서강대학교

초록/요약

This thesis discusses the meaning of hegemonic masculinities and their relationship with women and other subordinated masculinities in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novella, The Sign of Four, the second in the well-known Sherlock Holmes series. In the late-Victorian period, men felt anxiety about the growing power of women as women started to demand equal rights to men. Moreover, there was male anxiety about the security of the empire due to the increasing global competition for imperial expansion and the resistance of colonies such as India. In response to their male anxieties, late-Victorian fiction imagined male characters who pursue homosocial lives abroad where they avoid the influence of women and achieve hegemonic masculinities through the competition among men. In The Sign of Four, Holmes responds to male anxiety about shifting gender relations and the security of the empire with his liminal masculinity, which embodies both mid- and late-Victorian qualities. Holmes uses the qualities of the dandy, the monk, and New Imperialist, such as theatricality, self-discipline, and physical power, to maintain his hegemonic position. The Sign of Four illustrates a hierarchy among men in terms of masculinities by assigning different degrees of attention to each man in the character system, which reveals the problems related to hegemonic masculinities. In this way, Holmes’s liminal masculinity criticizes standardized hegemonic masculinities and questions the meaning of being a better man.