Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone (1868) during a period in which few Victorians questioned the legitimacy of imperial rule in India. At that time it was widely believed that Indians were instinctual, impulsive, and fanatic; in other words, they supposedly lacked the mechanisms of self-control that guarantee sound government at the level of self and society alike.¹ The 1857 rebellion known in England as the Mutiny confirmed for many the passionate volatility of “the Indian character” and its general antipathy to law and order.² Although Collins does not directly dispute prevailing assumptions about Indians, he does question the extent to which “the English character” differs from its ungovernable colonial counterpart. In his novels, regulatory forces that supposedly prevail within the civilized self—rationality, morality, Christian faith—routinely fail to exert their hold. English characters are overmastered by their own “dark” and irrational obsessions, inordinate desires, unruly aggressions, and self-abasing idolatries. In The Moonstone, this uncanny irony subverts accepted oppositions between those who inhabit India, which Betteredge dismisses as one of the “outlandish places of the earth,”³ and those who inhabit the presumed “center” of empire. Indeed, the mysterious gem, coveted by Indian and English characters alike, exerts a profoundly decentering power, drawing forth into the light “outlandish” impulses that brood beneath the surface of purportedly civilized subjectivity. This “first and greatest of English detective novels,” as T. S. Eliot called The Moonstone,⁴ not only detects a stolen diamond; it also detects a sustaining illusion at the center of imperial ideology, the belief that savage passions exist at a comfortable remove, the unique possessions of racially other colonial subjects.

By disclosing an ungovernable “darkness” native to the English self, Collins anticipates insights developed by Freud in “The Uncanny” (1919). In this classic essay, Freud studies the origin of disconcerting feelings provoked by certain experiences (or representations of such) perceived as strange. The sense of strangeness is, he argues, superficial and deceptive, for the ego has sought to protect the conscious mind from knowledge of primitive impulses by translating them into forms that appear to be foreign to the self. The uncanny, he argues, “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”⁵ The distressing eeriness of uncanny experiences indicates not a confrontation with otherness, but rather a veiled encounter with strategically estranged aspects of the self.

Collins shows how imperial ideology functions as a repressive mechanism of the cultural mind, alienating ungovernable passions by projecting them onto the “lower races” who inhabit colonial territory.⁶ He reveals how Victorian culture attempts to distinguish the civilized English subject from its colonial counterpart in India and how, ironically, the distinctions it draws fall into doubt. For, in The Moonstone, as in Freud’s model, the repressive mechanism functions imperfectly. The susceptibility of English characters to the influence of the diamond demonstrates the fragility of their own self-command when embattled by “native” passions. The most fearful aspect of the “Oriental strangers” (The Moonstone, 197) who pursue the diamond, Collins knows, is the secret familiarity of their impulses and behavior. The novel dismantles conventional distinctions between Oriental and English, between savage colonial other and well-regulated imperial self. Collins constructs what is, as Franklin Blake terms it, a “strange family story” (7), a narrative that uncovers the forgotten strangeness that inhabits the familiar, the imperfectly repressed savagery that lives on in the family.

Approaching The Moonstone as an uncanny text of imperial culture has two advantages. In the broad context of postcolonial criticism, it heeds a call for readings attuned to the features of narratives that destabilize the dichotomies naturalized by imperial ideology. Edward Said, who largely initiated postcolonial studies by exposing those dichotomies, defines Orientalist discourse as a “political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”⁷ Yet theorists who have followed Said have argued that such clear-cut differences remain elusive even within the discourses that proclaim them. As Sara Suleri observes, “colonial facts” and, by extension, the representation of those facts, “fail to cohere around the master-myth that proclaims static lines of demarcation between imperial power and disempowered culture, between colonizer and colonized.”⁸

Freud’s discussion of the uncanny helps to account for the faulty construction of these “lines of demarcation” between familiar imperial culture and its strange Oriental colony. Early in his essay, Freud observes that the German words unheimlich, uncanny or strange, and heimlich, homely or familiar, are not so distinct as their antithetical construction implies. His etymological research discovers that, in addition to meaning “what is familiar and agreeable,” heimlich also signifies “what is concealed and kept out of sight,” while, according to one definition, unheimlich means that which “ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.”⁹ Like Said, Homi Bhabha appreciates that imperial discourses set in opposition the “heimlich pleasures of the hearth” and the “unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other.”¹⁰ Yet Bhabha also perceives, as his use of Freud’s terms suggests, the instability of the distinction. He asserts, indeed, that the “‘other’ is never outside or beyond us.”¹¹ Exposing this distressing truth as well, The Moonstone shows that the familiar pleasures of the English hearth and home, relying as they do on a dynamic of repression and projection, are sustainable only so long as native English passions remain hidden in the dark.

This approach also enables a constructive synthesis of two persuasive lines of analysis that have been applied to The Moonstone. A long-accepted reading of the novel decodes its symbolic structure as a psychosexual drama in which Blake’s theft of Rachel’s jewel figuratively enacts a sexual violation. “What is stolen from Rachel,” as Albert Hutter argues, “is both the actual gem and her symbolic virginity.”¹² This interpretation helped to establish Collins’s fascination with the disruptive force of repressed impulses on codes of propriety meant to restrain them. Another line of inquiry turns its focus toward the novel’s concern with imperial politics. John R. Reed, who initiated this perspective, treats the diamond as a reference to “England’s imperial depredations,” a “symbol of a national rather than a personal crime.”¹³ The novel, according to Reed, inverts the moral scheme of the civilizing mission by depicting the Hindu priests as “heroic figures, while the representatives of Western Culture are plunderers.”¹⁴ Ian Duncan concurs with Reed that the novel exposes the false pretenses of imperial authority but takes issue with the notion that it simply redistributes moral authority to India. The Moonstone, he argues, more disturbingly inverts the distribution of power while continuing to align India with moral depravity. Playing upon the “imperialist panic” generated by the Mutiny, Collins subjects his readers to the “nightmare of a devilish India,” depicting “another world triumphant in its darkness.”¹⁵ While Duncan offers a more compelling reading of Collins’s representation of India, he, like Reed, emphasizes an opposition that the novel in fact calls into question. Jaya Mehta similarly claims that The Moonstone “counterposes colonial terror to domestic romance,” invoking the “nationalist mythology of a quintessentially placid English domesticity as a foil to colonial Indian violence.”¹⁶ Arguments that position India as England’s other, however, whether victimized and plundered or nightmarish and vengeful, miss the extent to which the novel challenges such antithetical constructions.

