The Agency Within Inanimacy: The Culture of Diamonds in the

Imperialistic

Storyline of Collins The Moonstone

Wallis Stanfield

ENGLISH-4800

Dr. Christopher Keirstead

April 25, 2017

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Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before
we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to
go through with it.
-Robinson Crusoe

Throughout literature, the focus of stories has largely been

around the characters and individuals. They fall in love, go off to war,

chase glory and riches, meet death, separate and come back together.

A story can occur because of these characters, who live and breathe

and act within the words on the pages, and who create action and plot

and dialogue. Yet, so much less is literature about an object that is

instead the instigator of mischief and storyline, that drives the entire

plot and is so vital to the narrative that if it didnt exist in that

construct, then the characters around it would have no story written

about them. This narrative trope is especially true when three special

factors are attributed to objects: when the object is a decorative object

like jewelry or gemstones, whose only contribution to the novels

characters is as an ornamental thing to be displayed or worn, or as a

means for economic gain; if the object has travelled from its original

setting to a new one, or there and back again; and when the object has

a preceding myth that classifies it as being cursed (whether there is

an actual supernatural curse hinged to it or not).

Furthermore, these objects have a greater purpose in these

stories than being simply acted upon and controlled by the individuals.
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In the private sphere amidst individuals and groups, the objects do

their own acting upon the characters, effectively guiding their

thoughts, words, and actions. In the public domain, the objects not

only guide the decisions and movements of larger groups of people,

but also act as a mirror, reflecting back those societies ambitions and

ideologies through the fixation, possession, and pursuit of the objects.

I intend to argue that within the context of imperialistic practices

perpetrated by individuals in both reality and fiction, such beautiful

and inanimate objects have essentially fulfilled these factors and have

exerted the agency necessary to allow a story to be created around

them, thereby lending the power and purpose to a relatively useless

piece of dcor, mobility to the independently immobile, and a distinct

identity and reputation for animation to the inanimate.

The 1868 novel The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is perhaps

most famously known for its depiction of the role British imperialism

has in the lives of those at the Verinder estate in England and all who

come across the illustrious and titular Moonstone. The fictional Indian

Diamond is based on the reputed travel history of the famous Kohinoor

Diamond taken from the Punjab region in northern India in 1849 during

the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Today, the Kohinoor finds itself set in the

Queen Mothers Crown as part of the Crown Jewels of England. Yet,

within the novel, without the existence of imperialism and the

practiced custom of the new conquering forces pillaging the royal

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jewels from the old maharaja (Jean Arnold, 81), the Moonstone would

not have found its way into the Verinder household.

Imperialism and an imperialistic storyline facilitate the

international movement the Moonstone, a precious and rare diamond

that is gifted to Rachel Verinder on her birthday through the will of her

deceased Uncle Herncastle, and illustrates how those who participate

in its perpetuation treat ornamental objects like jewelry and gemstones

that are systematically and symbolically possessed and transferred -

both by elements of the supernatural, religion, or by the nation itself

as a way to disassociate their own actions and displace the blame on

something, rather than someone. Giving the Moonstone its reputation

as a cursed object is how the nation displaces the national guilt for

its rapacity. Those who participate in this myth only perpetuate the

role of imperialism in their society.

The detective tale begins with a nameless narrators letter to his

relatives in England, as he introduces the readers to his first

experience with the Yellow Diamond in 1799 in the prologue The

Storming of Seringapatam relegated in the Family Paper and tells of

its preceding fanciful story spread about the camp:

The deity breathed the breath of his divinity on the Diamond in

the forehead of the [moon-god]The deity commanded that the

Moonstone should be watched, from that time forth, by three

priests in turn, night and day, to the end of the generations of

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menThe deity predicted certain disaster to the presumptuous

mortal who laid hands on the sacred gem, and to all of his house

and name who received it after him (Moonstone 12).

