[In the following essay, Duncan explores Collins's representation of romantic imperialist discourse in The Moonstone.]

NOVEL AND EMPIRE

Wilkie Collins's Moonstone (1868) is the sole mid-Victorian novel of the first rank that makes England's relation with India the center of its business. In the conquest of Seringapatam an English officer steals a sacred Indian diamond and bequeaths it to his niece back home. When the jewel disappears from the niece's bedroom, her family and friends—a cast of representative English gentry—fall under suspicion. Eventually the thief is revealed and punished, but agents of the cult carry the Moonstone back to India.

Despite its concern with an imperial dispossession of national character, Collins's best-known novel fails to appear in any of the powerful studies of Victorian representations of empire of the last few years.¹ It is not as though the relation between imperialism and the novel has been judged unimportant. For Edward Said, “the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other” (70-1). This faintly scandalous claim invokes a familiar theory of the novel as the dominant literary form of historical modernity, identified with a new mimetic technology of realism. Said confronts the paradoxical absence of colonialism, the most salient condition of Britain's political economy, from the mise-en-scène of most Victorian novels. Empire appears nowhere because it is everywhere, the invisible cause of a domestic scenery of realist effects, informing the text as “a structure of attitude and reference” (62). An “incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic cultural form,” the novel founds its “globalized world-view” upon a hierarchy of geographical and social space: a metropolitan center expansive with light and detail, a remote and shadowy colonial margin (76, 52).

Supported by a virtuoso reading of Mansfield Park, Said's thesis coincides with Suvendrini Perera's nuanced and resourceful account of the symbolic fabrication of empire “at the primary levels of vocabulary, image, character, place, plot, narrative” (x, 11). Both critics rely upon a selective construction of the nineteenth-century novel, derived from Ian Watt's canon of formal realism and F. R. Leavis's great tradition of moral realism. The old critical hierarchy of rival, unequal traditions of the novel rather too neatly reproduces the ideological relation between center and periphery exposed in the critique of imperialism. Realism, proximate and metonymically dense, comprises the mainstream genre of domestic fiction, while empire lies in the backwaters of romance. The equation between the novel and formal realism, which tends to make the problem of empire one of reference, informs Martin Green's survey of a romance tradition of imperial adventure tales and Patrick Brantlinger's classification of the fictions of empire as “Imperial Gothic” (230-50).²

Sara Suleri has analyzed “the colonial fallacy through which India could be interpreted only as the unreadability of romance,” secured by the binary closure of allegory (2-15). Nevertheless romance (surely no kind of text is less unreadable) enabled, rather than constrained, the work of historical interpretation in nineteenth-century fiction. Far from signifying a local or reflexive failure of Victorian realism, romance was its dialectical guarantee. The distinction between the terms did not become reified until the demographic expansion and class subdivision of the literary market in the last quarter of the century (the period of Brantlinger's Imperial Gothic). Before then, they mark a productive rhetorical tension across a common literary register: a modern vocabulary of empirical visibility, particularity, and probability, entangled with a grammar of plotting and figuration that encodes past or original cultural forms and tends toward allegory and the master plots of national destiny. Victorian authors found the model of this narrative in the Waverley novels, which thematized the relations between domestic and national levels of event and among different cultures. Scott addresses the imperial constitution of domestic life by combining the linear, progressive, determinist plot of Enlightenment history with wonderful romance plots of return and recovery.³ The modern suppression of cultural origins coincides with their reabsorption as aesthetic forms or exotic commodities. In Guy Mannering (1815), one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Scott's conservative allegory of modernization relies on a scheme of complex analogies, articulated by a grammar of romance conventions, among the recovery of an alienated domestic estate, the sentimental education of protagonists, Indian conquest, and the supersession of primitive ways of life in Scotland. Different kinds of historical and cultural capital—metropolitan and colonial as well as patriarchal-feudal and matriarchal-tribal—converge to legitimate the modern British estate. The energy of their convergence is signified by romance, a syncretic cultural tradition that contains, orders, and justifies the diachronic motions of history, even as Britain's looting of India perilously repeats the ancient constitution of a domestic native culture from wild Eastern origins. Guy Mannering exemplifies Gauri Viswanathan's recent thesis that British national culture was founded upon imperial formations, rather than vice versa.⁴ As a category of cultural value, romance expresses the virtue and potency, rather than mere deficiency, of different cultural formations even as it contains them in an imperial solution.