The novel does so by focusing attention on forces that erupt from the dark otherworldly terrain of English subjectivity, where dwell impulses fully as irrational, violent, and passionate as those projected onto India. The novel’s depiction of English subjectivity is thus itself a response to the imperial cultural moment. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, Mutiny narratives propagate a view of colonial insurgents as “wholly irrational, at once childish and diabolic,” while aligning British colonial authority with rational order.¹⁷ In The Moonstone, this racial polarization of subjective faculties, a cornerstone of imperial ideology, falls into disarray. The successful foray of the Hindu priests no doubt enacts, as Lillian Nayder argues, a “reverse colonization of England” in symbolic retaliation for imperial exploitation.¹⁸ But the more striking irony is that irrational and diabolic forces need not colonize the imperial nation, because they are already indigenous inhabitants. Collins offsets the depiction of Indian subjects in Mutiny narratives by representing the mutinous instincts and impulses that disrupt the rational government of the English mind.

Persistent Affiliations

If the “master-myth” of Victorian imperial ideology attempted to enforce “lines of demarcation” between colonizer and colonized, contemporary religious and secular theories also existed that provided a basis, at least, for a skeptical critique of such dichotomies. Both evangelical Christianity and Victorian evolutionary anthropology, for example, promoted a universalist approach to human subjectivity that eroded clear-cut racial differences. To be sure, both movements were themselves shaped by, and in notable ways reconfirmed, British imperial power. In its paternalistic mission to convert the benighted heathen, evangelical Christianity supplied an ethical justification for empire.¹⁹ Although evolutionary anthropologists sought to study, rather than convert, colonial subjects, they were not cultural relativists. Rather, they assumed that colonial subjects represented primitive stages in the line of human development that reached its apex in northern Europe.²⁰

Still, both movements manifested a strong commitment to the common origin of mankind and consequently perceived “the savage” not as essentially different or wholly alien, but rather as a distant relative of the civilized self. Adhering to the biblical account of creation, evangelical Christians held that all humans descended directly from Adam and Eve. Those with darker skins, they believed, had simply indulged unregenerate human nature to a greater extent. As a result, Christian faith had degenerated into abject idolatry and its ethical system had succumbed to unrestrained instincts. Also asserting the common ancestry of different races, Victorian evolutionary anthropologists explained cultural and racial differences as the outcome of unequal progress from a common state of bestial wildness. From their perspective, the “savage races” had, rather than degenerating into savagery, lagged behind European cultures in the emergence from it.

Despite their evident biases, then, both disciplines maintained a theoretical commitment to the existence of a single “human family,” as Betteredge terms it (The Moonstone, 82). This belief prepares the ground for uncanny reminders of family ties. For Freud, again, the uncanny accounts for instances in which the conscious mind registers, if only in its unease, an ancestry held in common with the irrational, unrestrained “other” that, ironically, continues to inhabit the self. Evangelical Christianity and evolutionary anthropology similarly trace the genealogy of the modern English subject back to a point of origin preceding racial and cultural differentiation, to a period when the savage other was the self. Crucially, both disciplines also then expose the lingering presence of this “primitive” entity in supposedly civilized English subjects. According to evangelical doctrine, Christian subjects harbored the same degenerate propensities given freer rein in tropical climes. Even as Protestant denominations established missionary societies to convert the heathen abroad, they detected “heathen” tendencies at home.²¹ Evolutionary anthropologists believed that even the most progressive cultures retained, in modified and hidden forms, primitive practices and beliefs. Just as biological organisms furnished vestigial evidence of earlier formations, so too did modern civilization disclose surviving relics of its savage past.²²

By no means a rigorous student of either discipline, Collins nonetheless absorbed their broadly disseminated ideas. He was particularly intrigued by the notion that the supposedly civilized modern English self harbored primitive impulses antagonistic to the religious and ethical dictates of Victorian culture. In The Moonstone, he shows slight sympathy for the evangelical movement itself, which was by the 1860s a waning cultural force. He satirizes its rhetoric in the person of the self-righteous Miss Clack, who remains ever-conscious of the need to “discipline the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam” (191). The comic shadow cast on Clack’s piety, however, obscures the extent to which Collins justifies her vigilance. His novels in general confirm her understanding of the ongoing internalized conflict between the forces of self-command and an intractable natural element. Sir Patrick, a principal character of Man and Wife (1870), translates Clack’s spiritual struggle into a secular code of ethical development that bears the imprint of contemporary evolutionary assumptions. Articulating one of the chief didactic messages of the novel, he excoriates the national obsession with athleticism for catering to the “inbred reluctance in humanity to submit to the demands” of “moral and mental cultivation.”²³ Those who exercise their muscles alone, he believes, find themselves at the mercy of the “savage instincts latent in humanity—the instincts of self-seeking and cruelty that are at the bottom of all crime” (Man and Wife, 213). While Clack and Sir Patrick express very different points of view, both understand the modern English self as a precariously balanced governmental structure. The authority in power, aligned with spiritual discipline and ethical/intellectual cultivation, struggles to maintain its rule over rebellious instincts, aligned with an original yet persistent element perceived from the evangelical perspective as “fallen nature,” from the anthropological view as “savage instincts.”

Confirming this understanding of subjectivity throughout his work, Collins contests imperial dichotomies by questioning the ability of the modern English self to control the eruption of its primitive instincts and impulses. The notion that civilized subjects share a “fallen nature” and “savage instincts” with colonial others holds subversive potential in relation to the imperial “master-myth.” Collins might have contained that potential by applauding the English for disciplining their primitive instincts and impulses more effectively than their colonial counterparts. He might have suggested that only the aberrant criminal few at the center of empire lack the capacity for self-restraint. Yet he emphasizes instead a broad unreliability of self-control. His novels continually replay the “outbreak” (a favorite term) of what he calls in No Name “original wildness,” or what he labels “naked nature” in The Evil Genius.²⁴ They cultivate an anxiety about the irrepressibility of English savagery that the criminalization of certain particularly unrestrained individuals does not allay. The conviction that “our ancestor the savage” lurks within all English subjects wears the distinction between civilized and savage in the modern imperial world dangerously thin (The Evil Genius, 264).