This myth illudes the soldiers in camp who, although were warned by

the General Baird that any thievery would result in punishment by

hanging, the very next day during the siege, along with our narrators

cousin Colonel John Herncastle, storm the treasury of the Palace, where

Colonel John Herncastle kills the three Indian priests sworn to protect

the gem, and the last of which proclaims to Herncastle, The

Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours! shortly

before he dies (Moonstone 14). In Dirty Linen: Legacies of Empire in

Wilkie Collinss The Moonstone by Melissa Free, this theft views the

English as the instruments of their own undoing, the curses they

experience as wrought on themselves, and their denial as an active

perpetuation of violence (363) because Herncastle ignores its

reputation and removes it from its sacred setting within the forehead of

the Hindu moon-god Chandra. Even the anonymous cousin, in writing

the prologue, who believes in the myth and doesnt approve of

Herncastles violent and removal, participates in this theft by not

reporting it to his superiors for the sake of protecting the family name.

The cousin and Colonel Herncastle part bitterly, as the latter refuses to

acknowledge his disobedience and greed; Free suggests that this

encounter...is not just violence but secrecy: the refusal of the

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ownership of the truth (which is his) in exchange for the ownership of

the diamond (which is not) (353) and which is a contest of the private

choices and the public effects.

From being an object greedily plundered from its sacred home to

a gemstone now cursed (because of the plundering), Herncastle, but

also Blake and Betteredge through their narrations, give agency to the

Moonstone, as the Diamond fell into [his] hands and the Diamond

found its way into my aunts house in Yorkshire [and] came to be lost

(353) and again that cursed Indian jewel [that] has misguided

everybody who has come near it (356). Despite Blake and Betteredge

now knowing of the Moonstones origins and in failing to identify

Herncastles theft as imperial plunderBlake perpetuates the legacy of

elusion (354). The Moonstone, therefore, isnt just an inactive object

being taken and relocated which leads to its symbolic redefinition

(Arnold 98) as Arnold would put it, but rather it also has its own

mobility, both through the rumor of the gem being cursed and as it

reflects the travel performed internally and externally by the British

nation and those individuals who aid in its movement, and therefore

allows a story to be created because of its agency.

Free argues that we should also look at the Moonstone separate

of its identity, and instead look at its value to those who seek, steal,

give, possess, restore, and maintain it (Free 356). Furthermore, the

curse of the gem, in her estimation, is not believed to be because of

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the will of Vishnu the Preserver (Moonstone 13) but rather the curse

is due to its history of being stolen, conquered, and passed on through

military and territorial means, whether between different the warring

native groups in the Indian subcontinent or from international

imperialistic entities like the British government, and through these

outside forces imposing their own wills on its identity the chaos is

not object-but practice related: theft itself not its objects, agents of

empire not its colonial subjects, are at fault (Free 356). This mirroring

supports Jean Arnolds claim that a material object takes the place of

a mirror with its body image; the visible object partakes in an affective

dynamism that allows the subject to form identity through its reflection

of values and ideas (Arnold 37) and that the Moonstone is itself an

agent through the actions of imperialism as well as a conduit for the

vengeance of its past protectors (Free 356).

Therefore, Colonel Herncastles actions are directly

representative of the pride of British imperialism and the agency given

to the Moonstone as he attempts to avoid any repercussions for taking

the Moonstone:

He had kept the Diamond, in flat defiance of the

assassination, in India. He kept the Diamond, in flat defiance of

public opinion, in England. There you have a portrait of a man

before you, as in a picture: a character that braved everything;

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and a face, handsome as it was, that looked possessed by the

devil (Moonstone 44).

Victorian identity, for the individual in the private, the nation in the

domestic, and the empire in the global, are all distinct yet intercalated

prisms of culture (Arnold 18) as diamonds symbolize public and

private ideologies. Jewelry especially that consisting of diamonds -

have a greater purpose in culture and literature of the time as

representative of the ideals of the Victorian era. As British imports and

exports, jewels and jewelry maintained the face of the British Empire

the covetable wealth that increased with industrialization and the rise

of a global economy and growth of established trading groups akin to

the famous and well-established British East India Company, but also

the power through possession of the Royal Navy and British military

that protected its capitalist and political interests abroad via force and

fight.

