Why the Holmes brothers’ "complicated relationship" is not so strange and complicated, after all… (part 1)

 (Sherlock Meta by thenorwoodbuilder)

http://thenorwoodbuilder.tumblr.com/post/28772201102/i-broke-my-promise-and-wrote-another-very-long-holmes

Ok, first things first: I must fairly warn you that this is going to be a VERY long post. I’ll ramble A LOT about the Holmes Brothers, so either be prepared or just skip this one. ;-)

I suppose each of us has his/her own headcanon about the Holmes Brothers, and I firmly believe that they are all pretty legitimate. Nonetheless, I obviously (from my point of view) tend to prefer headcanons which are more consistent with the facts and hints (admittedly few…) we are given in the episodes, and/or by the writers (even if, in this case, given their tendency to troll us, I’d be more cautious in taking each word they utter at face value…). Also, I think that some clues we might legitimately deduce from the original ACD’s Canon.

With this “methodological” preamble, I’m now going to try and write down my personal – albeit, I hope, “reasoned” – headcanon about the Holmes Brothers, their “complicate relationship”, and their background.

I’ll start from the latter, as it seems to me the most logical thing to do. And I’ll start from the Canon, in this case. We all know that the character of Sherlock Holmes is heavily based on the real life figure of Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle’s professor and mentor during his university days in Edinburgh. Joseph Bell was a doctor, coming from a family of doctors, and pursuing his studies and his profession in an age when the scientific method was being developed and was kept in high consideration; therefore, there is nothing strange in HIS focus on deductive (rectius: abductive) methodology while dealing with diagnoses or forensic medicine. The curious thing is that, when Arthur Conan Doyle chose to use Dr. Bell’s methods as a model for a fictional detective, he didn’t endow with those exceptional deductive skills a character with a medical background (he, instead, chose for the medical character the role of narrator and biographer), which would have been quite “normal”, but preferred to draw a “civil” detective, a person who, yes, had some sort of a scientific background (we may assume that Sherlock Holmes studied – or studied ALSO – chemistry, during his erratic university courses), but was not a doctor. Besides, he decided that not only his detective, but his detective’s elder brother should have such peculiar deductive abilities, and “even in a larger degree” than Sherlock himself.



And here come the first question: why both Sherlock AND Mycroft had developed such peculiar skills? Remember that even Sherlock had not yet decided what he would have made with his life and his career, when he was already capable of stunning deductions and trying to acquire all the knowledge which might have improved his deductive abilities. Remember also that Mycroft had apparently no reasons at all for developing and exercising this kind of ability: even his work for the Government (which today we could compare to the role of a sort of super-analyst) wouldn’t have required the ability of deducing little details about single individuals, but only the skill to see patterns in political, economical and social events – the ability of looking at the general picture and make correct inferences about current or future sets of events. Neither Mycroft nor Sherlock had a medical training; apparently (at least according to Sherlock Holmes’ own words), they came from a family of country squires, who had “led much the same life as is natural to their class”, and not from a family with a medical and/or forensic tradition. So WHY did they develop these peculiar skills?

The answer is not obvious. Being highly intelligent doesn’t translate automatically into being skilled at the kind of deductions the Holmes Brothers so perfectly master. The world is full of geniuses who, albeit perfectly capable of LOGICAL deductions, could never infer a person’s profession through the observation of physical details. This is because THIS KIND of deduction requires a very specific TRAINING (as Holmes himself tells Watson on several occasions), including both a large set of knowledge (in order to be able to understand the meaning of what one is observing, and therefore make the right inferences from it), and the ability of look for the right, most significant details. So, for some reasons, both the canonical Holmes Brothers (but this is true also for their modern counterparts) decided to invest a lot of their time and energy into training themselves in this way, even if it was of no immediate utility to them (we may also assume that, being Mycroft seven years the elder, he was the first to start this “training”, and then taught all he had already learnt to his younger sibling). But this is the point: which could have been the reason for such an effort? Boredom? But you can fight boredom in a thousand different ways: with complex equations, or becoming a chess world champion, or a renowned philosopher or scientist (as our modern Mycroft significantly points out…), and so on. WHY someone should choose to develop such peculiar skills, skills for which apparently neither brother had a reason to work so hard when they started to develop them? Well, quite evidently because THERE WAS a reason. There is always a reason behind any human choice, isn’t there? And we can normally infer that reason from the features of the result of that choice.