Clack’s evangelical perspective affords her partial insight into this disturbing fact. Attempting to extract an edifying moral from the incident in which the Hindu priests subject her hero Godfrey Ablewhite to an ignominious search, she exclaims, “How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce on us unawares!” (The Moonstone, 198). The Indian rebellion, in which “Oriental noblemen” took British colonial authority “unawares,” offers a precedent for the “outrage” committed on Ablewhite in the streets of London. More disturbingly still, it offers a precedent for surprise attacks committed by what Clack calls “our own evil passions.” There is indeed, as Clack observes, a “dark conspiracy” at work “in the midst of us” (198). The fact that she describes the passions with terms drawn from the lexicon of peripheral otherness suggests a vain effort to preserve a sense of the foreignness of desires and rages that disrupt the government of the imperial self. Collins insists, rather, that “dark” passions are as much “native” to the heart of empire as to the “outlandish places of the earth.”

The Foreign Face of Passion

The significance of the novel’s representation of India and its native subjects emerges in light of this irony. Collins certainly demonstrates familiarity with conventional depictions of India as the nightmarish antithesis of orderly domestic life in England. Yet the disconcerting irony is that the English home, inspected closely, fails to oppose itself to strange colonial otherness. The novel’s representation of India and its natives deserves close attention because it establishes habits of mind that recur, in muted ways, in England. The most explicitly “foreign” elements of the novel provide keys to the most familiar.

The prologue represents India as the native ground of rapacious violence and fanatical idolatry, characteristics that, particularly after 1857, were typically associated with the colony. According to the unnamed Herncastle cousin who relates the history of the Moonstone, the gem is for many centuries worshipped as an integral part of a Hindu idol that resides in a temple in Somnauth.²⁵ In the early eighteenth century, however, the Mogul emperor unleashes “havoc and rapine” against his Hindu subjects. During this period, a Mohammedan “officer of rank” steals the diamond from a shrine in Benares, where the idol had been transported for protection. A succession of three Hindu priests then devote their lives to the service of the deity, pursuing the diamond as it passes “from one lawless Mohammedan hand to another” until it becomes the possession of Tippoo, Sultan of Seringapatam. Unable to use “open force” against their oppressors, they instead await an opportunity to recapture the gem “in disguise” (The Moonstone, 3). Before they do so, of course, John Herncastle steals the diamond and removes it to England.

This “wildest” of legends extracted from the “native annals of India” is propelled by a conflict between varieties of unrestrained Indian subjectivity (1). The synecdoche of the “lawless Mohammedan hand” indicates unrestrained desire, subjectivities abandoned to the pleasures of brutal acquisition. In the Hindu priests, the self-indulgence of the Oriental despot gives place to dutiful self-renunciation. Their pursuit of the Moonstone exemplifies unrestrained devotion, subjectivities governed by zealous idolatry. To the Mohammedan, the diamond is treasure, valuable for its beauty and monetary value. To the Hindu idolaters, the diamond is sacred talisman, valuable because it belongs to the deity before whose will they bow.

If the Moonstone’s history offers a stereotypical portrait of unrestrained Indian subjectivities, Collins also shows how such portraits are eagerly accepted as evidence of the foreignness of passionate excess. The reception of information supplied by Murthwaite, the Orientalist traveler recently returned from the “wild places of the East,” provides a case in point (65). On the evening when Rachel first wears the diamond, he informs her, “I know a certain city, and a certain temple in that city, where, dressed as you are now, your life would not be worth five minutes’ purchase.” The Ablewhite sisters, who “burst out together vehemently, ‘O! How interesting!’” enact the unquestioning attitude that assumes the veracity of “interesting” pictures of strange and distant locales (66). Although Betteredge disdains their enthusiasm, he also relies on Murthwaite’s expertise as he constructs the foreignness of India and its subjects. “[C]lever as the Hindoo people are in concealing their feelings,” Murthwaite penetrates the disguise of the priests when they appear at the dinner party (79). They turn on him, Betteredge reports, with “tigerish quickness,” briefly revealing their murderous impulses before reassuming their “polite and snaky way” (70). This scene confirms that the Hindu priests are violent, deceptive, and unreservedly devoted to their idol, but it also shows how Betteredge intensifies the otherness of those he fears. To his mind, the Hindu priests, with their “tigerish” manner and “snaky” indirection, represent dangerous tropical animality that has encroached upon the temperate and familiar regions of English country life.

Such clear-cut dichotomies between the familiar nation and its strange bestial others rely on a naive ethnocentric mind-set exemplified most clearly by Betteredge, the character most leery of the “outlandish places of the earth”: “[H]ere was our quiet English house,” he exclaims, “suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond” (33). The “Indian Diamond” broadly signifies for Betteredge an infernal world in which the antithesis of all that is good, proper, rational, well ordered, and English prevails. “Who ever heard the like of it,” he wonders, “in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution?” (33). This devoted servant of the “quiet English house” articulates several striking tributes to the progress and stability of his nation and its subjects. Unlike mutinous Indians and Continental revolutionaries, the English are, Betteredge asserts, “an easy people to govern, in the Parliament and in the Kitchen” (58). Just as he guards the circumference of the estate to secure it against the intrusive ploys of the Indians, so too does Betteredge patrol the ideological borders of the imperial nation, defending them against rebellious otherness.

But sometimes, as Freud indicates, disturbing secrets are hidden in apparently quiet houses. The Moonstone undercuts Betteredge’s naive ethnocentrism by disclosing what appear to be disruptive alien passions within the “quiet English house.” Those who inhabit the imperial nation and its domestic spheres fail to offer uniquely tractable or well-governed alternatives to volatile colonial subjects. Mutinous English passions may be more deeply repressed and their forms of expression more cleverly hidden, but they nonetheless become visible over the course of the narrative. As they erupt within the familiar social realm, they expose the artificiality of the racial oppositions that sustain the imperial project.

In the Shivering Sands, Collins constructs a symbol that both acknowledges and repudiates the tendency to estrange disruptive passions by projecting them onto racial others. Inspiring intermingled horror and fascination in those who gaze upon it, the Shivering Sands is one of the novel’s focal points of uncanny intensity. Its disturbing power emanates from the knowledge it discloses about the structure of human subjectivity in England as well as in India. While the surface of the quicksand appears relatively benign, at certain moments it heaves and ripples, indicating the “spirit of terror” that “live[s] and move[s] and shudder[s] in the fathomless deeps beneath” (304-5). Collins describes the surface as the “false brown face” (304), adopting a phrase that certainly recalls the deceptive Hindu priests, whose “polite” demeanor briefly reveals their terrifying intentions. But Collins does not arbitrarily locate the quicksand in Yorkshire, deep in the heart of the imperial nation and notably adjacent to the “quiet English house.” This juxtaposition suggests that “quiet English” subjects, no less than their colonial counterparts, conceal volatile passions in their “fathomless deeps.”