With manufacturing, however, also came the ability through

these imports to create secondary jewelry, which is less expensive

jewelry in all price ranges, and was then consumed by the domestic

British populace or exported; Arnold denotes that now jewels became

widely owned as commodities, mined and traded around the globe,

and valued as signs of wealth, class, empire, gender roles and

relations, and aesthetic refinement (Arnold 7). Possession of gold was

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important in order to support Britains currency and further expand

international trade as well as be used for jewelry production.

Historically, imperialism in Africa was due to the excellent

resources and strategic positioning of ports for trade and travel (South

Africa). The Cape of Good Hope was an extremely advantageous port

for the British military to acquire from the Dutch in 1795 after the

Battle of Muizenberg, as it proved an excellent trading post and stop

for the ships travelling between South Asia and the Indian

subcontinent, as well as a vital military position for maintaining

geopolitical power both on land in the British colonies and in the seas,

so as to protect trading ships from pirates in the Indian Ocean. In order

to be a major player in the global trade of gemstones, Great Britain

had to maintain their own sources for capitalist mining one of which

was in the Cape Colony of South Africa, where both the Eureka

diamond and the Star of South Africa were found in the 1860s under

British colonialism (Cape Town Diamond Museum). What had occurred

in Great Britain with the Industrial Revolution, and the transnational

migration in America with the California Gold Rush in the 1850s,

similarly followed after the discovery of these two diamonds in South

Africa the Mineral Revolution. With it came a boom in

industrialization from a once mostly-agrarian society, which not only

changed the geography but also the culture, as demographics changed

and urbanization developed.

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Cecil Rhodes, a famous British mining magnate and the Prime

Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890-1896, was also the founder of

the De Beers Consolidated Mines (now the De Beers Group of

Companies), which originally had the monopoly on global diamond

trading. Rhodes firmly supported New Imperialism and the Scramble

for Africa as it not only supported his supremacist agenda he once

said we [the British] are the finest race in the world and the more of

the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy

those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable

specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they

were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra

employment a new country added to our dominion gives(Confession

of Faith) but also brought great wealth and power to the British

Empire and himself. Trade, via imperialism, had then supplied the

British with the necessary resources to make jewelry in greater

quantities of varying qualities authors Ginny Redington Dawes and

Corrine Davidov of Victorian Jewelry: Unexplored Treasures estimate

that the quantityof jewelry produced in the nineteenth century

probably exceeded the output of all previous ages together.

Indeed, the Victorian consumption of objects namely, jewels

and jewelry through mercantilism and imperialistic means, according

to Arnolds summation of Karl Marxs and Arjun Appadurais critical

analyses of capitalism, labor, and commodities, attests to the

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importance of the commodity, to its ability to communicate an invisible

realm of meaning, yoking a visible object like jewelry to aesthetic,

political, gendered, or class meanings (Arnold 38). The Moonstone

has such operative ability and animation as it acts as a channel

reflecting the environment back to itself (Free 356) and as [a]

symbolic object [which] reveal[s] political and social conflict at the

heart of a culture (Arnold 43) for Herncastle and the British Empire,

and the violent actions of each for the pursuit of possession of the

Moonstone, and of India. Arnold also claims when individual and

cultural values embodied in the jewels exist as an internal conflict for a

character, his or her handling of the object constitutes a site of rich

emotional production (Arnold 30). Herncastles handling verifies

these values through his peculiar behaviour upon arrival back to

England; despite his wealth and rank, rumours abound that in his new

solitary, vicious, underground life he is now smoking opium,

experimenting, and carousing with those well beneath his class

(Moonstone 44). Two years prior to the transcription of this part of the

narrative by Betteredge, Herncastle visits the Verinder estate wasted,

and worn, and old, and shabby, and as wild and as wicked as ever

(Moonstone 45), pleading to visit with Lady Verinder and Rachel when

he is refused, he begins to laugh in a soft, chuckling, horridly

mischievous way and says he will remember [his] nieces birthday

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(Moonstone 45). The next the Verinders hear of Herncastle, he has

died, and has bequeathed the Diamond to Rachel for her birthday.

