Irene Adler is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A former opera singer and actress, she was featured in the short story "A Scandal in Bohemia", published in July 1891. Adler is one of the most notable female characters in the Sherlock Holmes series, despite appearing in only one story. While not technically a criminal and bearing no malice towards Holmes, she outsmarts him and evades his traps. Sherlock Holmes refers to her afterwards respectfully as "the Woman". In the original Doyle story, Watson notes Holmes has no romantic interest in Adler or in women in general, pointing out the detective only exhibits a platonic admiration for her wit and cunning. Despite this, some derivative works reinterpret Adler as a romantic interest for Holmes or as a former love who later regularly engages in crime. Retrospectively, the original story, written in 1891, is viewed as a more progressive and feminist interpretation of Adler. From the television shows Sherlock and Elementary to the film Sherlock Holmes, each portrayal depicts several notable qualities Adler possesses, such as her independence, adaptability, and intelligence; but a common issue pointed out with each portrayal is the attempts to mesh these qualities with seduction and manipulation.

Fictional character biography

Irene Adler appears only in "A Scandal in Bohemia". Her name is briefly mentioned in "A Case of Identity", "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", and "His Last Bow". According to "A Scandal in Bohemia", Adler was born in New Jersey or Chelsea, London in 1858. She had a career in opera as a contralto or soprano, performing at La Scala in Milan, Italy, and a term as prima donna in the Imperial Opera of Warsaw, Poland. In Poland, she became the lover of Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and King of Bohemia. The King describes her as "a well-known adventuress" (a term widely used at the time in ambiguous association with "courtesan" ) who has "the face of the most beautiful of women and the mind of the most resolute of men." Five years after their secret romance, the King has been arranged to marry Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meiningen, a young Scandinavian princess. However, he fears her conservative family would call off the wedding if any evidence of his former liaison with Adler were ever revealed to them. The king fears she may attempt to blackmail him with a photograph of the two. The events of the story unfolds when the King seeks out Holmes' skills to retrieve the photograph from Adler after multiple attempts has proved fruitless. In pursuit of information about Adler, Holmes witnesses her marry Godfrey Norton in secret. Despite this, Sherlock still tries to retrieve the photograph for King. However, Adler, aware of their plan, flees the country before they could catch her. Despite his cunning plans, Holmes fails to seize the compromising photograph, having been outwitted by Adler. His perspective on the investigation changes when Holmes realizes that he has been on the wrong side of the affair all along. In a handwritten letter addressed to him, Adler reveals that she has hidden the photograph simply for the purpose of protecting herself against the monarch's wrath. She writes, "As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged." Holmes, who "used to make merry over the cleverness of women," requests a photograph of Adler in lieu of an emerald ring from the King and leaves, "without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him." He keeps her photograph locked up as a reminder of his respect for her intellectual prowess.

Possible real-life inspirations

Adler's career as a theatrical performer who becomes the lover of a powerful aristocrat had several precedents. One is Lola Montez, a dancer who became the lover of Ludwig I of Bavaria and influenced national politics. Montez is suggested as a model for Adler by several writers. Another possibility is the actor Lillie Langtry, the lover of Edward, the Prince of Wales. Writing in 1957, Julian Wolff, a member of the literary society The Baker Street Irregulars, comments that it was well known that Langtry was born in Jersey (she was called the "Jersey Lily") and Adler is born in New Jersey. Langtry had later had several other aristocratic lovers, and her relationships had been speculated upon in the public press in the years before Doyle's story was published. Another suggestion is the dancer Ludmilla Stubel, the alleged lover and later wife of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria.

Analysis of Adler in "A Scandal in Bohemia"