The Moonstone: A Romance belongs to the tradition founded by Scott, in which romance represents an allegory of historical and cultural formation. Collins represents the subtle alienation of an English domestic culture, signified by a virtuous transparency of character, through its participation in an imperial economy. India now holds a fatal glamour of cultural origins, while England's history and national character are hooded in a colonial darkness. Conceived at the end of the decade of imperialist panic that followed the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Collins's tale does not propound an anti-imperialist sympathy for oppressed colonial peoples, or admiration for a devilish Hindu culture, but neither does it enthrone the imperialist subject-position, the proud seat of world-historical agency, analyzed by Said. Disconcertingly, the grand narrative structure of romance corresponds to an Asiatic rather than an English cultural identity. It contains the effects of realism within it, including the progressive model of history, in a demonic counter-imperialism. When a conventional English domestic order is finally restored it appears reduced, artificial, bright but fragile; while the horizons of the world around it, opened by the deeds of empire, are sublime and alarming. Imperial romance turns upon the diminished solutions of domestic fiction to prophesy, not without agoraphobia, another narrative domain: the public, democratic, history-making vastnesses of a world economy.

INDIA AS MYSTERY

T. S. Eliot called The Moonstone “the first and greatest of English detective novels.”⁵ Dorothy L. Sayers, a practitioner of the genre, elaborates: “Judged by the standards of seventy years later … The Moonstone is impeccable. What has happened, in fact, is that The Moonstone set the standard, and that it has taken us all this time to recognise it.”⁶ Sayers puts her finger on the anomaly of The Moonstone's status as a generic archetype, the product of a subsequent tradition. Yet the novel was obliged to make sense in a preexisting literary grammar. To read it under the influence of its reputation is to be surprised by the thematic failures and disjunctions that compose its bravura formal perfection. Not the professional detective, the redoubtable Sergeant Cuff, but an outcast, the weird Ezra Jennings, succeeds in accounting for the diamond's theft, through sympathy and sheer luck as much as through scientific ratiocination.⁷ Nor is the Moonstone restored to its patrimonial function within the symbolic economy of the Victorian country house. Instead, a sinister gang of Indians gets away with “Robbery! … And Murder!”⁸

The English failure to recover the Moonstone mirrors an Indian success. The Moonstone is not lost but restored, to sacred origins. The Indians are not “a set of murdering thieves” but “a wonderful people,” ready to sacrifice caste (more precious than human life) for the sake of religion (109). So argues the explorer Murthwaite, whose shared identity with the Indians as a secret agent in an alien empire enables him to speak for the virtues of Hindu culture. “This sort of thing didn't at all square with my English ideas,” protests the steward of the country house (108).

The positive alterity of India, its victory over English police skill, complicates recent accounts that make The Moonstone perform a double gesture of epistemological totalization and ideological closure in the name of an omniscient detection. The mystery novel is supposed to cure a crisis of representation with a hermeneutic virtuosity that regulates the relation between world and subject. D. A. Miller argues that Collins's narrative subjects a familiar social world to the alienating surveillance of an interloping detective, then localizes guilt in a scapegoat and disperses the function of detection throughout the register of the realist representation. The narrative dialectic restores (that is, endows) ideological innocence to the world:

Power in the novel is never gathered into an identifiable (and hence attackable) center. Neither is it radically “disseminated” so that the totality it claims to organize breaks down into discontinuities and inconsistencies. Its paradoxical efficiency lies in the fact that an apparent lack of center at the level of agency secures a total mastery at the level of effect. What finally justifies us in calling the novel's perception of power “ideological” is that The Moonstone never really perceives power as power at all. The novel is itself blinded by a mystificatory strategy of power in the very act of tracing it. … The novel must always “say” power as though it were saying something else. As I've tried to suggest, the “something else” is no less than the irresistible positivity of words and things “as they are.”⁹

Miller's account of a “thoroughly monological” narrative that “promotes a single perception of power” remains strategically blind to the novel's most conspicuous signifier of historical power (54, 56), especially since the condition of being not only “identifiable” but “attackable” constitutes India at the origin of Collins's story. Nor does India simply appear as England's elsewhere, the novel's something else, negative sign of that power and agency repressed in the domestic mimesis. India bears instead “the irresistible positivity” of an alien force that breaks in and out of the domestic order, effortlessly eluding a circumscribed agency of detection.