Collins associates the Shivering Sands most explicitly with Rosanna Spearman, the “silent” maidservant who is “troubled occasionally” by shudders of repressed desire for unattainable Franklin Blake (21-22). She reinforces the symbolic import of the Shivering Sands by sinking herself and her confession in its unquiet depths. Her death, however, leads Betteredge to a broadly relevant insight about the nature of the self and its repressed passions. He reflects that “we learn to put our feelings back into ourselves, and to jog on with our duties as patiently as may be” (159). Although Betteredge assumes that members of the upper classes can afford to indulge their feelings, his insight is not restricted to a particular class, gender, or race. The comment forges a connection between “quiet English” characters and the Hindu priests, noted for their “patience” and adept at “concealing their feelings” (71-72). The Shivering Sands bears a sign of racial difference on its “brown face,” but only those who read superficially may convince themselves that the knowledge it symbolically conveys applies only to strangers.

Family Ties

The prologue of the novel foregrounds not just the outlandishness of India, but also its forceful appeal to a character invested with imperial authority. John Herncastle, an officer in the imperial army, proves easily susceptible to irrational and passionate impulses associated with the colony. As the British force prepares for the assault on Seringapatam, the “fanciful story of the Moonstone” awakens his acquisitive desire and volcanic ire (3). A man of “unlucky temper,” Herncastle vows in an “angry outbreak” to capture the jewel for himself (3, 5). Ironically entrusted to “enforce the laws of discipline” after the conquest of the city, Herncastle succumbs to an aggressive “frenzy” in which he seizes the diamond, murdering the Indians who guard it (5). This first English chapter in the story of the Moonstone notably extends a motif established by events that precede the intervention of the purportedly civilized nation. Herncastle is but another “officer of rank” in a conquering force who grasps the diamond in his “lawless hand.”

Back in England, the Herncastle family takes decisive action to disavow their unsavory relative. On the strength of testimony given by Herncastle’s cousin, the rest of the family repudiates him as well: “He came back” from India, Blake remembers, “with a character that closed the doors of all his family against him” (30). This version of events suggests that Herncastle has acquired a “character” he did not formerly have, that he has been contaminated in India by essentially alien passions. Yet the effort to ostracize the wayward son, to close the family doors against him, suggests fearful complicity as much as disapproval. The Herncastles repudiate John because he extravagantly indulges impulses that they still attempt to hide. If he possesses a more liberal “dash of the savage” (30) than they, he differs from them in degree only. His sister Lady Verinder shares his volatile anger, possessing her own “dash … of the family temper” (32). The similar structure of these phrases suggests that “the savage” and “the family temper” might be read synonymously. Rachel exhibits her own “dash” of the family temper when her diamond is stolen, acting “wild and angry” and speaking to Blake “savagely” in an “outbreak of ill-will” (86, 101).

Nor is this dash of savagery limited to blood relatives of Herncastle. Irritated by Rachel’s decision to break off her engagement to his son, the senior Mr. Ablewhite denounces the Herncastle family, implicitly representing his own line as superior. As he does so, however, he ironically gives vent to savage anger: “[B]ecoming purple” with anger, he looks “backwards and forwards from Rachel to Mr. Bruff in such a frenzy of rage with both of them that he didn’t know which to attack first” (257). This “outbreak” recalls the “frenzy” that possesses Herncastle, who of course actually attacks multiple opponents in India (4). Collins indicates that even Ablewhite, a “remarkably good-natured man,” verges at times on violent fury (253). The “self-registering thermometer” of Ablewhite’s complexion grows a “shade deeper” as his rage intensifies, suggesting the emergence of his racially “foreign” self (255). The most distressing “family secret” of the novel is that upper-middle-class English characters share much in common with members of the “human family” they would like to hold at a distance.²⁶

Never less than detestable, Herncastle does perceive the hypocrisy of those who bar their doors against passions already lodging comfortably within. That knowledge perhaps provokes his sardonic laugh “into himself” (32) when turned away from Rachel’s birthday celebration. By this point on terms of joking familiarity with the family savage who abides within, Herncastle anticipates with cruel pleasure the spectacle of foreign passions unleashed by the Moonstone within the “quiet English house.”

English Idolatry

When the diamond arrives in the Herncastle home as a birthday gift to Rachel, the superstitious regard it enjoys begins to indicate the fragility of the distinction between those allotted opposing positions on imperial lines of demarcation. When Betteredge bemoans the fact that the “cursed Moonstone ha[s] turned us all upside down,” he attributes agency to the diamond itself, which is ironic for multiple reasons (82). Most notably, he exemplifies the tendency to “alienate” the sources of disturbance by blaming the “devilish Indian Diamond” (33). But his attempt is amusingly self-defeating, for by attributing “devilish” agency to the gem, Betteredge invests the object with supernatural power. He thus duplicates the kind of “outlandish” belief system he elsewhere dismisses as “hocus-pocus” (49). His first reaction to the diamond compounds this irony:

Lord bless us! it was a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover’s egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. … No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an “O” as the Bouncers themselves.(61-62)

The gem erodes barriers and distinctions that Betteredge elsewhere invests with much importance. He finds himself, as he admits, helplessly expressing the giddy enthusiasm of the Ablewhite sisters. His fascination, shared by his young mistress, transects the class divisions that structure the household. Through a symbolic connection, it also links him to Rosanna, the reformed urban criminal whom he admonishes for her morbid obsession with the “fathomless deeps” of the Shivering Sands. His hypothetical speculation “that you could hold” the diamond “between your finger and thumb” suggests an awakening in him of the acquisitive desire that governs John Herncastle.

