Finally, the most recent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes' character have been in the form of television programs, with one in the Unite States and one in Great Britain. The British program, Sherlock, has been lauded as a demonstration of the character's cyborg character, as Holmes is portrayed "as a tall, artistically dressed young man clutching a Blackberry [as] an almost perfect synthesis of man and machine" (Coppa 211)
Holmes' powers of disguise and deception are practically legendary within the original short stories and novels, to the point that he often hides in plain sight. For example, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," he is able to reveal himself to Watson in an instant before turning "his face half round once to the company once more, subsid[ing] into a doddering, loose-lipped senility" (Conan Doyle, "The Man with the Twister Lip" 2)
Holmes' powers of disguise and deception are practically legendary within the original short stories and novels, to the point that he often hides in plain sight. For example, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," he is able to reveal himself to Watson in an instant before turning "his face half round once to the company once more, subsid[ing] into a doddering, loose-lipped senility" (Conan Doyle, "The Man with the Twister Lip" 2)
Holmes' powers of disguise and deception are practically legendary within the original short stories and novels, to the point that he often hides in plain sight. For example, in "The Man with the Twisted Lip," he is able to reveal himself to Watson in an instant before turning "his face half round once to the company once more, subsid[ing] into a doddering, loose-lipped senility" (Conan Doyle, "The Man with the Twister Lip" 2)
This devotion to integrating new technologies into his identity and person is important because it means that Holmes is a kind of cyborg in the sense that the word is used by bioethicist and critic Donna Haraway. Haraway writes that "cyborg anthropology attempts to refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines," and one can easily see how this could relate to description of Holmes when one considers his own use of technology and cross-organism "border relations" (Haraway, Modest-Witness@Second-Millenium 52)
This devotion to integrating new technologies into his identity and person is important because it means that Holmes is a kind of cyborg in the sense that the word is used by bioethicist and critic Donna Haraway. Haraway writes that "cyborg anthropology attempts to refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines," and one can easily see how this could relate to description of Holmes when one considers his own use of technology and cross-organism "border relations" (Haraway, Modest-Witness@Second-Millenium 52)
This mutability is not unique to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Holmes does exemplify this tendency in way usually reserved for fairy tales, folk legends, and comic book narratives. This is actually what separates Sherlock Holmes from more straightforward detective stories such as CSI, because although in general both share "a similar pretense: a world of incontrovertible evidence where noble sleuths toil to reveal the truth; a narrative of crime told through traces and often substantiated by convenient and detailed criminal confessions," in Sherlock Holmes stories these "traces" are ultimately second to the sheer power of the detective himself (Harrington 366)
As such details can be changed and pasts remembered differently in the service of whatever Holmes is being presented or discussed. This interpretation is in line with Franco Moretti's argument that in the world of Sherlock Holmes, clues are ultimately secondary to Holmes himself, because "Holmes as Superman needs unintelligible clues to prove his superiority," and as a result the details that make up these clues can change at will (Moretti 216)
And while he is certainly the second man in the Holmes-Watson equation, he is not intimidated or hesitant to accompany Sir Henry Baskerville to Dartmoor alone, without Sherlock Holmes. He is willing to guard Sir Henry, despite the dangers, as demonstrated when he wrote in his diary: "I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling on impending danger- ever present danger…" (Doyle, 727)
70) As the king of Bohemia posits, Irene is seen by the male characters as some sort of hermaphrodite being, whose beautiful body seems incongruent with her sharp wit: "She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men."(Doyle, 2002 p
Miss Irene Adler's mind does not conform to her body-yet she can become a positive protagonist precisely because of her body."(Cortiel 1999 p