Michael Coppola

The following essay examines the roles of Sherlock Holmes and his colleague, Watson, in the social construction of masculine norms in Arthur Conan Doyle‟s The Sign of Four. This novel includes a description of the courtship and marriage of Watson to Holmes‟s client, Mary Morstan—an act of masculine fulfillment that reinforces hegemonic patriarchal ideals of the time. The novel also supports patriarchal values via subtle homophobic and xenophobic discourse. I argue that the use of such discourse serves to co-localize the feminine, the male homosocial/homoerotic, and the foreign into a suppressed, repressed „other‟ incapable of challenging the patriarchal system. In this process of „othering,‟ the novel inescapably draws attention to the plasticity and vulnerability of its own ideologies. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Recent scholarship has identified Sherlock Holmes as more than a master of detection. Arthur Conan Doyle‟s legendary creation has become viewed as an enforcer of the ideologies of his time, particularly those concerned with gender roles. In an analysis of “The Speckled Band,” Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan envision Holmes as symbolizing the patriarchal values of Victorian England. By foiling the wicked stepfather‟s plan to murder his daughter, Holmes replaces him and assumes the role of patriarch—a process symbolic of state-sponsored initiatives to act within the private sphere and protect Victorian women from men and, presumably, themselves.1 I want to argue that a similar process occurs in Doyle‟s second Holmes novel, The Sign of Four: potentially subversive feminine elements are brought under the protection and control of patriarchal figures. As in “The Speckled Band,” an “entangled encoding of the feminine and the Oriental as sexualized other” (Hennessy and Mohan 400) serves to conflate the foreign and the feminine and align both of them against the masculine ideal, personified by Holmes. With Watson‟s help, Holmes is able to subdue these threatening elements and protect Victorian patriarchal values and his own masculinity. That masculinity is defined by strongly homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-feminine sentiment. These components appear to characterize the masculine construction of the late Victorian period. Ronald Hyam offers a fascinating account of the historical emergence of this type of masculinity: prior to this period, Early Victorian men were fairly sentimental in their friendships. They walked about arm-in-arm (as much of the rest of the world outside the Anglo-Saxon nations still does); they described themselves in their letters as „loving friends‟; they accepted romantic non-sexual attachments with each other in youth as part of the natural order of things [...] They were not much given to competitive sport, but preferred country pursuits, rambling, shuttlecock and board games. They had no fear of tears. (72) Such behavior would eventually succumb to a new definition of masculinity marked by discipline, sportsmanship, repression of „feminine‟ qualities, and sexual restraint (72). Hyam postulates that this change reflected a broader shift in Victorian ideas about sexuality in general—the draconian, repressive measures of the so-called Purity Campaign—and was furnished “partly in the name of empire” (71). M. COPPOLA: PATRIARCHAL PEDAGOGY -2Indeed, anxieties about sexual incontinence in Britain‟s colonies may well have influenced the new masculinity‟s emphatic misogyny and xenophobia.2 Male authors of the late Victorian period may have had additional incentive to mystify and suppress the feminine in their work: the rise in popularity of female authors. In a treatise of Victorian sexuality, Fraser Harrison suggests that masculine construction in the late Victorian period constituted a male backlash against a perceived increase in female influence on British culture. Harrison explains that a key strategy of late Victorian males who were uncomfortable with the changing roles of women in their society was to try to separate the superior reasoning power of masculinity from the emotional, intuitive capacity of femininity. He argues that the late Victorian period was one in which men feared the power of women, and that “it can be no coincidence that books which featured male trios and duos acting as collective heroes enjoyed great popularity during those years”—books such as the Holmes stories (129). One would expect The Sign of Four, then, to chronicle Holmes and Watson‟s collaborative subjugation of the feminine. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick‟s Between Men describes a particular tactic available to males interested in suppressing the feminine and reinforcing patriarchal ideologies. The ardent distinction between “men-loving-men” and “men-promoting-the-interests-of-men” (as opposed to a smoother continuum of homosocial-homosexual relationships between women) serves to demonize homosexuality and reinforce “such patriarchal institutions as heterosexual marriage” (3). The control of male homosocial desire, manifested in homophobia and repression of the feminine in the male, thus enables the ideology of male domination within patriarchal systems. Since The Sign of Four culminates in the marriage of Watson and the female client, Mary Morstan, it will serve to exemplify how Holmes and Watson join forces against the feminine, pooling their resources to conquer an elusive, inscrutable foe. The suggestion that Holmes, a genuine genius, would require Watson‟s aid in reinforcing patriarchal ideologies—indeed, that he would need Watson‟s help for anything at all—certainly seems counterintuitive. Yet when Holmes tells Watson “the fair sex is your department,”3 there is truth behind the sarcasm; Watson is, in many ways, Holmes‟s liaison not only to women, but also to personal qualities deemed „feminine‟ by late Victorian society. Watson acts as a safe vessel, a reservoir, for the feminine qualities that Holmes, as a paragon of late Victorian masculinity, is not allowed to exhibit. Conversely, Holmes instructs Watson—mainly by example—in the anti-feminine, homophobic and xenophobic values that were stressed in late Victorian masculine construction. At first glance, The Sign of Four certainly lends itself to this simple dichotomy: Holmes-masculine, Watson-feminine. From the start of the story, the effeminizing effects of Watson‟s profession are apparent; as a doctor, he is unavoidably a caregiver, and must chastise Holmes‟s use of cocaine, a warning that Holmes disregards with what Kirby Farrell sees as “bravura echoes of Faust” (32). Farrell describes the pair as “a „split-man,‟” one “a rational plotter” and the other “all impulse and sentiment” (36). When Holmes criticizes Watson for the “romanticism” of A Study in Scarlet, the physician argues, “the romance was there,” to which Holmes replies, “Some facts should be suppressed, or at least a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserves mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes by which I succeeded in unraveling it” (135). Such suppression of emotional „facts‟ is a key ingredient to late Victorian masculinity that Holmes exemplifies and would have Watson imitate. Mary Morstan presents a challenge to Holmes‟s masculine pedagogy by attracting Watson at first sight. Holmes explains to his colleague that “The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning” (146), and that every client should therefore be treated indiscriminately. Holmes‟s indifference to Mary actually protects his masculinity by avoiding what Sedgwick terms “the slippery relation [...] between desire and identification [...] the feminizing potential of desire for a woman” (24). To desire Mary is to risk identifying with her—a risk Holmes simply cannot take. Here Doyle is depicting the inevitable clash between Victorian England‟s masculine values and its need to enforce its patriarchal ideologies: the former, in its ideal, forbids association with women; the latter requires heterosexual marriage to maintain control of women. Enter Watson. Since his purpose is merely to praise and admire Holmes‟s ideal masculinity rather than achieve it (which, according to the logic of the stories, would be impossible), Watson is allowed to transgress those values. Indeed, as more of a foil to, rather than a protégé of, Holmes, Watson TCNJ JOURNAL OF STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP VOLUME X APRIL, 2008 -3is certainly forgiven his „errors,‟ and The Sign of Four is wrought with instances of Watson absorbing feminine qualities to enhance Holmes‟s masculine ones. Anxiety is a prominent example. According to D. A. Miller, “However general a phenomenon, nervousness is always gendered in the novel [...] nervousness remains a signifier of femininity” (qted. in Nemesvari 609). In an eerie cab ride through London, Watson confesses I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan‟s manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He held his open note-book upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern. (150) Thus begins the process of Watson‟s identification with Mary, which will culminate in his fulfillment of that necessary patriarchal institution, marriage. Besides women, Watson is allowed to identify with the one of the novel‟s manifestations of British xenophobia: Thaddeus Sholto. The son of Major Sholto, who spent time with the British army in India, Thaddeus lives in an apartment drenched in “Eastern luxury” (153). A self-confessed hypochondriac and generally agitated man, he describes himself as the very antithesis of late Victorian masculinity: I am a man of somewhat retiring, and, I might even say, refined tastes, and there is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman. I have a natural shrinking from all forms of rough materialism. I seldom come in contact with the rough crowd. I live, as you see, with some