Despite the sack of Seringapatam that opens the novel, with the British taking the place of previous, Muslim invaders, The Moonstone apprehends an India that exceeds and outlasts British dominion and knowledge. Collins turns around the Scottish Enlightenment universal historiography that described a progression of distinct socioeconomic and cultural formations. James Mill's influential History of British India (1817) relied, for instance, on a conjectural “progress of civil society” to classify Hindu culture as prehistoric rather than as the product of a high civilization. Prehistoric and sublime, Collins's India conforms to a familiar orientalist fantasy, except that prehistory and sublimity now fulfill their tropological potential of resistance to the colonizing, rationalizing rearrangements of a Western evolutionary history. In the final pages, Murthwaite spies on the Moonstone's restoration:

Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.

(526)

The Englishman credits modern (empiricist and individualist) principles of narrative causality, “accident” and “crime,” for the Moonstone's return. But they are irrelevant to an archaic, sacral, and fatalistic world where priestly devotion fulfills destiny. In one of the best discussions of The Moonstone, Tamar Heller argues that it “concludes on the margins of resistance” to the normative domestic regime of Victorian fiction: “The end of the novel promises a repetition of the historical cycle in which repression is followed by resistance.”¹⁰ It is truer to say that Collins represents India as a space more vast and perilous than a “margin”—its own fatal center and dark origins. Cyclical recurrence marks an imaginary domain that exceeds mere history or at least the Western linear history that guarantees the narrative of imperial progress. India is a cultural origin strong enough to resist that alienating momentum and reclaim its own. If Collins's India is no mere periphery sustaining a Western developmental center, neither is its exteriority the proof of an ontological weakness. Stylized, spectral, confected from the tropes of Gothic romance, India represents an alternative symbolic economy that defies scientific detection and sympathetic reciprocity alike. In this way realism apprehends an alien reality. Not for the last time, Manichaeanism is the cultural wisdom of empire.¹¹

The definitive romance of British India appeared more than thirty years after The Moonstone. Kipling's realism illuminates the antithetical technique of Collins's oriental Gothic. In Kim Kipling makes India a mystery thrillingly knowable, penetrable, and playable to the initiates of the imperial game (among whom the reader, for a season, is included). In all its vivid strangeness the great world of Kim's India ends up feeling poignantly familiar, partly because estrangement is made a fact of the hero's psychology. In the last pages the accession of a totalizing perspective dislocates Kim's subjectivity (“the bigness of the world … swept linked thought aside”) to replace it with an instrumental and colonizing relation to a world grasped anew as natural, familiar, everyday:

Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be walked upon, fields to be tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and true—solidly planted upon the feet—perfectly comprehensible—clay of his clay, neither more nor less.¹²

For Said, this epiphanic topos of a post-Wordsworthian realism conforms closely enough to the ideological technique described by Miller (Said, 141-4). If India can be imagined as England, the sufficiency of the real (“the irresistible positivity of things ‘as they are’”) turns out to be above all nostalgic. We read no such domestication of the nocturnal, deadly, and phantasmagoric India in The Moonstone. Its terrain lies apart, shadowed in stock figures that yield no sympathetic texture of dailiness, use-value, lives we might ever inhabit.¹³ It affords, instead, an alien nexus of value: a positivity of evil.