But most strikingly, Betteredge swoons into a mind-set analogous to those held by the “influence of Oriental religions” and superstitions (39). Murthwaite later asserts, “We have nothing whatever to do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to a practical man” (282). Yet the novel indicates that “practical” English subjects are as prone to fanatic obsessions and irrational superstitions as “Oriental strangers.” The ethnocentric steward, another apostle of English common sense, quickly succumbs to the mesmeric grip of the Oriental talisman. It lays “such a hold” on him, drawing his “eyes into it so that they saw nothing else.” In the spirit of exposing a hypocrisy (rather than admonishing a sin), Collins appropriates the evangelical habit of unveiling forms of idolatry that have crept into Christian culture. In Practical Christianity, Wilberforce defines “idol” broadly as whatever “draws off the heart from [God], engrosses our prime regard, and holds the chief place in our esteem and affections.”²⁷ In this sense, Clack justifiably refers to Betteredge as a “heathen old man” (193). His “prime regard” is easily engrossed by the Moonstone and, of course, by Defoe’s sacred text.

Collins is particularly concerned to indicate that habits of mind triggered by the foreign diamond precede its arrival. The appearance of the Moonstone only provides a new occasion for the exhibition of impulses “old-established in the mind.” Early in his account, Betteredge memorably asserts, “I am not superstitious,” only then to confess his superstitious regard for Robinson Crusoe, the text from which he draws clairvoyant readings of the future (8). After describing a search for guidance within its pages he remarks with relief, “I saw my way clear” (12). Long before the devilish Oriental diamond appears, Betteredge practices his own heathen cult, worshiping as his divine oracle, no less, a story that narrates the civilizing genius of the English hero.²⁸ As he holds the novel in his hands, searching the pages for esoteric wisdom, he represents merely an older version of the “sensitive” English boy who, employed as medium by the Hindus, reads the future in “the ink in the hollow of his hand” (18). The distinction between Betteredge’s homely reading and their outlandish ritual is, as it were, paper thin.

The English “fascination” for the Moonstone does not therefore mark a reverse colonization of the imperial nation by Oriental superstition. Rather, it reveals purportedly “foreign” modes of idolatry already in place, although unacknowledged, in England. The displacement of the diamond from Indian to English culture exposes the artificiality of racial distinctions sustained by imperial rhetoric.²⁹ The effort to estrange the variety of mind subject to the “influence” of the mysterious and valuable jewel, already problematic after John Herncastle’s violent “frenzy,” becomes increasingly untenable as more English characters fall under its spell.

Heathen Idolatry and Savage Self-Seeking at Home

The Moonstone’s experience in England uncannily repeats its history in India because presumably alien habits of mind secretly inhabit Victorian domestic culture.³⁰ Long before the intervention of the British Empire, the diamond graces the figure of a Hindu idol regarded as “the inviolate deity” by its worshippers (The Moonstone, 2). The deity is then violated by a Mohammedan officer who values the diamond as a material rather than a sacred object. In revenge for the hypocrisy of his family, Herncastle sets in motion a process that reveals the full extent to which the English domestic sphere harbors the same instincts and impulses that determine the diamond’s stormy history in India. Specific forms of idolatrous worship and lawless acquisition change to reflect their unique shape in Victorian culture. The Hindu cult of the Moon god gives way to the English cult of domesticity. Mohammedan despot transmutes into materialistic scoundrel. Yet these parallels expose the persistent presence of heathen idolatry and savage self-seeking “at home.”

Recent critics have argued that the theft of the jewel from Rachel exposes a similarity between patriarchal authority in the middle-class domestic sphere and British imperial authority in India. Nayder observes, for example, that in “his dual role of protector and thief, Blake illuminates the paradox of Victorian guardianship, in both its patriarchal and its imperial guises.”³¹ While the novel does align Rachel with colonial savagery and perhaps implicitly positions Blake as her colonial governor, it gives even more reason to perceive an uncanny correspondence between English heterosexual relationships and Oriental idolatry. This link largely confirms Nayder’s point about the paradox of male guardianship, since even those who bow before the domestic deity and her talisman insist upon possessing the objects they worship.

On the verge of marriage, Rachel has attained the status of a powerful goddess in the Victorian cult of domesticity. Both before and after the theft of the diamond, men in her circle approximate the idolatrous service exemplified by Indian devotees. Blake expresses his “devotion” by renouncing cigars when she mentions her dislike of their odor (55). Her word is also law for Bruff, who affirms the innocence of Ablewhite on the strength of her unsupported testimony. The “practical” lawyer abandons rules of evidence when the English deity speaks. Betteredge, who confesses himself “an average good Christian” only when “you don’t push [his] Christianity too far,” exhibits the fierce loyalty of those in thrall to “Oriental religions” (165). Irritated by Cuff’s effort to implicate Rachel in the theft, his heathen passion “break[s] out,” provoking him to grab the Sergeant by the throat and pin him against the wall (133). Holding “on like death to [his] belief in Miss Rachel,” Betteredge reveals a liberal “dash” of the ferocity that drives the Hindu priests to smother Ablewhite (151). Collins suggests that those Victorians who perceive their culture untainted by the fanaticism of heathen religions may find evidence to the contrary in the chivalric code that structures sexual relations in the middle-class cult of domesticity.

Ablewhite, who secretly despises this sacred cult, violates the deity in the manner of his Mohammedan predecessors. In his culture, of course, it is the religious cult that holds power and legitimacy, and this forces him to practice subterfuge like the Hindu priests. Ablewhite plays the role of mild philanthropist and seems to adhere with special devotion to Victorian chivalric codes. He is the gracious assistant to multiple “Ladies’ Charities” and pays homage to Rachel in affectionate birthday verses (55). This sensitive facade conceals varieties of acquisitive desire conventionally associated with Mohammedan despotism. In a secret villa, Ablewhite indulges the opulent lifestyle of an Oriental potentate, supporting his sensual gratifications with appropriated wealth. The gentle consideration he shows for women masks the sexual appetite of the stereotypical Sultan. Although Ablewhite keeps only a single mistress, his villa includes “a conservatory of the rarest flowers” and “jewels which are worthy to take rank with the flowers” (448). Given the associations of female sexuality with flowers and jewels (a particularly resonant metaphor in this novel), the villa takes on the symbolic character of an English harem.

Ablewhite regards both Rachel and her diamond as loot to plunder from the temple of domesticity. He views the diamond as a financial resource with which to sustain his sensual life and sees Rachel herself as yet another flower for his conservatory. His desire is not as apparent as his financial chicanery, but Betteredge does at one point catch him “ogling” the heiress (62). In her analysis of nineteenth-century imperial discourse, Inderpal Grewal observes that the image of the “woman ‘caged’ in the harem, in purdah, becomes the necessary Other for the construction of the Englishwoman presumably free and happy in the home.”³² Skeptical of such oppositions, Collins intimates that an Englishwoman may well find herself caged within a marriage that replicates the power structure of the harem.

