that Sherlock is a typical romantic character, so... yeah.

I'm going to paste the main chacteristics of a romantic character and compare it to BBC Sherlock. You could write about the whole show here because there’s a lot that fits into those categories but I’m gonna list 1-2 examples so you get the general idea. Feel free to add more. What I find hysterical is that there’s a bust of Goethe in 221B

1. Emphasis on emotion

Even though Sherlock always accuses John of being a romantic “As ever, Watson, you see but do not observe. To you, the world remains an impenetrable mystery, whereas, to me, it is an open book.Hard logic versus romantic whimsy - that is your choice.”, his own choices are often driven by feelings, not ‘hard logic’. He cares about his clients, he shot Magnussen so Mary could be save & John happy, he faked (?) his sucide to save his friends, etc, etc. Back to the quote - he was talking to an imaginary John (to himself) and at the end, he chooses heart and we can clearly see that in S4.

2. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience and truth.

He imagines the whole TAB+S4 (probably even s3)

SHERLOCK: It was a case, a famous one from a hundred years ago, lodged in my hard drive. She seemed to be dead but then she came back. Shot herself in the head, exactly like Moriarty. I’ve been in my Mind Palace, running an experiment: how would I have solved the crime if I’d been there in 1895

MORIARTY: What do you want, Sherlock? HOLMES: The truth.

3. Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on “natural” feelings as a guide to conduct are valued over controlled, rationality.

4. Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature

5. Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the supernatural, the mystical, the “gothic”

6. Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution

Mycroft = the government

7. There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness. The art often dealt with death, transience and mankind’s feelings about these things. The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose creative spirit was more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.

I believe Mofftiss took inspiration from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, here’s a summary if you haven’t read it. Werther = Sherlock, Charlotte = John, Albert = Mary.

Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert. Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His sorrow eventually becomes so unsupportable that he is forced to leave Wahlheim [...] He returns to Wahlheim, where he suffers still more than before, partly because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day becomes a torturing reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. She, out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he recites to her a passage of his own translation of Ossian.

Even before that incident, Werther had hinted at the idea that one member of the love triangle – Charlotte, Albert or Werther himself – had to die to resolve the situation. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter to be found after his death, he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, on the pretext that he is going "on a journey". Charlotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but does not die until twelve hours later. He is buried under a linden tree that he has mentioned frequently in his letters. The funeral is not attended by any clergy, or by Albert or Charlotte. The book ends with an intimation that Charlotte may die of a broken heart. "I shall say nothing of... Charlotte's grief.... Charlotte's life was despaired of," etc.

8. The French Revolution

It was a time of huge social and political transformation, which was pretty inspiring to the Romantics, who, as we might remember, valued individuality and freedom and rebelled against social and literary conventions of their day.

9. Interest in history/Ancient Greek and Roman elements

EUROS - the god of the east wind

Romantic literature also mixes reality with the supernatural etc, often doesn’t make sense taken at face value, we have ghosts in TAB, imaginary plane in TFP. There’s a scene in Kordian by Juliusz Słowacki, where Kordian is at the top of Mont Blanc, then flies to Poland on a cloud. In TFP they also just somehow appear in places, like on the boat. All in all, Sherlock posseses all the traits of a romantic character, there are even direct references to romantic literature. S4 opens with Sherlock being on his phone=heart all the time, in that season he relies on his feelings rather than logic.

#sherlock #meta #romantic

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