This beautiful yellow Diamond, one of the largest in the world

its size made it a phenomenon in the diamond market; its colour a

category by itselfthe lowest of the various estimates given was

twenty thousand pounds (Moonstone 50) which, converted to USD

and factoring inflation, would make the gems worth at least

$699,000.00 today, at minimum. However, Herncastle did not acquire

and possess it for its monetary value, for the financial return was

higher if he had the gem cut and re-sold in smaller pieces. He was

aware of how his life was threatened once he took ownership of the

Diamond, and he is conscious of how retaining the gem in its

unchanged entirety is dependent on how it is removed from his

possession through death. Franklin Blake, his will executor, tells

Betteredge that if Herncastle had died by violent means, as in if

someone were to murder him to take the gem from him, then the

Moonstone was to indeed be deposited in [Amsterdam] with a famous

diamond-cutter, and it was to be cut up into from four to six separate

stones (Moonstone 50) so that the integrity of the Diamond, as a

whole stone, is here artfully made dependent on the preservation from

violence of the Colonels life because if he is killed, then the Diamond

will be the Diamond no longer; its identity will be destroyed

(Moonstone 50).
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This aversion to violence not only to his physical being but also

enacted upon the Diamond through some type of deconstruction - is

incredibly ironic considering the manner in which the gem was taken

from the Palace treasury by Herncastle in the Family Paper in the first

place. When asked by Betteredge what the reason is for Herncastles

logic in the will, Blake gives credit to a plot organized among Indians

who originally owned the jewelwith some old Hindoo superstition at

the bottom of it (Moonstone 51). The Diamonds integrity as a

whole must be maintained. Arnold denotes that India valued the size

and weight of the stone as a natural find, granting value to the

diamond as a product of nature that could symbolize and suggest a

natural order to religious and political power (Arnold 41), which

implies that Herncastle, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is

upholding an Eastern cultural value that has travelled with him and has

been implicated legally into his will, despite an increase in the

exoticization of diamonds and gems taken from India and transported

internationally to European cities that had diamond-cutters guilds, like

Amsterdam. He recognizes that the Diamond is a symbol of India and

the imbalanced relationship it has with Britain, and that any alteration

to the Diamond made for its conformity to Western jewelry styles is

injudicious to its Eastern meaning, since the gem has political and

spiritual power (because of its domestic transfer between maharajas

and warring Indian groups prior to its seizure by Herncastle, and its
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setting within the Moon Gods head) even though removing it from

India is the first and ultimate transgression. But, through an

imperialistic gesture, with historical precedents in British history for the

gifting of tributes (Arnold, 88), he gifts it to Rachel, queen of the

day (Moonstone 76). Yet, by having Lady Verinder reject and turn

away Uncle Herncastle and his gift, the novel arguesagainst royal

support of the [British East India] companys actions in India (Arnold

89). When compared to the treatment of the Kohinoor Diamond, which

was cut and refashioned for Queen Victoria in the 1850s, both gems

are given as gifts and worn by women. But, does the gifting justify or

erase the theft? Does the giving really equivocate the taking?