Adler is a very unique character within the Holmes stories. While most women in the canon are either victims, objects of desire, or in need of the detective’s help, Adler has a large amount of agency in the story. Unlike Holmes’ other female adversaries, Adler is not explicitly a criminal nor does she need Holmes help; she only acts to protect herself. Adler is also unique because she outsmarts Holmes — Holmes remarks in “The Five Orange Pips” that he has been beaten just four times: “three times by men, and once by a woman”, that woman being Adler. Due to her intelligence Adler earns Holmes's unbounded admiration, but he is not romantically attracted to her. When the King of Bohemia says, "Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity she was not on my level?" Holmes dryly replies that Adler is indeed on a much different level from the King. The beginning of "A Scandal in Bohemia" describes the high regard in which Holmes held Irene Adler: "To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. [...] And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory." Analysis of “A Scandal in Bohemia” has also focused on how Adler diverges from Victorian social standards for women. She is unmarried at the beginning of the story, in opposition to “the importance that the middle classes placed on the family unit” at the time. Adler further defies gender norms by cross-dressing, donning male clothes with great comfort as demonstrated by her reference to them as her “walking-clothes”. Several authors have argued that Adler’s nonconformity is what leads to her victory over Holmes, as he makes deductions based on societal norms that she does not adhere to. Holmes underestimates her ability to detect his ulterior motives when he enters her home, then the detective is unable to recognize Adler in cross-dress, and so does not know she is aware of his plot. This gives her time to abscond with the all-important photograph, triumphing over Holmes.

Portrayal of Adler in derivative works

In derivative works, she is frequently used as a romantic interest for Holmes, a departure from Doyle's story where he only admired her for her wit and cunning. In his Sherlock Holmes Handbook, Christopher Redmond writes "the Canon provides little basis for either sentimental or prurient speculation about a Holmes–Adler connection." Carole Nelson Douglas wrote a series of eight novels and six short-stories focusing on Adler, beginning with Good Night, Mr. Holmes which details the events of "A Scandal in Bohemia" from her point of view. The series continues with Adler’s other adventures in numerous locations around the world, showcasing her cunning and brilliance. Compared with later adaptations, Douglas’s mysteries have been praised for not “rel[ying] on Adler’s sexuality or appearance.” The Young Adult series Sherlock, Lupin and Me is about the adventures a young Irene Adler has with a young Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin. In Elementary, a CBS drama bringing Sherlock Holmes to modern-day America, Adler is not a real person and is actually a false-persona played by Jamie Moriarty, the show's main antagonist. As Adler, Moriarty serves as Holmes’ lover in Britain and, even after finding out her secret identity, Holmes still loves her. In Sherlock Holmes (2009), Adler is a master-thief employed by Moriarty and seeks out Holmes to get his help to find someone - leading to the events of the movie. Despite her employment to Holmes’ enemy, Adler and Holmes fall deeply in love.

Controversy of modern adaptations

Despite Adler's brief appearance in the Sherlock Holmes canon, she has become the sole woman character the audience associates with Holmes in contemporary adaptations. With the character's popularity, comes a significant change in canon where Adler is framed as a romantic liaison of Holmes. Heavier emphasis is placed on her "body" and physical representation by hinging on tropes of sexuality. There is a modern claiming of Irene Adler as a feminist/proto-feminist character. Some argue that, Adler “serves as a feminist symbol within a literary series that predominantly praises masculine behavior” and shows that “even in 1891, strong feminist characters existed.” Due to Adler’s unique position of being a woman who outsmarted Holmes, many claim that she is a feminist character and therefore should be adapted as such. On the contrary, some claim that, despite Adler’s outsmarting of Holmes, she should not be regarded as a feminist character. Although Alder is uncharacteristically independent, at the end of “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Holmes still comes to “acquire” her in the form of a photo, following the anti-feminist view of women as objects. There also is an argument that Adler still abides by female gender roles, seeking just to get married and be subservient to her husband. One notable proponent of this idea is Steven Moffat, creator of A Scandal in Belgravia who claims "'In the original, Irene Adler's victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That's not a feminist victory.'"As such, modern reinventions of Adler almost always attempt a "post-feminist metamorphosis" by providing her autonomy over her body where she can maneuver her sexuality to exert control over the male-centered narrative. Through a liberal feminist lens, Adler's sexualized role names and confronts the power of men to the male audience in order to defy the patriarchal structure. However, this deviation from the source material has become heavily criticized as problematic in nature. By "sex-ing" up her character, postmodern adaptations "failed to re-appropriate [Adler] from its Victorian original by falling back on dominant masculine discourses." Critics attribute this deviation to the "sensationist urge" to make modern Victorian adaptations more "sexy and sexual" by "introducing nudity and sexually risqué narrative elements."