Said argues that the sentimental colonization of India in Kim depends on Kipling's strategic repression of the event that most disturbed the nineteenth-century British imperial imagination, the so-called Indian Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. Collins wrote The Moonstone in the decade following the Mutiny, when stories of rebel atrocities and bloody British reprisals were still flourishing and an epidemic of insurgency spread from New Zealand to Jamaica.¹⁴ Throughout the 1860s the empire appeared on the brink of disintegration, held precariously together by force. A new, dark vision of India emerged, defined by racialist fantasies of oriental barbarism, “changeless patterns of superstition and violence which can be dominated but not necessarily altered”—the exact view reflected and transvalued in The Moonstone (Sharpe, 58; Brantlinger, 200). In this moral climate it is less remarkable that Collins should have eschewed sympathetic realism than that he harnessed the imperialist panic, the nightmare of a devilish India, to depict another world triumphant in its darkness.¹⁵

THE FATE OF CHARACTER

As The Moonstone unfolds, the mystery splits into two problems requiring separate solutions: the whereabouts of the diamond and the identity of the thief. The loss of the diamond soon becomes secondary to a more urgent concern with loss of character. This urgency is expressed by the heroine, Rachel Verinder, whose own character falls hostage to the regime of suspicion instituted after the Moonstone's disappearance (“there's something wrong about Miss Rachel” [173]). She cares far less about the stolen diamond than about the seeming dastardliness of her cousin and lover, Franklin Blake, whom (it turns out) she has witnessed committing the theft. The high psychic cost of the lovers' estrangement impresses more than the final assurance of a complete restoration of their faith in one another. The long ordeal of doubt reveals a symptomatic doubleness of character, experienced by each as a (gender-specific) division of subjectivity. The woman suffers between desire and judgment, when she loves against reason and the evidence of her senses; the man suffers between action and consciousness, when he takes the jewel in a drug-induced trance.¹⁶

The crisis of character, meanwhile, proves to be wholesale and categorical. The gravest casualty, Rosanna Spearman, bears the fragile character of a servant who was once a thief, while Ezra Jennings has “a very doubtful character” (372), which may indeed be “gone” (428) altogether. The vulnerability of both outcasts accompanies a physical dissymmetry and preternatural keenness of sympathetic intuition. In contrast, the novel's villainous case of doubled or divided character, Godfrey Ablewhite, is the classical type of Anglo-Saxon fairness: “He stood over six feet high; he had a beautiful red and white colour; a smooth round face, shaved as bare as your hand; and a head of lovely long flaxen hair, falling negligently over the poll of his neck” (89). Face and hand converge in a deceptive smoothness, since Ablewhite's hands are neither empty nor clean.

Remarkable for its thoroughness rather than originality, the characterological scheme expresses a historical and cultural crisis of national dimensions. Its setting, the country house, is here as elsewhere in Victorian fiction the center of civilization, a synecdoche for England. “I follow the plan adopted by the Queen in opening Parliament,” boasts the house steward and family retainer, Gabriel Betteredge, of his annual address to the servants' hall (93). From the beginning the great house is under siege, soon to be invaded and despoiled: “When I came here from London with that horrible Diamond … I don't believe there was a happier household in England than this. Look at the household now! Scattered, disunited—the very air of the place poisoned with mystery and suspicion!” (223). If the disintegrating agent is the Moonstone (“here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond” [67]), what the household disintegrates into is London. Swarming with lawyers, usurers, philanthropists, and the detective police, the modern commercial metropolis is the very locus of mystery in the nineteenth-century urban gothic tradition recently described by Richard Maxwell.¹⁷ If plunder characterizes the imperial economy at its foreign site (the storming of Seringapatam), the domestic correlative, as Alexander Welsh has noted, is neither production nor even consumption but debt: something like the figure of an ontological lack.¹⁸ Debt is the foreign agent (“a strange gentleman, speaking English with a foreign accent” [91]) that invades the house alongside the Moonstone to undermine Blake's character, and debt drives Ablewhite to pocket the jewel.