Yet Collins perceives that the English cult of domesticity also limits the freedom and independence of women. Language that links Rachel to the diamond itself clarifies both the sources of her authority over her idolaters and the restrictions placed upon it by them as well. She becomes the “centre-point towards which everybody’s eyes [are] directed” because she, like the diamond, has great worth and great beauty (64). Her vast wealth and multifaceted beauty help to explain the mysterious influence she wields over those men who succumb to her “charming” and “irresistible” power (47, 270). The sad case of Rosanna, who lacks her mistress’s “handsome income” as well as her physical advantages, highlights the point that only beautiful women of a certain socioeconomic position might expect to win the idolatrous regard of men in Victorian England (249). Rachel, however, pays a significant price for the power she wields. She embodies the symbolic instability of the diamond, which is always, even within the framework of the sacred cult, simultaneously sacred talisman and desirable possession. The patriarchal cult in England, like its colonial counterpart, must own the object of its adoration. It is a sanctified variety of acquisitive desire that Blake expresses in his need to see and to possess, to have and to hold, the idol he serves. It is particularly ironic that Collins discloses the operation of primitive possessive impulses within the cult of domesticity, for many Victorians believed that the status afforded middle-class women marked one of the essential distinctions between their culture and savagery. It is this popular assumption that John Stuart Mill treats with scorn in The Subjection of Women (1869). To his eye, as to Collins’s, relations between the sexes in supposedly civilized England carries the “taint of brutal origins.”³³

The theft of the diamond, the crime committed at dead of night in the “quiet English house,” thus represents a twofold outbreak of primitive possessiveness, implicating both Blake, the idolatrous servant, and Ablewhite, the lawless thief. Collins introduces the tantalizing possibility that Rachel will reject both forms of outlandish authority that her cousins represent. The Moonstone’s mysterious flaw corresponds to what Betteredge calls the single “defect” in the character of “this charming creature,” her “independence” or “self-will” (52-53). The history of the diamond suggests that it possesses a maddening “independence” as well, tending as it does to wander away from those who desire to possess it (35). Rachel exerts her independence after witnessing the symbolic assertion of ownership by her chief devotee. She resigns her post as deity, abandoning the temple and retreating into inscrutable silence. Just as the Hindu cult recaptures its talisman, however, the English cult of domesticity eventually reclaims Rachel. Victorian England clings to its forms of heathen worship as tenaciously as India.

Face to Face with Strangers

As the romantic and criminal story lines draw to a close, Collins offers no sense of a triumphant transcendence of imperial dichotomies. Both plots continue to emphasize the strength of Victorian cultural investment in the otherness of heathen idolatry and savage self-seeking. Yet both plots also ensure that the complicity of English characters in outlandish modes of thought and behavior at least comes to light. And both plots continue to erode, through very different mechanisms, lines of demarcation between colonizer and colonized.

The happy ending of the romantic plot reflects the result of a sympathetic relationship that bridges the social divide between the English lovers and Ezra Jennings. In the context of England’s self-proclaimed mission to enlighten the dark places of the earth, it is deeply ironic that the solution of the mystery in England, the “toilsome journey from the darkness to the light,” depends on this racially hybrid colonial subject (329). Jennings has been treated recently with a degree of asperity for placing himself in the role of colonial servant and for thus countenancing British imperial rule.³⁴ Yet Jennings himself has a position of authority; throughout the final section, Blake agrees to be “guided implicitly by [his] advice” (384). Indeed, Jennings usurps the presumed role of British civilizing authority in India and reverses the path of reform by correcting injustice and diffusing refined sentiment in outlandish England. While English characters inflict passionate violence on India in the “storming” of Seringapatam, Jennings “enter[s] to us,” as Blake phrases it, “quietly” (1, 319). The peaceful intervention of the racial hybrid counteracts the conventional polarization of racial identities.

The fact that Jennings is a physician suggests that he offers a healing curative for a culture sickened by racial dichotomies. The remedy he offers, the capacity to perceive arbitrarily drawn “lines of demarcation” and to tolerate their dissolution, is inscribed in and on his body. As the child of an English man and a woman indigenous to “one of our colonies,” Jennings subverts in his biological heritage the barrier dividing colonizer and colonized (366).³⁵ The code of his weird appearance further calls that barrier into doubt. His most notable feature, his “piebald” hair, opposes black and white “without the slightest gradation of grey” (319). Collins emphasizes the abnormality of this stark division, referring to it as an “extraordinary contrast” that has occurred only through “some freak of nature.” The ideological separation of racial identities is, he suggests, as fully “capricious” as the principle that has divided the colors of Jennings’s hair. It is further remarkable that the dividing “line between the two colors,” preserves “no sort of regularity. At one place, the white hair ran up into the black; at another, the black hair ran down into the white” (319). Those who gaze upon Ezra Jennings confront a symbolic text that graphically illustrates the construction and inevitable confusion of antithetical racial categories.

Because he unsettles imperial dichotomies, Jennings calls forth the intense dread of the uncanny. A servant at the Verinder estate experiences “downright terror” in his presence (410). Mrs. Merridew, Rachel’s chaperone, “utter[s] a faint little scream at the first sight of [his] gipsy complexion and [his] piebald hair” (412). Jennings inspires, as he ruefully observes, near universal “dislike and distrust” (393). His ostracism is tragic because, unlike the novel’s other uncanny symbols, he demonstrates the universality of human nature by exemplifying certain of its most admirable qualities. While the Moonstone awakens and intensifies acquisitive desire and idolatrous obsession, the colonial hybrid kindles sympathy and compassion. Revealing the precious associations he holds for “little hedgeside flowers,” Jennings speaks in the voice of a Wordsworthian persona who taps into the great fund of human feeling by projecting significance onto the “meanest flower that blows” (366). Both Blake and Rachel find it possible to look beyond his deceptively foreign appearance to appreciate such familiar sentiments. Although Rachel is at first taken aback by his aspect, she refuses to treat him “like a stranger” (410). As Blake repeatedly comes “face to face with Ezra Jennings,” he begins to sense the “inscrutable appeal to [his] sympathies” emanating from the “strange man” (364, 365). Collins rewards them for overcoming the “terror” inspired by hybridity by reuniting them within the fold of tenderness over which Jennings presides. Notably, both first express their love for each other to Jennings.

