"Dirty linen": legacies of empire in Wilkie Collins's the Moonstone.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-DEC-06

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Domestic, the Oxford English Dictionary informs, means "of or pertaining to one's own country or nation; not foreign, internal, inland, 'home.'" But what becomes of this definition when that which pertain[s] to one's own country or nation is inextricably, dependently intertwined with sites--nations, colonies, protectorates--abroad; when, like England in 1799, 1848, and 1868 (the years, respectively, of the opening scene of The Moonstone, its principal action, and its publication), the foreign shapes the domestic: empire defining (though not equivalent to) nation? To "be" English in the nineteenth century was to be of, and hence constituted by, (the British) empire, to claim the summary position not only of Britishness but of empire itself. English identity was superincumbent, pressing down on that which simultaneously held it up: the subject races, the colonized countries, the "foreign." Mutually constitutive of what it meant to be English, domestic and foreign were false binaries, ideologically and discursively produced and consumed, enabling the great white illusion of imperial necessity and generosity, and the refutation of lack that underscored the unidirectional and utterly false logic of imperialism: we are doing them a service. (2) Wilkie Collins challenges this factitious binary in The Moonstone by constructing a private, domestic history as simultaneously imperial, collapsing not only home and away, but also private and public, and family and empire, and he does so through an archive--of family, by family, for family--that belies its own intent. Collected by the family's new patriarch, Franklin Blake, in order to remove the "suspicion" under which "the characters of innocent people have suffered" (Collins, 17) and may suffer in the future, his archive--that is, in fact, The Moonstone--actually documents not innocence, but collusion with the imperial project, enacted and perpetuated by a family collectively unable to identify imperial assault as a "crime [that] brings its own fatality with it" (16). (3) In failing to recognize their part in the very guilt to which they attest, the voices that produce the archive do not merely bear witness; they actively participate in familial responsibility for imperial depredation through their denial of it. They inherit, in effect, that which they refuse to own, and in trying to distinguish the domestic from the foreign, demonstrate not their inevitable but their manifest inextricability.

The Archive, the Judge, the Detective, the Reader

To underscore--to solicit, even--the reader's active interpretive role, Collins structures the text as an archival document, constructs the plot as a mystery, and positions fictional and actual readers as both judges and detectives. The compilation of letters, reports, notes, newspaper clippings, journal entries, wills, and even a receipt, "placed on record in writing" (17), serves as testimony for the reader's consideration. Franklin Blake organizes and submits the evidence to his family, while Collins, indirectly, submits it to us. The reader is asked to evaluate not just the theft of the diamond from a country estate in England but its earlier removal from a sacred Hindu shrine in India, presumably by John Herncastle, "the Honourable John" (39), "the well-known nickname of the East India Company," whose "theft of the Moonstone comes to represent the legally sanctioned robbery of India by the British government" (Nayder, Wilkie, 120). (4) The stakes of the theft are greater than the loss of the family's (questionable, at best) treasure, for what is really on trial in this novel is personal and national responsibility in the violence of imperialism.

Though an extract from a "Family Paper," describing events that took place in India in 1799, opens the novel, it takes the form of a "Prologue" (MS, 11); "The Story," as labeled by its assembler, Franklin Blake, begins with "The Loss of the Diamond" in Yorkshire in 1848 (17). Rather than introduce the story himself, Blake instructs Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward, to "take the pen in hand, and start the story" (18). Blake and the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff, have decided that

"this strange family story [...] ought to be told [by] certain persons concerned in [the] events who are capable of relating them. Starting from these plain facts, the idea is that we should all write the story of the Moonstone in turn--as far as our own personal experience extends, and no further." (17, 18)

These words are Blake's, but they are transmitted through Betteredge, who quotes the gentleman. Blake's hand in the compilation is thus by no means invisible, but it is, like his part in the events that unfold in the novel, always occluded by distance, if not by disavowal. Initiating his narrative by documenting the legal influence on the collection of first-person accounts, Betteredge later makes his own observations on the judicial manner in which evidence is gathered:

In this matter of the Moonstone the plan is, not to present reports, but to produce witnesses. I picture to myself a member of the family reading these pages fifty years hence. Lord! what a compliment he will feel it, to be asked to take nothing on hearsay, and to be treated in all respects like a Judge on the bench. (195)

The legal language of the novel (5) caught the attention of a contemporary, who, reviewing it for The Times, wrote,

There is a superabundance of law, and [...] every narrator makes too much a point of giving his simplest statements the air of depositions taken before a police magistrate. But some of these faults are very closely allied to the merits of the book. (The Moonstone, 4)

Indeed, these perceived faults do serve as merits, which derive chiefly from the book's wedding of the personal with the political, the private with the public, the past with the present, and, ultimately, fiction with fact.

Collins goes further in his effort to solicit the reader as an active interpreter, for not only does he structure the text as both archive and legal document, he also generates a mystery, casting the reader as chief detective in the first English detective novel. (6) Perhaps the reason, then, for the "great" Sergeant's Cuff's (MS, 300) initial failure either to recover the diamond or to detect the thief is that, though looking at the right subject--the family itself--and even in the right place--in the home--he is still overlooking the stone's earlier theft--its removal from the Indian shrine. Cuff's disappearance halfway through the text incites the reader to do t/his work. (7) So, too, does the use of multiple narrators, which wrenches authority away from an individual first-person narrator or an ill-defined but omnipresent omniscient narrator. Other writers had used multiple narrators in their fiction before--most notably Samuel Richardson in his epistolary novels--but Collins's particular pairing of multiple narration and mystery / detection underscores the variability of perspective in startling ways and "encourage[s] the reader to draw his own conclusions by comparing and contrasting accounts" (Lonoff, "Multiple," 149). A collection of voices that serve as both evidence and archive, this family history obviates and implicitly challenges the (imperially linked) authority of a single, knowing figure, documenting not merely the double-theft and recovery of a gem valued at [pounds sterling]30,000, but the high cost of the illusion of innocence upheld at--and in the--home.