atmosphere of elegance around me. I may call myself a patron of the arts. It is my weakness. The landscape is a genuine Corot, and, though a connoisseur might perhaps throw a doubt upon that Salvator Rosa, there cannot be the least question about the Bouguereau. I am partial to the modern French school. (155) If we take Richard Nemesvari‟s observation that “Victorian England often defined itself against what it saw as the moral failings, and sexual perversities, of such countries as France” (604), it is even easier to view Thaddeus, comic figure though he might be, as a threatening „other‟ that reflects contemporary British homoand xenophobia. His opulent, foreign decadence presents the possibility for some disturbing dualities—a possibility symbolically eliminated in the murder of his twin, Bartholomew. When Thaddeus first meets Holmes and Watson, he immediately appeals to the doctor for an examination of his mitral valve; Watson subsequently assures him that all is well (154). Again, Watson‟s occupation has placed him into a position to reconcile with the feminine by acting as a caregiver, to say nothing of the symbolic suggestion of listening to another man‟s heart. When the three men are ascending the stairs to discover Bartholomew‟s corpse, Watson supports the terrified Thaddeus while Holmes remains comfortably aloof—“So shaken was he,” narrates Watson, “that I had to pass my hand under his arm as we went up [...] for his knees were trembling under him. Twice as we ascended Holmes [...] carefully examined marks [...] upon the [...] stair-carpet” (168). Holmes‟s methodical practice of detection separates him from the emotional dimension of the story that only Watson can experience. If Watson is capable of associating with the feminine and foreign other, he is baffled and antagonized by the figures of British masculinity he encounters in The Sign of Four. Holmes, on the other hand, excels at appealing to the hyper-masculine types that appear in the novel. When McMurdo, a prizefighter-turned-bodyguard, refuses to allow the company to enter Bartholomew‟s lodge, Holmes reveals himself as “the amateur who fought three rounds” with him years earlier, to which McMurdo responds with respectful recognition and grants them passage (165). McMurdo, who refused to accept even Thaddeus‟s approval of the strangers, amiably tells Holmes, “If, instead o‟ standin‟ there so quiet, you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I‟d ha‟ known you without a question” (165). Whatever he lacks in delicate sentiment, Holmes has no problem communicating via M. COPPOLA: PATRIARCHAL PEDAGOGY -4masculine machismo and, as McMurdo suggests, physical power. When in “The Speckled Band” Dr. Grimesby Roylott demonstrates how dangerous he is by bending a steel poker, Holmes afterwards explains to Watson, “I am not quite so bulky, but if [Roylott] had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.” Then he bends the poker back.4 Although Holmes typically employs disguise and guile in his work, he often proves himself capable of raw force when necessary. Watson, of course, is far less capable of speaking the language of machismo. In his encounter with a surly dog-keeper, the civil doctor finds himself at a loss until he invokes Holmes: I had to knock at No. 3 for some time before I could make any impression. At last, however, there was the glint of a candle behind the blind, and a face looked out at the upper window. “Go on, you drunken vagabond!” said the face. “If you kick up any more row I‟ll open the kennels and let out forty-three dogs on you.” “If you‟ll let one out it‟s just what I have come for,” said I. “Go on!” yelled the voice. “So help me gracious, I have a wiper in this bag, an‟ I‟ll drop it on your „ead if you don‟t hook it!” “But I want a dog,” I cried. “I won‟t be argued with,” shouted Mr. Sherman. “Now stand clear; for when I say „three,‟ down goes the wiper.” “Mr. Sherlock Holmes—” I began; but the words had a most magical effect, for the window instantly slammed down, and within a minute the door was unbarred and open. (182-3) Holmes—even in name—provides access to a masculine world that denies entrance to the likes of Watson and Thaddeus Sholto. Holmes needs Watson to help subdue the feminine through marriage; Watson needs Holmes to learn the rules of late Victorian masculinity, even if that gender construction is impossible to emulate perfectly. Ironically enough, even Holmes cannot inhabit this hyper-masculine structure completely. He is in constant danger of mental androgyny, and employs a number of tactics to deny the feminine within himself. Scott Derrick‟s insightful analysis of Poe‟s detective, Dupin, discusses one such tactic that Holmes seems to have borrowed from his literary predecessor. Derrick notes that Dupin‟s powers of intuition and empathy are problematic, feminine qualities, and that when compared to the policemen who only deal with empirical evidence he is in jeopardy of appearing effeminate. He