Two Views on Joan Watson

[neadods]

I can't get this out of my head, so I'll work it out through my fingers. Note: *non-plot* spoiler for latest Elementary below.

So, over the weekend, M and I had a total fight long discussion about Joan Watson. While I'm not entirely convinced by her POV, I found her thesis compelling enough to put both our takes here for the hive mind to chew on.


MY TAKE:
I have felt that the casting of Watson as a minority woman has turned out to be a case of 2 steps forward, 1000 back because Joan is saddled with so many anti-feminist cliches. The ones at the head of the list are:

- She makes emotional decisions
- She walks away from things she starts
- She is inarticulate, unable to explain either feelings or actions (and instead either avoids or lashes out)

After years of training to be a surgeon, she has a crisis of conscience and gives it all up after one crisis. Her second job is, according to Sherlock, not just in a different field, but probable self-punishment. When tempted back to medicine, her reaction is to look back at her experiences via photos... and delete them. When tempted to a new and different thing in her life, she dumps her only paying job to take it.

She cannot tell her boyfriend or her family why she changed her jobs. She cannot tell her former doctor friend why she isn't coming back *and* she does not admit, even when directly credited, that she ordered the test that saved a girl's life. She only seems to talk to her therapist, and even then she doesn't actually *communicate,* evading and talking around some of her decisions - such as her decision to stay with Sherlock without pay - AND without telling him what she has done!

And finally, the scenes in the latest episode that made me want to smack her, there's her reaction to her friends' concern - stomping out, and then snapping "that was out of line." She could have shut the whole thing down with a "this is how I feel and it's not what you see" - but instead, she completely blames them for caring, even though viewed from the outside her actions have been a textbook checklist for a woman being groomed for abuse.

No, seriously. From the outside, this is what has happened over six+ months:
- Isolation from friends
- Isolation from family (Sherlock has to broker that peace)
- Gave up her job to work with him full time
- Gave up her home to live with him full time
- Showing interest in nothing but what he does, a subject that has never interested her before.

Joan Watson has suddenly made a former client the center of her world and blown off everyone and everything else. That's enough red flags to make a parade, and she doesn't explain herself, just lashes out when people dare question that - even after she's been arrested doing the new work!


MAUREEN'S TAKE:
It is unfair to extrapolate this year of Joan's life as "normal" for this character, and thus unfair to look at her actions and say "the producer is saying X about her or all women," especially because you cannot become a surgeon in the first place without smarts and long-term discipline.

That having met her family, it is reasonable to say that Joan was more or less told that she had to grow up to be either a surgeon or a lawyer or some other high-powered job and was groomed for it rather than picking the career on her own. Furthermore, she was probably told from childhood that achievement isn't enough, it has to be HIGH achievement.

That whatever happened in the operating theater and the following suspension wouldn't just rattle her confidence, but shatter her world. That the Joan that we've met is broken and flailing and rudderless not because she's a damsel in distress, but because anyone of any gender needs time to process that the lifelong plans are not going to happen as projected.

For the first time in her entire life, Joan has a clean slate. She is able to look at the world without her parents' or her own expectations and truly decide what SHE wants to do; if she wants to go back to the plan or start a whole new one. This process inevitably involves false starts, mistakes, being overwhelmed, etc. Elementary (because God knows it's not about well-crafted mysteries; even M won't defend that part of it) is primarily about Joan's evolution from "Mommy's little surgeon" to her own adult self.

That we've probably seen exactly what Joan was like as a med student; throwing herself into studies so that she can be the best she can be in the shortest amount of time possible; not being the best is intolerable. That her friends were completely out of line with the intervention and if they were worried about her situation and what it looks like, they should have talked to her one-on-one, maybe even come to the brownstone and met Sherlock rather than making snap judgements themselves and confronting her.

And while M didn't really defend Joan against the charge that she is crap at communication, M's willing to give her a partial pass on the basis that Joan is still processing all of these life changes and that's not easy to put into words.


So there you go. Two opposing views of Joan Watson, both of which interpret the same data presented by the show. (And I'll tag this post... at some point.)

Comments

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

I think the show has done a good job of making Joan a character who does what Joan would do - she's not supposed to be an example of what "women" or "minorities" would do in any situation. And if she's bad at communication - well, some people are. I mean, when *Sherlock*is the one remembering you made plans with your friends or getting you back in touch with your family...I have to take that as a sign that the show knows that Joan doesn't deal with this stuff in the most functional way. Just because we're on her side doesn't mean that her actions are always in the right. (Like, she's shown to be at fault for getting herself arrested; she got overeager to prove she could be just like Sherlock, directly off of that meeting with her friends, and we're meant to see that, I think: that story is *about* the fact that she screwed up, and whether she's going to decide to overcome that, or give up.)

