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wildwoodgoddess · 7 years

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The Key To Understanding S4 of Sherlock is to Accept Mary as She Is…

I’ve seen a lot of people who say S4 doesn’t make sense to them. We’ve got a variety of theories trying to make the story fit some different storyline than what is being shown on screen.

I know some of that is fueled by inconsistencies in filming—possible continuity errors, changes in wording, things they find unrealistic. But it seems that one of the core issues for a lot of people is Mary.

I can understand that. Why was she even brought into the story in the first place? Some adaptations skip her entirely. People wanted to keep the focus of the story on John and Sherlock. They didn’t want a trio.

Those are perfectly fair objections. And I don’t blame people for being upset about the fact that she turned out to be an assassin and that she shot Sherlock, etc. I thought that some of the Mary-as-villain theories were really interesting and would have been fun in the story.

But that’s not where the writers took things, and now some fans are having a hard time accepting that Mary could be all those things and still be loved by John and Sherlock.

Yes, loved. The reaction to her death, if nothing else, makes it clear that both men loved her very much. They grieve her, deeply. Her memory becomes John’s inner voice, his conscience.

How can that be? How can the show portray her as kind, sweet, funny, insightful, and yet also portray her as selfish, ruthless, secretive, and a killer?

Well, it’s called an antihero. And it’s something few female characters are allowed to be.

More below the cut...

Antiheroes are typically extremely flawed heroes who toe the line of being villains and yet are still shown in an empathetic light. Gray, antihero characters, like Severus Snape, are usually men. Creators and audience alike are used to men who are flawed, even despicable, and yet empathetic, even heroic. Somehow, we manage to like them.

But make a woman an antihero? Make her a gray character? Then you face audiences who complain that she’s unlikable, that she’s a villain, that she’s a bad person.

Or that she doesn’t make sense. She’s too contradictory. The writers must have messed up.

The wikipedia list of fictional antiheroes (which is not comprehensive by any means, but it’s a pretty good overview) includes characters from almost all media, from books (classic and modern) to movies to comics and video games.

Out of 239 names (yep, I hand counted), only 13 are women (as far as I could tell). 5 in books, and a few in movies and TV. One or two in comics. None in video games.

Sherlock made the list in book, movie, and TV guises, btw. Our Mary should also be on that list for TV, if someone cares to add her. The show clearly shows her in an empathetic light, despite her dubious moral decisions. And that’s exactly why some parts of the fandom have a hard time with her character.

If you do a search for “antihero female,” you’ll see a bunch of headlines referring to why female antiheroes are so rare, why we need more of them, why they’re so controversial, and how novel the few are that we do have.

So why is it that we tend to reject or vilify female antiheroes in a way that we don’t usually with male ones?

Part of it is that we are steeped in millennia of storytelling that reduces female characters to a pretty narrow set of archetypes.

Archetypes relating to their relationship with men/sexual reproduction:

Father’s Daughter

Dutiful Mother

Evil Mother

Virgin

Femme Fatale

Slut (sometimes same as Femme Fatale)

Old Maid

Archetypes relating to their age and/or sexual reproduction (sense a theme here?):

Maiden/Girl/Virgin

Mother/Middle Aged

Crone

Archetypes on the Extremes:

Goddess

Witch

Bitch

Fairy Godmother

Damsel in Distress

Ingenue

Amazon

If you study literary archetypes, you’ll notice that there are NO hero roles for female characters. Males, yes. But if you want a female hero, you have to gender-bend the male archetype or make a hero out of one of the other archetypes such as the ones listed above.

Females are usually reduced to one quality. Either they are an Amazon or they are an ingenue. Either they are a Damsel in Distress or they are a witch.

We are deeply conditioned, even as feminists and progressive people, with this archetypal understanding of female characters. This isn’t our fault. It goes way beyond just storytelling.

If you’ve studied Carl Jung at all, you’ll know a lot of his research and theories in psychology revolve around archetypes: how they form, where they came from, how they impact our thought processes, our view of ourselves and others, how they influence our behaviors.

Like so many other biases and blind spots, this is something we have to become aware of and actively undermine. And it doesn’t come naturally for most of us.

We feel uncomfortable with female characters who are deeply flawed. We judge them more harshly, we try to box them into specific categories. We call them unrealistic or badly written. We call them nonsense. We wonder what, exactly, is the point of them.

Some people try to say it’s only logical that, given her good qualities, Mary must be heroic, and they downplay the truly awful stuff she does. They’re trying to fit her into a more positive archetype.

Others try to say it’s only logical that, given her bad qualities, Mary must be a villain, and anything that seems to be charming or good about her must be an act for nefarious purposes. They’re trying to fit her into a villain archetype.

That feeling that she can’t possibly be both comes from those archetypes embedded in your brain.

If you let her be that gray character that she is clearly portrayed as being, you don’t need intricate theories to understand S4. She’s flawed, sometimes bordering on villainous, yet also good and heroic. She is somebody that hurts the people around her deeply, yet they still see value in her and find a way to love her anyway.

Maybe we should take a lesson from that...

I think we need more female characters like Mary. We need her example in our own lives. Not so that we can justify shooting our friends (or even our enemies).

But, speaking for a moment as a woman to other women, think of how harshly we judge ourselves, each other, for our flaws. Could it be that those archetypes, that inability to acknowledge complexity and contradictions in women, that drive to categorize us as either good or bad—no in between, has affected how we see and treat ourselves and the women around us?

Storytelling likely evolved as a way to warn each other of dangers (there was a naughty child who wandered too far from home and ate those pretty red berries at the edge of the woods, and she died…lesson: don’t wander off and don’t eat those berries—they’re poisonous). It grew to include reminding ourselves of our past, our history, to inspire us, to help us understand each other and the world we live in. Storytelling is at the heart of every single human culture on earth. It’s powerful, it’s influence lasts for generations.

If storytelling shaped our view of women, storytelling can also help us change that view. Maybe it can help us have more grace, more understanding for each other, and for ourselves.

Mary Watson adamantly refuses to fit into any established female narrative. And I think that is absolutely the best contribution she gives to the show.

#bbc sherlock #sherlock s4 #meta #spoilers #mary watson #antihero #female characters #archetypes

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