The Needle and the Damage Done
Representations of order, disorder and violence through addiction in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Sign of Four’.
Art has a way of capturing the spirit of its time, particularly in times of change and difficulty. The Opium Wars and the Indian Mutiny of 1857 had, in the late Victorian age, not quelled Britain’s fascination with the mystical ‘orient’; nor had it quenched her thirst for the profit she continued to make by trading opium out of India, the jewel of the Empire.
These conflicts added to the general feeling of instability which punctuated the late Victorian age, where post-industrial revolution poverty grew together with the rise of socialism and labour unions. Liberty causes such as the civil rights movement and feminism were gaining momentum. The British Empire and its aristocracy feared crime and all forms of disorder as potential instigators of revolution, amid general fears that society had surpassed its golden age and was in decline. This decline was attributed to the moral decay of individuals within it, neatly deflecting deeper questions on the causations of elevated crime and revolutions abroad. This is an idea Arthur Conan Doyle takes up in The Sign of Four, portraying violence and disorder as criminal acts committed by morally deficient individuals, affecting individuals from higher classes.
For the purposes of this short essay, I narrow my focus on Holmes’ drug addiction and his role as a detective. While Doyle stops short of criticising the British Empire, in The Sign of Four Sherlock Holmes’ drug use is a metaphor of order and chaos, the processes of violence necessary to produce order, and the cyclical nature of such. Doyle also uses drug addiction and reference to specific drugs to ask quiet but loaded questions of Britain’s growing dependency on India’s opium trade, and her pervading, corrosive cultural influence on England.
The Sign of Four opens thus: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case”, making it obvious the leading character is a morphine addict. However Doyle’s use of language in describing intricacies such as the “neat morocco case” gives the reader an image of Holmes’ mental and social status, despite his addiction.
A morocco case is designed for the orderly storage of mathematical instruments, wood-working instruments, an unloaded pistol and magazine: he is an English gentleman. Doyle’s signature attention to detail creates a discourse which ironically suggests Holmes’ drug taking is part of an orderly ritual.
To show contrast, when Watson chastises his brilliant companion for this ‘weakness’, he describes the drug-taking as a physically violent and chaotic process:
“it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change, and may at last leave a permanent weakness. You know too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is not worth the candle.”
As this exchange continues, the reader learns Holmes’ drug use is limited to when he is between cases:
“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me…the most abstruse cryptogram…and…I can dispense with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
Holmes’ addiction is significant, and marks him as a man in turmoil, exploiting late Victorian fears of a world gone mad. Despite the precision of Holmes’ rapid deductions and “extraordinary genius for minutiae” Doyle has masterfully created a character that embodies the processes of order and chaos - ideas constantly in flux.
Although Holmes turns his formidable talents to restoring order, and has a natural propensity to do what is right, as an individual he is addicted to chaos and disorder. This renders him permanently unable to exist at peace within an orderly world. Without crime, violence and chaos, Holmes’s mind cannot cope with everyday life, becoming a chaotic thing which itself needs to be brought to order by the drug ritual, and as Watson warns, the physical violence it wreaks on his mind and body.
Crime, violence and disorder are stimulants in themselves to Holmes; essentially he exchanges one addiction for another to stave off an ever-present feeling of dread.
If we consider Holmes as a metaphor of England, the addiction to chaos through imposing order is particularly insightful.
Doyle’s focus on crime was as individual acts rather than results of wider harm. An imperialist, Doyle avoided criticising the institution he admired so much. But The Sign of Four is not without political commentary. “’Which is it today…morphine or cocaine?’”. Cocaine was at first considered a ‘cure’ for morphine addiction, but by the 1890’s “cocaine was increasingly associated with the degenerative effects of opium use”.
As cocaine’s addictive properties were discovered, the cultural symbolism of the drug addiction presented images of the exotic colony subversively enslaving its master. Holmes’ opium use is also pertinent to the imperialist racist undertones of The Sign of Four, as morphine was inextricably linked to India, presenting India as a chaotic degenerative other, influencing strong, orderly England. Holmes is England — brilliant, objective, orderly almost to a fault, and seemingly invulnerable: except this one indulgence.
The Sign of Four closes with order being restored thanks to Watson and Holmes’ sound British character and ‘gentlemanly’ virtue. The ill-gotten Agra treasure is emptied into the Thames and not retrieved, and the empty treasure box is itself another portentous political metaphor: Holmes’ brilliant rational mind demystifies the curious murders and debunks the suggestion of a cursed treasure — but was he correct?
Having restored order from processes of violence and disorder, Sherlock Holmes, the “last and highest court of appeal in detection” reaches once more for the dread “cocaine-bottle” and prepares to compromise himself for the exotic, chaotic, addictive pleasures of the foreign other once more.
Bibliography
Bulfin, Ailise. “The Natural Catastrophe in Late Victorian Popular Fiction ‘How Will the World End?’”. Critical Survey. 27.2 (May 2015): 81. Web: July 7
Clausen, Christopher. “Sherlock Holmes, Order, and the Late-Victorian Mind.” The Georgia Review 38.1 (1984): 104–23. Web: July 7
Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Sign of Four”. The Complete Sherlock Holmes Long Stories (1974) 124–239. London: Book Club Associates.
Farrell, Kirby. “Heroism, Culture, and Dread in The Sign of Four”. Studies in the Novel 16.1 (1984): 32–51. Web: July 7.
Keep, Christopher, and Randall Don. “Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of the Four”” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction32.2 (1999): 207–21. Web: July 7.
McBratney, John. “Racial and Criminal Types: Indian Ethnography and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sign of Four”” Victorian Literature and Culture33.1 (2005): 149–67. Web: July 7.
© Jennifer Zeven 2021