Sherlock Holmes (2009) & Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

Guy Ritchie's Irene Adler is straightforwardly Holmes' love interest. In both films, she claims authority by weaponizing her sex appeal. Her power is mostly equated with her clothing or the absence of it. As opposed to the autonomous agency of Doyle's version, Adler is an agent of Professor Moriarty and obeys his instructions without any independent arc of her own, functioning as a pawn and an intellectual inferior compared to her male counterparts. In the scene where she dresses in front of Holmes, kisses him passionately and drugs him before leaving him handcuffed to the bed is observed by Rhonda L H Taylor that, "'[h]er overt sexuality is a weapon used with the intent and result of disorienting Holmes and making him appear foolish, an emasculating (sic.). This Adler uses her female nudity as a disguise/deception to best Holmes, rather than assuming the canonical Adler's disguise as a young man to accomplish the same goal.'"

"A Scandal in Belgravia" (2012)

One of the most controversial takes on Adler is an episode of the BBC series Sherlock titled "A Scandal in Belgravia". Her introduction was a response to criticism across the internet over the domination of male characters in the first season of the show while the female characters are always portrayed to be "arrested, avenged, ridiculed or rescued." Thus in the first episode we are presented Adler, an antagonist who uses her sexuality through her dominatrix position in order to gain secrets and other information to blackmail her clients. In reality however, she is later revealed to still be under the mercy of the men around her, who still have the real authority and control. Critics point out that even in a dominatrix framing where the woman occupies a dominant role, they are still following the orders of their male counterpart and focusing on the satisfaction of a male consumer. Some critics defended Adler's portrayal in her initial scenes, pointing to moments when she physically overpowers Sherlock with a riding crop or when Sherlock fails to deduce anything from her naked body. In an interview to the Guardian, Steven Moffat, co-creator of the series defends this portrayal of Adler, stating, "in the original, Irene Adler's victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That's not a feminist victory." However, to most critics, the misogyny behind the character was showed in the final scenes. Adler's power becomes temporary as she is revealed to be a confederate to Jim Moriarty's schemes. As she remarks in the episode's final moments, “I had a bit of help. I had all this stuff, and never knew what to do with it. Thank God for [Jim Moriarty].” Later, Sherlock claims victory over her by deducing her emotions with his cold rationality and Moriarty's protection is lost and control over her is reinstated to Sherlock, once again encasing the autonomy of Adler within masculine boundaries. . Critics point out that “Irene fears bodily injury. Her phone, the sensitive information stored within it, both protects and endangers Irene's body...its loss exposing her to physical harm” and that between Sherlock, Moriarty or Mycroft Holmes, all three men have more power and resources to force Adler to be compliant in order to survive. Critics also claim that her overall role in the episode reinforces the prostitution paradigm, that all women are sexual property of men. Rather than belonging to one man, Adler functions as "public property" and her only real use is her sexual function, following the trend of women's role in the Sherlock series as "conduit[s] for male power...as the object of sexual dominance, they are necessary to release that power. But they do not acquire power themselves; it is, instead, passed on to Holmes." In her final appearance in the episode, a hijab-clad Adler is rescued by Sherlock from the hands of a terrorist cell in Pakistan. This scene garnered widespread criticism. In the essay “Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes Stories: The Case of Irene Adler”, Antonija Primorac observes,"'By the end of the episode, the dangerously sexual female nude body of the metropolitan center is displaced into a Pakistani desert and transformed into a kneeling powerless bundle of indigo-blue wraps that set off her tear-sodden face. The luminous skin of her ‘battledress’, of the naked female body-as-weapon, is supplanted by a crestfallen figure in a hijab. In a stereotypically Victorian fashion that does not feature in Doyle's text, Adler's use of her own body as a means of power turns her into a fallen woman who has to be punished, banished to the former colonial space and saved by the hero.'"

Name pronunciation

Different pronunciations of Irene Adler's first name have been proposed. The traditional British pronunciation of the name is "Eye-ree-nee", which has been used for Adler's first name in some adaptations, including the BBC 1989–1998 radio series. The standard American pronunciation of the name, "Eye-reen", would be appropriate since Adler is said to be from New Jersey. It may also be pronounced this way in modern British usage. This pronunciation has been used in television adaptations such as Elementary, Cashville and Sherlock. Another pronunciation, "Ayr-ray-na", was used in the Granada television series. This pronunciation has a "continental flavour" fitting Adler's career as an opera singer in continental Europe.

Actresses who have played Irene Adler

Audio

Stage plays

Television and DTV films

Television series

Theatrical films