This command to retain the Diamonds integrity persists in

how it is conditionally given to Rachel if her mother, Lady Julia

Verinder, his sister (by marriage), is still alive upon Rachels birthday,

then she shall receive it. If Lady Verinder is not alive, then the

Diamond shall be sent to Amsterdam as previously mentioned and cut

accordingly. It is so Lady Verinder may witness his free forgiveness of

the injury which her conduct towards methe insult offered to me as

an officer and a gentleman, when her servant, by her orders, closed to

the door of her house against me, on the occasion of her daughters

birthday (Moonstone 53) which was the last time there was any type

of contact between them. Herncastle posthumously uses the

Moonstone as a vehicle for the impression he wants to leave behind, as

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its position as an object to be publicly displayed will act as a continual

reminder in the Verinder household of what had happened and who he

was. Betteredge and Blake debate whether this is a vengeful and

spiteful scheme by this wicked man or if this is the character of a

penitent and Christian man (Moonstone 54) and while Betteredge says

that man died with a horrid revenge in his heart, and a horrid lie on

his lips. God alone knows the truth (Moonstone 54) it remains that

the Moonstone is now a vehicle for more than one plot of revenge its

own revenge from being thieved from its place in the forehead of

Chandra and then the rejection by his sister Lady Verinder.

As a gift to his niece, the Moonstone becomes a point of

connection for Herncastle and Rachel, as well as a point of contention

about what the gem is supposed to do and what it actually does now

that it is in the Verinder household: is it supposed to enable Lady

Verinder to forgive Herncastle? Does the gem have a true innocent

purpose as a gift? Or, as Betteredge and Blake ponder, has Herncastle

knowingly left a legacy of trouble and danger to his sister, through the

innocent medium of his sisters child? (Moonstone 46) because of the

three mysterious Indians now waiting in the town outside of the

Verinder estate, just as Blake has arrived. Arnold argues that the

Moonstone, in its duality, is:

A material object and an exchange of power; an ordinary

gesture and a risk as it symbolizes and transfers values that bind

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the society in which it was given. What makes the diamond so

valuable as a gift to be given and received makes it equally

valuable as an object to be taken by other for whom the gift was

never intended. In this way, gift giving and theft create value

reciprocally (Arnold, 89).

The acceptance of the Moonstone in some ways attempts to legitimize

imperialism and Herncastles actions while placing the burden of the

curse and the means of which the Diamond was acquired on Rachel.

This inheritance comes with a price: a pretty gemstone with a violent

past and a dangerous present, one that plays into the Victorian

imperialistic tendency for the domestics purposeful ignorance of what

is actually occurring abroad in its colonies. Arnold asks if Rachel,

ignorant to the Diamonds true history, inherits the sins of the father

by accepting the gift, and more generally, whether all citizens bear

guilt arising form the actions of the state (Arnold, 91). In 1973, John

Reed asks a similar question: Does a nation inherit the evil of its

forbearers if it accepts benefits derived from the crime? in English

Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone (287),

to which Melissa Free answers in her Dirty Linen conclusion as yes, if

that inheritance includes a logic that we persist in believing and

enacting (Free 363).

Interestingly, both plots of revenge stem from a defiant rejection

of duty, either to your country or to your family. While Herncastles

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military unit in Seringapatam was explicitly ordered to not steal

anything upon pain of death, he did so anyway, incurring the wrath of

the dying Brahmin priest and the curse of the Moonstone. Lady

Verinder also broke custom by refusing her kins audience when he

came to visit. The gem manifests as a visual reminder of the

dissension and the hostility that persists, not only between Herncastle

and the Verinder family but also as an homage to the violence used to

obtain and move it in the spirit of imperialism, by being a portable

metonym for India itself (Portable 40). While its aesthetic purpose is

to appear beautiful and be displayed, what the hidden and unknown

representation of it is the secrets, stories, and cultural myths it

contains.