argues that Dupin both protects and undermines his masculine identity by transforming a “conventionally feminine capacity” into “a competitive masculine technique” (70). By masculinizing his feminine skills, Dupin can use them to emasculate his emotionally obtuse colleagues (68). Dupin‟s defense mechanism can be seen in Holmes‟s treatment of Athelney Jones, the “red-faced, burly, and plethoric” (176) policeman who investigates Bartholomew‟s murder. Jones refers to Holmes as “the theorist” (177) with some degree of scorn, and engages in a decidedly one-sided battle of wits with the super-sleuth. His intuitive powers impaired, Jones accuses Thaddeus of his brother‟s murder, while Holmes merely shrugs, quotes Goethe, and mutters in French (178). The two part company, each determined to beat the other to the mystery‟s solution. While Jones resorts to arresting everyone who was in the house at the time, Holmes employs his usual method of infiltration and guile. To track a missing ship, he places an ad in the newspaper in which he simulates “the natural anxiety of a wife for her missing husband” (208). He later appears to Watson and Jones in the guise of an old man, presumably having infiltrated some criminal circle. Once Jones‟s case falls apart, the cocksure policeman arrives at Baker Street “Very different [...] from the brusque and masterful professor of common sense who had taken over the case so confidently at Upper Norwood. His expression was downcast, and his bearing meek and even apologetic” (209). Like Dupin before him, Holmes has used the feminine tools at his disposal to emasculate his one-dimensional rival, who is now willing to follow Holmes‟s lead. In doing so, Holmes effectively subdues his own potentially disruptive feminine traits. Of course, there is an inherent problem with localizing feminine attributes to Watson and strengthening Holmes‟s masculinity: a problem that must be solved by denying the existence of a TCNJ JOURNAL OF STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP VOLUME X APRIL, 2008 -5homosocial-homosexual continuum between men. Such denial is achieved by Holmes‟s active aversion to sentiment and Watson‟s attachment to Mary Morstan. These measures ensure that Holmes and Watson‟s relationship is a purely pedagogical one; Holmes serves as a model of masculinity that Watson admires. The novel carefully distinguishes Holmes and Mary in Watson‟s mind as Holmes lulls Watson to sleep: He took up his violin from the corner, and as I stretched myself out he began to play some low, dreamy, melodious air—his own, no doubt, for he had a remarkable gift for improvisation. I have a vague remembrance of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face, and the rise and fall of his brow. Then I seemed to be floating peacefully away upon a soft sea of sound, until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me. (203) This intimate moment between Holmes and Watson is necessarily punctuated by a reiteration of Watson‟s love for Mary, and the recollection of Holmes‟s “earnest” features is necessarily “vague.” When Watson awakes, he necessarily recoils at Holmes‟s “atrocious sentiment” that “Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them” (204). This tension between the two men is resolved at the end of the novel, when Watson finally graduates from the Holmes School of Misogyny and marries Mary, the news of which Holmes responds to with “a most dismal groan” (254). But the novel would have us believe that Holmes‟s disappointment does not stem from his resentment of Mary as a rival for Watson‟s affection; rather, from Watson‟s inability to emulate the masculine ideal of “cold reason” (254) that Holmes embodies. When Holmes appears “dejected and somewhat morose” (207) upon Watson‟s return from a visit to Mary, we are to understand that delays in the progress of the case cause his depression. When Watson describes how Holmes “would hardly reply to my questions, and busied himself all evening in an abstruse chemical analysis” (207), we are to infer that frustration over the case is driving Holmes to distraction. To suggest otherwise would grant the possibility that the tension between Holmes and Watson has homoerotic elements, which in the context of the novel is unthinkable, as Stephen Knight writes: I doubt if Doyle was ever bothered by the fear of a trace of homosexuality between the roommates. Watson and Holmes have the sort of British male relationship which excludes all sexuality, including anything as positive as homosexual feelings. The French and the Americans tend to see and depict Holmes as a foppish dandy, with a distinct effeminacy, but they‟re misled by the languid manners that among the English are held to reveal effortless superiority. (378) The novel‟s ideology certainly agrees with Knight, and so its unease about male homoerotic desire is more clearly manifested in a decidedly less English context: around its villains, Jonathan Small and Tonga. Farrell points