If Jennings shows that strangers possess familiar sentiments, his detective work correspondingly discloses the unfamiliar terrain of the English self. He counteracts the projection of criminal instincts and savage impulses onto racial others by guiding Blake toward a degree of self-knowledge. On the morning following the theft of the diamond, Blake confidently asserts that the “Indians have certainly stolen the Diamond” (80). Even after he discovers evidence that implicates himself, he remains at a loss to explain his motivations. Jennings surmises that opium, secretly administered by Dr. Candy, impels Blake “to possess [him]self of the Diamond, with the purpose of securing its safety” (389). The experiment he devises to prove this supposition repeats and exposes the process of alienating possessive idolatry. As Blake drops into an opium-induced trance, Jennings recalls to his mind the “unexpected appearance of the Indians at the house” (418). It is, ironically, fear of the Hindu priests that provokes Blake to mimic their effort to possess themselves of the jewel. As they prowl outside the house, intending to secure the safety of their deity’s jewel, he unconsciously performs a parallel act of idolatrous service within. Although Blake owns his actions, he never self-consciously perceives the extent to which he shares the idolatrous tendencies of those he scapegoats. Such self-consciousness might in turn have triggered the recognition that, after all, the Moonstone belongs to their deity, not to his. The experiment is, as Jennings admits, only “partially successful” (424).

The conclusion of the criminal plot forcefully demonstrates the inevitable return to the English self of impulses projected onto the racial other. The “noticeably dark complexion” Ablewhite assumes to avoid detection while spiriting the diamond away yet again throws criminal suspicion onto colonial subjects (430). From one perspective, the disguise indicates the extent to which Ablewhite has fallen into line with the lawless Mohammedan hands that have preceded him. At the same time, it deprives Victorian culture of the consoling affiliation of self-seeking and cruelty with racial otherness. The “swarthy complexion” is a disguise, but then so too is the white face of benevolent philanthropy (444). Surface colors, such as the “false brown face” of the Shivering Sands, are ultimately less accurate guides to the nature of character than the variety of passions that seethe beneath the surface.

The unmasking of Ablewhite dramatizes the terror provoked by the realization that the familiar English philanthropist has all along concealed lawless acquisitive desire. Significantly, Blake is able to gaze with grim distaste upon the body of a dark criminal. His nerves, however, are simply “not strong enough to bear it” when Cuff reveals the “livid white” skin beneath the “swarthy complexion.” Cuff is more stoic, but the task of stripping away the swarthy disguise etches “horror in his face” (444). The intensity of these reactions indicates the extent to which Victorian culture is repelled by the knowledge that the “savage instincts” of “self-seeking and cruelty” do not remain “latent,” even in the most apparently able and white of English subjects.

The scene of Ablewhite’s unmasking emblematically captures the larger symbolic and thematic structure of The Moonstone, which strips the foreign disguise from the face of familiar passions. The uncanny logic of the novel repeatedly subverts prevailing assumptions about differences between English selves and Indian others. The irrational superstitions, idolatrous obsessions, and acquisitive desires that Victorians associate with the volatile colony come spilling back across the lines of demarcation, ironically arising within the “quiet English house” itself.

Notes

I would like to thank Peter Chapin and Terence Bowers for their insightful comments on a draft of this essay.

1. This basic assumption surfaces in justifications of British rule in India in many distinct imperial discourses throughout the nineteenth century. Charles Grant, a missionary who wrote an influential treatise on the character of the “people of Hindostan,” described them in 1797 as “a race of men lamentably degenerate and base … governed by malevolent and licentious passions” (qtd. in Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959], 31). In 1833, Thomas Babington Macaulay represents the administration of the East India Company, despite its serious flaws, as the advent of the government of reason: “I see that we have established order,” he definitively states, “where we found confusion” (“Government of India,” in Prose and Poetry, ed. G. M. Young [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970], 704). In 1888, John Strachey, a member of the Viceroy’s council, anticipates a return to “confusion” should the British leave India: “We cannot foresee the time in which the cessation of our rule would not be the signal for universal anarchy and ruin, and it is clear that the only hope for India is the long continuance of the benevolent but strong government of Englishmen” (qtd. in Stokes, 284).

2. For a survey of literary responses to the Mutiny, see Patrick Brantlinger, “The Well at Cawnpore: Literary Representations of the Mutiny of 1857,” in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), 199-224. In her reading of Mutiny narratives, Jenny Sharpe focuses on a specific motif that indicates the tendency to locate the cause of colonial uprisings in the presumed passionate volatility of colonial subjects. She traces an obsessive concern for the rape of white women by native men, which functions to translate a “struggle for emancipation” into an “uncivilized eruption that must be contained” (Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993], 7).

3. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 74. Hereafter cited in the text as The Moonstone.

4. T. S. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932), 377.

5. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol. 17, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 241.

6. Collins witnessed this process in reactions to the Mutiny, which, as Sue Lonoff suggests, “firmly established” in the minds of many of his contemporaries a picture of Indians as “an alien, mysterious, and potentially violent people” (Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers [New York: AMS Press, 1982], 178). Collins himself published a response to the Mutiny—“A Sermon for Sepoys”—in Household Words 17 (27 Feb. 1858): 244-47, which strikes a comparatively restrained note by attempting to discover common ground in the moral and ethical systems of the two cultures. Anthea Trodd, in the introduction to her edition of The Moonstone, refers to his essay as a “reminder, ostensibly to Moslems but really to his readers, of the virtues inherent in the Muslim faith” (introduction to The Moonstone [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998], xvii).

7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 43.

8. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 3.

9. Freud, 224-25.

10. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2.

11. Ibid., 4.

12. Albert D. Hutter, “Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction,” Victorian Studies 19 (1975): 242. See also two additional psychosexual readings of the novel: Lewis A. Lawson, “Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone,” American Imago 20 (1963): 61-79, and Charles Rycroft, “A Detective Story: Psychoanalytic Observations,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 26 (1957): 229-45. Feminist accounts that interpret Blake’s sexual “conquest” as broadly indicative of Rachel’s subordination to patriarchal power have developed the standard psychosexual interpretation. Tamar Heller argues, for example, that the diamond “signifies not merely [Rachel’s] virginity but what Bruff calls her ‘self-dependence’ as well” (Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992], 146).