Both the private and the public are symbolized through the

binary nature of the Moonstone, where subject-object relations are

muddled through the actions of the characters. While Betteredge is still

unsure of the message Herncastle wants to convey is of a Christian

man repentant, passing along a stolen object through his mode of

inheritance, another characters motives to possess the Diamond are

revealed as well. Godfrey Ablewhite, a seemingly very kind,

handsome, wealthy, famous philanthropist, and cousin to Rachel,

appears at the Verinder estate for her birthday party with the intention

of marrying her. Rachel rejects his proposal, and that night he

convinces an opium-influenced Franklin Blake to take the Moonstone

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and give it to him, where he promises to return it to the bank for

safekeeping but instead makes off with it and attempts to have it cut in

pieces and sold. However, he is presumably killed by the Indian priests

that have been following the Diamond, fulfilling the vengeance that

was initiated when Herncastle took it in the first place.

The private and public continue to be at odds since the

Moonstone is the fictionalized historical Kohinoor Diamond. Because

the Kohinoor has been on public display since 1851 and possessed by

the British Royal Family, it contrasts with the privately owned

Moonstone, both in India and in Britain by Colonel Herncastle and

(briefly) by the Verinders. But this contrast allows readers of The

Moonstone to interpret Collins challenge of the British cultural

practice of building and maintaining empire (Arnol, 75) as it returns

upon itself to destabilize domestic British culture (Arnold 83).

Through historical criticism, this lens is Wilkie Collins attempt to

reject what happened when the Kohinoor Diamond underwent a

physical and cultural transformation at the request of the British

monarchy (Arnold 81) and his attempt to rewrite history in his fiction,

as while the Kohinoor Diamond remains to this day in the Crown Jewels

of England, the fictional Moonstone was returned to the head of the

Moon God and the culture of India, providing some alternate message

about imperialism, the gifting, stealing, and repossessing of travelling

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objects because of imperialism, and the both the Indian culture and the

Moonstones refusal to be defined by the British Empire.

In Stefanie Markovits Form Things: Looking at Genre through

Victorian Diamonds, which takes a neo-formalist approach to

dissecting the role of diamonds in Victorian literature, diamonds are

given two values: the lyric and the narrative, the former which is

associated with symbolism and the latter which has to do with both the

object and the storys form. Diamonds, then, being both material and

immaterial (Victorian Studies Vol. 52 No. 4, 596), the polysemantic

Moonstone has therefore come to represent multiple meanings, both

on in the public and private sphere: a sacred gem re-possessed and

hunted by its current Indian protectors; a diamond of great worth as a

solitaire, by itself without any additions or detractions, but even more

value deconstructed; as an item of adornment and display; as a symbol

that represents and rejects British imperialism; and as an agent for

multiple revenges and plot movement. Not just the Moonstone, but

diamonds in general for the Victorians, while they establish public

values of money, class, gender roles, and empire[and] symbolized

private personal emotions through gifts, inheritances, and as aesthetic

objects (Arnold 20) they also reveal a cultures moving history of

desires and emotions individual feelings and experiences that

accumulate and become embedded in historical practices in the

mining, production, marketing, and wearing of jewelry (Arnold 20)

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this is why the unnamed first narrator does not report on Herncastle

immediately, and why both Rachel and the poor housemaid Rosanna

Spearman remain quiet about seeing Franklin Blake (unwittingly) steal

the Moonstone, which is then possessed by Ablewhite. The Moonstone,

although an uncommunicative object, holds the history of its

transferences, which is kept quiet by Rachel and Rosanna, although

they are fully capable of communicating it aloud, do no such thing

because of their respective loves for Blake. Furthermore, the

Moonstone is a public symbol of Indian ethnic and religious history

through its crystal identity, yet it is privatized through imperialism. This

distinction between the private and public and the domestic (both that

of Britain and of the individual household) and global exposes Victorian

perception of objects as they relate to their society and individuals: the

Moonstone as an agent for interpretation of the motives and moods of

the characters in the story, for without which we would not see.