As for her friends: personally, I think they did a *horrible* job of indicating actual concern, and a really good job of acting like they knew exactly what was best for Joan, exactly who she ought to be "when she grew up," and were upset that she was stepping off of that narrow path.I found it telling that her friend mentioned talking to Joan's mother, and how proud her mom was of Joan's new choice - but then completely disregarded that fact to say that *she*, the friend, knew that Joan wasn't a detective. Joan's mother had met Sherlock, and talked to Joan about being a detective, and wasn't worried, but the friend didn't seem to bother taking that into consideration in making her pronouncement and *belittling* Joan's choice. (Calling her a private eye, in that tone, was only one step up from calling her a gumshoe.) I'm not saying that her friends had no right to be concerned about Joan (and the point about moving in with her last client was a decent one; that must look strange and worrisome), but most of their comments were basically along the lines of "no, you're supposed to be a doctor," and "you must be involved with the guy, because you couldn't have made this choice for your own reasons" - instead of, you know, *asking* her about what she was doing and why.

Also, last night's episode demonstrated for me the subtle additions that Joan's being a woman brings to the show: when the criminal was confronted by two male cops, Sherlock, and Joan, he could have addressed them all, could have said that they *all* were crazy, or that their collective *story* was crazy - but nope, he only confronted Joan, and specifically said she was a crazy *woman* with a story. That just seemed incredibly pointed and accurate to me, and I think they've been good about stuff like that. (And that is particularly interesting to me in this case, because even Sherlock, who rocks up to crime scenes looking scruffy, insults people, and behaves oddly even at his best, is protected by a certain amount of white male privilege, so that he gets away with that behavior. I'll be interested to see if the show keeps playing around with the fact that Joan doesn't have that privilege.)

[maureen-the-mad.livejournal.com]

"I think they did a *horrible* job of indicating actual concern, and a really good job of acting like they knew exactly what was best for Joan, exactly who she ought to be "when she grew up," and were upset that she was stepping off of that narrow path."

Yes, yes, YES! This is what I was trying to get across to Nea; why I considered that Joan was not only in the right to be angry at her "friends" and their little intervention (in a public place? really???), but that what they were REALLY trying to do was to stuff Joan back into the box that they're used to, that they're uncomfortable with her trying to break out of, and that has become FAR too small and narrow for Joan.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

she's not supposed to be an example of what "women" or "minorities" would do in any situation

Yes, but she's the only woman on the show, so she's the only developed female character on the show (everyone else is either part of the crime du jour or a recurring bit player) so she's got a lot resting on her shoulders.

a really good job of acting like they knew exactly what was best for Joan, exactly who she ought to be "when she grew up," and were upset that she was stepping off of that narrow path

And this is where I continue to interpret what we saw in a completely different way. I saw people who weren't stuffing her back into a box, but who had known her for years and known her goals all that time... goals that she has now suddenly replaced with something she's never been interested in before and just happens to be exactly what the guy she is totally wrapped up in is into.

If one of my old friends who'd had a clear career path started remaking herself in the image of a guy she'd only known for a few months and couldn't articulate why this was good for her, I'd be damned worried, and not because I want her stuffed in a box. More because I'm afraid Guy X is stuffing her into the box.

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not disagreeing that there are reasons for people observing Joan to have been worried; your "if one of my old friends" scenario makes perfect sense. My problem is that I don't think *Joan's* friends seemed worried about her as much as they seemed worried that she was doing something they saw as frivolous or ridiculous. They acted like Joan was behaving like an infatuated girl, not like somebody who was being groomed or cut off from her friends. So yes, in theory, if the scene had played out differently, her friends' concerns would have seemed reasonable to me, but the scene had too much emphasis on the idea that Joan was giving up an "appropriate" career for something undefined and silly (hence the comparison to...I forget whether it was skydiving or hang-gliding, but either way it's like saying "don't be ridiculous, Joanie").

As for Joan being the only woman: in the absence of any qualifying remarks about women, or a pattern of stereotypical behavior, I have to take Joan as an individual character in her own right; otherwise we wind up saying that there are things that female characters can't do because it'll look bad. In the aggregate, sure, there are stereotypical behaviors that writers ought to guard against, but where does that leave any individual character? It's like saying that Joan has to be unimpeachable, or she's letting down the side somehow - that female characters don't get to have flaws when the male ones do. Your mileage may vary, of course.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

that female characters don't get to have flaws when the male ones do.

I don't insist that the stuff I watch pass the Bechdel test, but I do insist that the entire female contingent not be describable as
- totally evil
- stupid
- lust-addled dupe
- the punchline

Joan tends towards the last. It's a sad thing to celebrate "hey, it's been three weeks since someone asked her to her face if she was a prostitute!"

[tempestsarekind.livejournal.com]

Fair enough - I just disagree that Joan *is* the punchline. I mean, my take on the whole prostitute thing is that it's not a joke; it's often a way that other characters try to deliberately discomfit or belittle Joan.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I agree - they are belittling her, over and over, and always it's people associated with Holmes. But she never calls him out on it and he's never apologized that we know of. I don't know which is more offensive to me, that he considers such gendered slurs acceptable (along with monitoring her menstruation) or that she just takes it. We know he can stop it with a word because now that she's his mentee, it has stopped.

I also considered it a perfect example of the producer's idea of "humor", as Joan continues to be the butt of other gendered slurs, like the "lady with a crazy story" line.