out that this pair is in many respects a “parody” (35) of Holmes and Watson. Tonga, a fierce, cannibalistic islander, is Small‟s devoted servant and thus “grotesquely mirrors the emotional, hero-worshiping Watson” (36). Farrell notes the “erotic taboo” implicated “in the romance between Small and his „faithful mate‟ Tonga, who is not allowed to survive their adventure,” suggesting the islander‟s demise has a similar function to Watson‟s abandonment of Holmes for Mary (46-7). Since Tonga is quite far from being an Englishman (upon first seeing him Watson mistakes him for “a Newfoundland dog” (220), emphasizing his subhuman nature), it is far easier for the novel to localize homoerotic anxieties on him and his Orient-traveling master, Small, than on their heroic counterparts. Lawrence Frank suggests that Tonga, with his exotic poison darts, “becomes a version of the Medusa”— that is, a personification of Victorian anxieties about women (70). Frank describes the perceived similarities between Victorian women and tribal people that pervaded Victorian consciousness: European women are distinguished from European men, and allied with primitive peoples, through the phenomenon of arrested development [...] In stature and capacity, a woman remains akin to a child, equated figuratively with those so-called savages who embody the infancy of M. COPPOLA: PATRIARCHAL PEDAGOGY -6humankind [...] the phenomenon of arrested development provides the physiological basis of woman‟s inherent inferiority. (67) The demonization of the diminutive Tonga thus serves to suppress the feminine both directly (via his imagined physiological correlation with women) and indirectly through the cooperative action of homoand xenophobia that fosters, as Nemesvari and Hyam have demonstrated, anti-feminine sentiment. Frank echoes Hyam‟s description of the disconcerting nature of the Orient for Victorian notions of sexuality: “In the labyrinthine East,” he writes, “distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, founder, suggesting the fragile and perhaps illusory status of gender as constructed in Western societies” (62). If Tonga represents the possibility of such indeterminacy, then die he must. And who better to destroy this dangerous symbol of foreign homoeroticism than Holmes and Watson, who have been dismantling and disguising possible feminine aspects of their own psyches throughout the novel? The climactic chapter even bears the reassuring title, “The End of the Islander”— Tonga‟s fate is sealed before the reader even sees him through Watson‟s terrified eyes. The final action of the story involves chasing down the islander and his English master, Small, who contrive to escape in the swift ship Aurora, which along with the villains carries a legendary Indian treasure and the symbolic status of „foreign feminine other.‟ Like the feminine, the Aurora is elusive (“she has a name for being a clipper” (215), says Holmes), “dainty” (220), and associated with the male homoeroticism and foreign sexual decadence represented by its fiendish passengers. The partnership of Small and Tonga, evinced by their standing together on the Aurora‟s deck, is a disgusting and unnatural alliance, the thought of which haunts Watson: “I can see the two of them now as they stood, the white man with his legs far apart, shrieking out curses, and the unhallowed dwarf, with his hideous face, and his strong, yellow teeth gnashing at us in the light of our lantern” (221). This horrifying vision is one of foreign bestiality—with all of its sexual implications—in league with an Englishman. If we also accept Farrell‟s reading of Small as a potential doppelganger for Holmes, the scene presents an even more powerful tableau of late Victorian fears of homoeroticism and the possibility of foreign corruption of English morality. After presenting this subversive symbol, the novel destroys it with prejudice: Tonga is not only shot by both Holmes and Watson but sinks into “the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames” (222). Small is granted “a symbolic death, his wooden leg [itself the consequence of a crocodile attack in India] sunk in the [...] immobilizing mud of the Thames” (Farrell 37). In a final symbolic nullification, Watson recounts that “The Aurora herself was hauled off and made fast to our stern” (222). The exogenous threats of femininity, homoeroticism, and non-English indecency are collectively neutralized. The foreign savage has been subdued; the European woman remains. Yet Watson‟s guilt about being attracted to a wealthy heiress makes him reluctant to propose to her. He does not want to be accused of viewing her as a commodity, but, ironically enough, the novel treats her as one. When Watson brings her the treasure chest with her inherited fortune, he describes the light “playing over her sweet, grave face, and tinting with a dull, metallic sparkle the rich coils of her luxuriant hair” (227). Perhaps this language is meant to foreshadow the chapter‟s