If the text is an archive of evidentiary testimony, and the reader is the judge-detective, what is her subject? While the hunt for the diamond and the identification of its thief/ves are our ostensible objectives, I have begun to argue that the stakes are actually much greater: it is the thick overlay of empire and home that we are truly examining, (a portrayal) in which home is not merely affected by but effecting empire. The "legacy of trouble and danger" inherited by the family is generated not by the agency of a stolen diamond--its presumed (Oriental) power--but by national agency--agents of empire, the family itself (MS, 43). The "Indian Jewel" (300) is not cursed; it is "plunder[ed]" (14): therein lies the problem. In my analysis, empire, not the Moonstone, is the family curse and the real "family scandal" (148), centered around--and illuminated by--the spoils of empire, is the scandal of a grasping nation overreaching itself, protected by the urgency of containment from within. Family history operates as imperial history writ small, and the murders and thefts that the family tries to keep quiet serve as a cloak for a murderous, thieving nation, generating and purportedly preserving its empire.

Though imperial violence is relayed as domestic discourse by Herncastle's cousin in the novel's prologue, Collins, both through Blake's nameless progenitor and through Blake himself, a member of the family still (and again) divided by (the most recent theft of) the gem, extends an invitation to the novel's readers to act as surrogate assessors of the (family) archive--to judge for ourselves a "family story" (17), a fiction, that began with an historical, imperial siege. Attributing the story's authorship to eleven others and its editorship to Franklin Blake, Collins, though distancing himself, invites interpretation of Herncastle and, by implication, of the violence for which he is both conduit and metonym: the national crime that he refuses to acknowledge and that his cousin accommodatingly obscures. Blake's alleged neutrality--he is at pains to assert his objectivity, to "record [...] the facts"--mirrors the author's own (17). "In the interest of truth" (17), Blake collects and presents "the attestations of witnesses," to which "nothing [is] added, altered or removed" (197), allowing himself the authorship of only two chapters. Unlike Collins, however, Blake and his forbearer fail to see the imbrication of family and--the implication of family (responsibility) in--empire. It is this inability to register that which the narrative records that determines Blake's place in the perpetuation of the logic of imperialism, a logic that reproduces while absolving itself--a logic that self-replicates and self-deludes; and one that we, as readers, are explicitly invited to repudiate.

The legacy available to us as readers of Collins's carefully constructed archive, "a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal" (17), is to look at rather than away from history's dirty linen, refusing to accept unquestioningly a dominant narrative obscuring responsibility. Whereas Peter Caracciolo contends that "Collins's Arabesque devices help expose the thoughtless Western reader's own complicity in the theft of the sacred diamond" (167), I insist that readers--all readers--are presented with choice. Careful scrutiny of Collins's archive allows the reader the opportunity to reject a legacy of lies. In identifying the ways in which imperial denials of accountability and beliefs in entitlement play out in the text--the way, that is, that imperial mythologies are exposed--the reader can elect to reevaluate the past and to refuse to participate in the perpetuation of the logic of secrecy and disavowal that undergirds imperialism, "then" as now. While this "family" history may, indeed, be the reader's own, it need not be her future--which is to say that how one reads not only matters but is itself political.

In drawing attention to agency in his original preface to The Moonstone, Collins stresses the very responsibility of which I write--not only of characters, but also of readers. Acknowledging a shift in his interests and artistic intent, he claims:

In some of my former novels, the object proposed has been to trace the influence of circumstances upon character. In the present story I have reversed the process. The attempt made here is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. (June 30, 1868)

The notion that the maturing author wishes to investigate is not, now, how circumstance molds character and directs choice, but how people and choices shape events. He sets out to explore in The Moonstone not psychology (the influence of circumstance on human beings) but action: the impact of individuals, and their societies--character, that is--on history--or circumstance. This redirection of purpose signals a move in authorial concern away from subjectivity toward accountability, from personal susceptibility to personal responsibility. Overtly focused on family, The Moonstone is ultimately a study of the impact of individuals and the (English) nation they collectively color on events themselves; as well as their refutation of that impact, even as they unwittingly convey (and live) it (out). The implication for readers is that interpretation matters, for if what we do has an impact, so, too, does how we perceive events, both past and present.

Everyday Violence, Everywhere Else

Though Collins's contemporaries were familiar with "empire," they tended to perceive it as something that existed outside of, but not as part of, nation, (8) and his nineteenth-century reviewers--no doubt as a consequence of this belief--did not see The Moonstone as a piece of social criticism. Evoking the sense that home and away are distinct, Margaret Oliphant, in "Sensation Novels," an 1862 article for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, valorizes the "distant sound of guns," which, even post-Mutiny, do not merely threaten but actually bolster her sense of security along the bank of the Thames: "That distant roar has come to form a thrilling accompaniment to the safe life we lead at home" (564). For Oliphant, imperial violence and domestic tranquility are discrete, as are sensation fiction and reality. Danger is romantic--"thrilling"--and/because distant, its echo but not its presence an "accompaniment" to the dullness and safety that is home. Oliphant's attitude is similar to that of the anonymous writer of "The Sensation Novel," which, in 1874, appeared in The Argosy, a literary journal edited by sensation novelist Mrs. Henry Wood. Here, too, violence is romanticized and praised, as long as it takes place outside the English home (137). Both Oliphant and the anonymous contributor to The Argosy mirror Rachel...

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