13. John R. Reed, “English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone,” Clio 2, no. 3 (1973): 286.

14. Ibid., 283. For a more recent account that compellingly reads the novel as a critique of British imperial practices, see Lillian Nayder, Wilkie Collins (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 115-25. This line of argument is contested by Ashish Roy, who claims that the novel is a “prototypical imperialist text exhibiting imperialist rule and a justification of that rule within a single narrative strategy” (“The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone,” New Literary History 24, no. 3 [1993]: 676).

15. Ian Duncan, “The Moonstone, the Victorian Novel, and Imperialist Panic,” Modern Language Quarterly 55 (1994): 305.

16. Jaya Mehta, “English Romance: Indian Violence,” The Centennial Review 39 (1995): 612. Although I disagree with this thesis, Mehta’s account is historically informative, sophisticated in its close readings, and often persuasive in its claims. The thesis is balanced by the observation that Collins “draws attention to the crosscutting of race and class … and the arbitrariness of racial identity” (623).

17. Brantlinger, 222.

18. Nayder, 101.

19. Gauri Viswanathan argues that the Clapham Sect, a group of influential evangelicals, “played a key role in the drama of consolidation of British interests in India … supplying British expansionism with an ethics of concern for reform and conversion” (Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989], 36). Also see Stokes, 28-36.

20. George W. Stocking provides a lucid review of the different intellectual strands of Victorian anthropology. In the discussion that follows, I rely heavily on his analysis of pre- and post-Darwinian views and the impact of anthropological inquiry on the understanding of the relationship between civilization and savagery. Particularly see his chapter “The Darwinian Revolution and the Evolution of Human Culture” in Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 144-85. I should clarify that my use of the term anthropology is somewhat anachronistic, since those who subscribed to the single origin thesis and embraced the evolutionary paradigm generally belonged to the Ethnological Society of London (founded 1843). In the early 1860s, those who believed that the different races were actually different species split off to form the Anthropological Society of London. In 1871, the two factions rejoined in the Anthropological Institute. See Stocking, 248-54.

21. William Wilberforce, one of the principal architects of the Anglican missionary movement in India and Africa, perceived his own culture as only slightly more enlightened. In a book that remained popular throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Wilberforce implores his English readers to acknowledge that “sensual gratifications and illicit affections have debased our nobler powers” (A Practical View of Christianity, ed. Kevin Charles Belmonte [Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1996], 18). He rails against those for whom the title of Christian “implies no more than a sort of formal, general assent to Christianity in the gross, and a degree of morality in practice, but little if at all superior to that for which we look in a good Deist, Mussulman, or Hindoo” (Wilberforce, 77).

22. The central expositors of sociocultural evolution subscribed in one form or another to a doctrine of “survivals,” the notion that contemporary culture comprehends practices that, if examined closely, reveal previous evolutionary states. In The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870), for example, John Lubbock asserts that “among the most civilized nations there are traces of original barbarism” (qtd. in Stocking, 154). Although Freud primarily uses the uncanny to explain the reemergence of the individual’s primitive self, he also applies it to the survival of culturally primitive habits of mind. Commenting upon the animistic belief in the “omnipotence of thoughts,” for example, he observes that “We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation” (Freud, 247).

23. Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife, ed. Norman Page (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 211. Hereafter cited in the text as Man and Wife.

24. See Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. Virginia Blain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 474, and Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius, ed. Graham Law (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994), 264. Hereafter cited in the text as The Evil Genius.

25. Collins does not name the Hindu idol, and critics have advanced readings of the novel based on different assumptions about its identity. William M. Burgan, who provides a detailed source study of texts Collins relied upon for information about Hindu mythology, identifies the deity as Siva, god of destruction and generation (“Masonic Symbolism in The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” in Wilkie Collins to the Forefront: Some Reassessments, ed. Nelson C. Smith and R. C. Terry [New York: AMS Press, 1995], 101-48). Mark M. Hennelly alternatively identifies the deity as Vishnu (“Detecting Collins’ Diamond: From Serpentstone to Moonstone,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39 [1984]: 25-47). Both interpretations argue that the novel’s symbolic and thematic structure reflects the duality of these mythological figures.

26. Elisabeth Rose Gruner also argues that The Moonstone undermines the conventional Victorian ideal of the upper-middle-class family as a safe and secure “sphere” that excludes disreputable elements, although she emphasizes its connection to sordid crime rather than to colonial savagery. “For Collins,” she argues, “the Victorian family, far from protecting one from the increasingly complex and dangerous public world, is itself the source of many of its own complexities and dangers” (“Family Secrets and the Mysteries of The Moonstone,” Victorian Literature and Culture 21 [1993]: 128).

27. Wilberforce, 86.

28. Arguing that The Moonstone “takes large comfort” from Robinson Crusoe, the “workmanlike myth of colonial enterprise,” Ashish Roy conflates the novel with Betteredge and misses the irony of his clairvoyant readings (Roy, 657).

29. The enforced removal from India of the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, one of the Moonstone’s several historical precedents, complements this point. After annexing the Punjab in 1849, Governor-General Dalhousie demanded that Maharaja Dalip Singh cede the Koh-i-noor to Queen Victoria, who added it to the stock of crown jewels. In an interesting analysis of this transaction, Mehta observes that the “incorporation of loot from the conquered into imperial regalia has ancient and primitive antecedents; at once magical and metaphorical, it performs a kind of visual cannibalism” (Mehta, 616). If the acquisition of the Koh-i-noor demonstrated imperial power, it also ironically reveals the survival of primitive impulses and rituals within Victorian culture.

30. Hennelly argues that the diamond’s “travels in both India and England apparently serve to locate thematic values in either one or the other culture. But the actual point is the reverse—namely, that such an identification of national characteristics is too reductive and narrow-minded and that the insular Victorians, especially, must integrate what they see as Indian (or lunar) values into their own petrified culture” (Hennelly, 42). While the novel confirms his point about the dangers of reductive national identities, I would argue that it does so not by advocating the integration of “foreign” values, but rather by documenting the extent to which they are already integrated.

31. Nayder, 122; see also Heller, 144.

32. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 54.

33. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 476.

34. Nayder, 122-23.

35. In The Races of Men (1862), an anthropological study that provided theoretical support for apologists of empire by disputing the assumption of common origins, Robert Knox represents the racial hybrid as a “degradation of humanity … rejected by nature” (qtd. in Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race [New York: Routledge, 1995], 15). Collins emphasizes the fact that the hybrid is rejected by human communities rather than by nature. In the symbolic text of Jennings’s hair, analyzed below, it is the “capricious” division of black and white that is described as a “freak of nature.”

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