conclusion; when the chest is found to be empty, Watson remarks, “Whoever had lost a treasure, I knew that night that I had gained one” (229). Denounce Holmes‟s misogynistic remarks though he might, Watson cannot help but subscribe to the Victorian patriarchal ideology that renders Mary “bound as non-person to patriarchal protection/possession within a father-daughter or a husband-wife relationship” (Hennessy and Mohan 398). Mary came to Holmes and Watson as a fatherless woman; one may easily argue that the main action of The Sign of Four is the replacement of her patriarch by Watson. By accepting Watson as her new patriarch, Mary defuses the threat she posed as an independent woman with a mysterious past linked to the Orient. Frank describes the “complex negotiation” by which Mary “suppresses the Medusa within her to become the transfixed embodiment of the woman of the male imagination” (81). Part of Watson‟s anxiety about Mary is based on her associations with the East, according to Frank, and becoming associated with the Indian treasure leads to being linked to “an India that is the projection of Western fantasies about women and the female body” (64). Peculiarly enough, Mary TCNJ JOURNAL OF STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP VOLUME X APRIL, 2008 -7has internalized Watson‟s fear of women [...] She fears the treasure, the temptations of wealth, and the lure of freedom. Finally, she unconsciously fears the mystery of her own body for which the pearls and the iron chest have come to stand. With its figurative implications, Watson‟s story of the treasure has fantastically associated her, and all women, with the ambiguous realm of the Indian subcontinent. (75) Mary seems as relieved as Watson when the treasure chest turns out to be empty—at this point, any trace of individuality she may have possessed in the story is eradicated, and Watson‟s subjugation of the feminine is complete. The pedagogical transmission of patriarchal ideologies can thus be traced in The Sign of Four— from a masculine ideal to Holmes, from Holmes to Watson, and finally from Watson to Mary. Holmes is informed by the cultural environment of late Victorian England—one that calls for a new masculinity that defies any association with the feminine, is earnestly homoand xenophobic, and reinforces itself via male homosocial bonds that deny any connections to homoeroticism. The Holmes-Watson pairing exemplifies such a bond; it is based solely on “men-promoting-the-interests-of-men.” In this case, Holmes acts as a masculine ideal for Watson. Like the sexualized bonds of ancient Greek men and boys, this pedagogical relationship is meant to propagate core patriarchal values such as unrestricted power over women (Sedgwick 4). Even if Watson is unable (or unwilling) to replicate Holmes‟s ideal masculinity, he nevertheless enables Victorian patriarchal values by transmitting them to Mary. Of course, the ideologies promoted by the novel do not go unchallenged. The active suppression of the feminine in Holmes, for example, tends to confirm its existence. Problematic figures such as Thaddeus Sholto, Small, and Tonga function as external symbols for internal anxieties desperate to remain hidden. And the crux of the patriarchal ideology—the asexual homosocial bond between Watson and Holmes—is founded upon a denial. After all, as Watson puts it, “A wondrous and subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other” (166). When this description of Watson‟s love for Mary is compared to an occasion in “Charles Augustus Milverton” when Watson recalls, “I felt Holmes‟s hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake, as if to say the situation was within his powers, and that he was easy in his mind,”5 the underlying emotion is more similar than late Victorian masculine scruples would like—because Holmes‟s reassuring hand on Watson and Watson‟s reassuring hand on Mary are links in the same pedagogical chain. NOTES 1. Hennessy and Mohan argue that late Victorian reform laws concerning women‟s property rights and the legal age of consent served to define women as sexualized objects and reinforced a “patriarchal gender ideology that commodified bourgeois woman as ornament of the home” (396-7). 2. Hyam explains that the sexual nature of the “cultural barriers between Britons and non-Europeans” is easily seen “in the facts that Taoism prescribed two ejaculations a day for fourteen-year olds, that prostitutes were attached to Hindu temples, that Melanesian converts thought it right to place phallic images on the Christian altar, that the Japanese regarded it as effeminate to refuse sodomy, and scornfully laughed at St. Francis Xavier in the streets for believing its practice to be wrong, that Sambian men in New Guinea were connoisseurs of semen-tasting much as some westerners are of wine-tasting” (59). 3. In “The Second Stain,” p. 297 of John A. Hodgson‟s collection. 4. In “The Speckled Band,” Hodgson p. 162. 5. In Hodgson, p. 282.