Jewelry acts as a visual sign that communicates a unique

language through and about objects and their relationship to

characters. As an agent, the prismatic structure of the Moonstone,

crystalline in its appearance, allows a multi-faceted story to be

constructed around it through the novels eight total narrators - like the

octahedral structure of a diamond - and the dynamic relationships

between the human characters and the object in question, which not

only draw the readers attentions to the Moonstone as it is quite

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literally the focal point of the story whether it is in front of the

characters eyes or not, but also raises questions about British values,

practices, and culture, especially seen through British colonialism.

Both the presence and absence of the Moonstone in its various

settings - which indicate a travel to, or from, other places direct the

narrative to focus on the symbolism of the gifted Diamond instead of

its physical appearance. Collins makes the Moonstone the main

character, not just an un-credited object, in his novel by setting the

Moonstone in contrast to his human cast of characters, who all fit a

role in a Victorian society influenced by the structure of colonialism

(Arnold 85). The international travel and enterprise of the British

Empire is revealed through the movement and consumption of gems

and jewelry in domestic, private spheres. Arnold claims that The

Moonstone argues convincingly that a parallel exists between colonial

practices abroad and domestic hierarchical practices at home (85)

and one way this is done is through Betteredges continual reference to

and reading of Robinson Crusoe, the 1719 Daniel Defoe novel about a

man who leaves Britain and is stranded on an island for nearly three

decades. An intriguing situation is established as Robinson Crusoe is

well-known for its titular character creating and representing an

industrializing, colonial organizational structure on the island he

inhabits as he creates an economic system, the othering of the

indigenous people, as imperializing forces often did through religion or

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oppression when encountering non-Western groups. Like Crusoes

enterprising character, who kills, oppresses, and capitalizes abroad,

Herncastles identity as an empire builder is legitimized through

Rachels acceptance and ownership of the symbolic Diamond, in the

same way that the military actions of the East India Company are

legitimized through Queen Victorias acceptance of the Kohinoor

Diamond (Arnold 91). Similarly, Godfrey Ablewhite performs this

aspiration as well due to his involvement in many philanthropic efforts

and his missionary zeal (98) and his involvement in the further

thievery of the Diamond.

Interpreted as an early literary text advocating for imperialism,

or at least reflecting the feelings of British society, the frequent

mention of Robinson Crusoe and its obsessive study by Betteredge in

the narration of The Moonstone seems to add a tone of irony to its

message of anti-imperialism, or at least a moment of contemplative

thought to the relationship between the island of Britain and the

actions of its people abroad and what the immaterial symbolism of

the Moonstone represents about colonialism.

Arnold perfectly states Victorian jewelrys role in its culture and

literature allows us to conceive of jewelry as part of a visual language

made of objects (28). By studying the role of diamonds, gems, and

jewelry that are indexed to imperialistic ideologies and Victorian

culture, the historicism and symbolism of the Moonstone can be

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perceived as not just an inactive object of imperialism but as an agent

of anti-imperialism through its movement between the multiple entities

that possess the gem, both state and individual. The Moonstone

challenges imperialism with its myth and cursed natures, its

narrative agency, and its symbolic power as a cultural and religious

talisman in India but also as a valuable product of a colonizing,

capitalistic British culture.

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Routledge, 2011.

Battle of Muizenberg. Muizenberg, Muizenberg Tourism, 9 Apr. 2013,

www.muizenberg.info/history/battle-of-muizenberg.

Bundy, Colin J., and Randolph Vigne. South Africa. Encyclopdia Britannica, Encyclopdia

Britannica, Inc., 15 Nov. 2016, www.britannica.com/place/South-Africa/Diamonds-gold-

and-imperialist-intervention-1870-1902.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Penguin Classics,1868.

Dawes, Ginny Redington, and Corinne Davidov. Victorian Jewelry:

Unexplored Treasures. Abbeville Press Publishers, 1991.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Penguin Classics, 1719.

Famous People in the Diamond Industry | CT Diamond Museum. Cape Town Diamond

Museum, Cape Town Diamond Museum, www.capetowndiamondmuseum.org/about-

diamonds/famous-people/.
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