So, here we have two brothers, linked by a quite singular relationship, which appears at the same time affectionate but distant, who both chose at a very young age to invest a lot of time, energy and work in developing the ability to deduce details about people’s lives, profession and personalities from their appearances and behaviours, apparently without any immediate utilitarian purpose. But a purpose – conscious or unconscious – they must have had. So which is the most plausible purpose? Well, it seems to me to be quite a defensive one. I mean, that the first reason a child may have to develop this kind of skills, is in order to be able to predict the actions and behaviours of people surrounding him, people from which he feels in some way threatened. Being able to predict their acts means being also able to take appropriate countermeasures – the first and simplest of which is just place yourself out of the line of fire, as much as possible.

I don’t think that Arthur Conan Doyle bothered too much to imagine a detailed background for his characters; but he was a writer and a human being, and he probably couldn’t help letting some of HIS background pouring into his characters. He came from a difficult, dysfunctional (if not properly abusive) family, his father was an alcoholic with mental problems (probably with a bipolar disorder) who got sectioned and ended his life in a mental institution. His mother had to rise her children almost alone and Arthur, the elder of several siblings, had to take upon himself parental responsibilities at quite a young age. He endowed his Dr. Watson character with an elder brother who was an alcoholic and died in disgrace; and endowed his Sherlock Holmes character with a dislike for human relationships, a consistent difficulty in expressing his deepest emotions, a strong reluctance to speak about his past and his family and a quite detached, even if not hostile, relationship with an elder brother as (if not more) remote and cold as himself. I think one can’t be accused of assuming too much, if he or she makes the hypothesis that the Holmes family, too, could as well have been a dysfunctional one – both the canonical one, and the modern one.



Mind you, I didn’t say a properly ABUSIVE family. There is no need for this, and we know that Gatiss keeps saying that he thinks the Holmes Brothers had a quite “normal” childhood. I’m not one of those overdramatic fanfiction writers who imagine a sort of Amon Goeth as Father Holmes. I think that, this being the case, the characters would be much different – much more damaged, badly unbalanced, even borderline – from what they actually are (and, if the nazi parent had been the mother, they would be schizophrenic at best, and serial killers at worst…). But what we are showed is enough to reasonably suppose a family background that didn’t provide much warmth and much sense of safety for these two boys. They both developed a defensive attitude towards people in general (deductions), and towards feelings and emotions in particular. And while the second could even be the mere result of a certain kind of education (I’ll come back to this), the first requires, according to me, a certain kind of experiences.

So, the kind of family I imagine for them is, as I’ve said, a (more or less) dysfunctional one, and probably a quite traditionalist one (you may infer this also by Mycroft’s attitudes: he is the elder, he is naturally the keeper of family traditions – “our traditions define us”). A family with an authoritarian, severe, stern (albeit not much physically violent, while maybe quite often verbally abusive), detached, mostly absent father, who probably died, or left (but he is not alive now, in any case, in my opinion), when Mycroft was quite young and Sherlock still a child, albeit not a very young one (I’d say around 8-9 years old). A family with a sensitive – probably too sensitive – and not very strong mother, the kind of mother who is essentially sweet to her children when she happens to look after them, but who generally prefers to delegate parental tasks to staff and teachers and never interfere with her husband’s methods of education; who is neither very present, nor very openly affectionate towards her children, and who certainly is not a strong, influential figure (Sherlock will find such a strong and affectionate figure in Mrs. Hudson, later in his life, instead); a mother who probably, too, died when her sons where still young, or at least became incapable, for a reason or another, to look after them (and who, in any case, is no more alive at present, in my opinion).

(Follow this link for Part 2)