Involvement in a modern, global, imperial commercial economy destabilizes the national character of England. This historical allegory would be more reliably conservative if it rested on any firm basis of original English character, untainted by debt or foreign influence, such as the honest squire Roger Carbury affirms in Trollope's Way We Live Now (1875). But no one in The Moonstone, however worthy or sympathetic, has not drunk of the cup of darkness. “There is a wonderful sameness in the solid side of the English character,” Ezra Jennings protests far too late in the proceedings, admitting that a side also exists that is neither (469). Ablewhite, who appears the most solid English gentleman in the book, enjoys anything but internal sameness. “Mr Franklin was a perfect savage by comparison with him,” murmurs Betteredge (97). Only the Indians, truly perfect savages, may preserve (but in the martyrdom of its renunciation) the ontological security of “caste.” (Miss Clack's contribution to this argument, “How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce on us unawares!” [241], typifies the wrong kind of allegorization that absorbs foreign differences into a normative Christian psychomachia.) Among the English, virtuous character has to have lived and suffered through its division, its loss, its incorporation of otherness. Even Rachel Verinder is exotically dark (her name combines “verandah,” that typically colonial sophistication of the English house, with “very Indian”), while Franklin Blake (whose name hints at a blackening of the traditional social type of Anglo-Saxon independence, as in those influential national romances Ivanhoe and Sybil) is a modern cosmopolitan mélange of European identities.¹⁹ Ezra Jennings, the man who shows how Blake took the Moonstone and yet acquits him of criminal guilt, is the novel's garish but honorable personification of racial and sexual adulterations.²⁰

COMMODITY OR FETISH

The phobic representations of a crisis of empire that I have called “imperialist panic” belong to an ideological tradition at least a century old when Collins wrote The Moonstone. The vast imperial spoils of the Seven Years' War, according to Linda Colley, induced “a collective agoraphobia” that contributed to the unsettling of traditional constructs of British national identity between 1763 and the wars with revolutionary France. In 1815 final victory over France, and a further massive consolidation of world empire, provoked a Romantic obsession with “the squandering of civic and personal identity in the imperialist project” and a resulting “internal dislocation” and alien contamination of metropolitan culture.²¹ In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny, during the roughest crisis yet in the British imagination of empire, Collins draws upon this Romantic tradition, specifically alluding to its darkest interpreter, Thomas De Quincey. The “invasion” of first the Indian diamond and then the Hindu gang neatly reverses an imperialist expropriation. A metonymic circulation of properties and categories in England's imperial economy causes their metaphoric destabilization, as they interpenetrate and infect one another. In a global system of exchange, where anything may be substituted for anything else, no character can remain (even if ever it were) original or pure.²²

At the same historical moment, Marx was redefining the Enlightenment historiography of successive socioeconomic and cultural formations. In Collins's scheme the economic network of empire dissolves the boundaries of discrete cultural stages. Robinson Crusoe and a pipe of tobacco, the infallible remedies of old Betteredge, exemplify the earlier, feudal cultural stage he mentally inhabits as one of a primitive development of national empire rather than a purely native Englishness. Robinson Crusoe is the founding fable of a modern, economic, and colonial formation of British identity, while tobacco is one of England's original imperial commodities.²³ Betteredge's solacing pipe joins in analogic series to Franklin Blake's fashionable nicotine addiction, which leads to his ingestion of a more potent, Eastern drug. Opium causes Blake's loss of character, the disastrous division of self from deed. Cultivated in India for export throughout the empire, oriental despot of the imagination of addicted British writers, object of wars to force open Chinese markets—opium above all other substances represented the global penetration and ontological contamination of a modern imperial economy. The commodity in its pure state as all-pervading, all-subverting fluid, opium enthralls the inner subject to an alien, Asiatic identity.²⁴

In contrast, the novel's other (and no less topical) Indian product, the diamond, represents a unique and threatened integrity.²⁵ Perhaps the most striking feature of the historiography of economic and cultural progress in The Moonstone is its radical displacement from any continuous human subject onto the object in question—the Moonstone itself. As its circulation drives the plot and maps the global imperial economy of modernity, the jewel is the vector of a universal history that cuts violently across societies and individuals.

At each stage of its “adventures” the diamond represents a particular cultural formation (34). From a fetish or idol in a Hindu theocracy, to a trophy of Mogul warrior-kings, to an heirloom among the English landed gentry, it will finally become (under the inexorable logic of debt) a commodity in modern commercial society. Dislodged from its sacred origins, the jewel retains their aura, but in the sinister version of a curse. If fatality is the standard romantic figure for an alienated cultural agency (as in Robert Southey's blood-and-thunder Hindu romance, The Curse of Kehama [1810]), commodification promises (to redeem a tendentious phrase) “the end of history.” At the Amsterdam diamond market the Moonstone is to be cut into pieces “to make a marketable commodity” (513). Liquidation will finally dissolve the jewel's original symbolic value: “Make half a dozen diamonds of it, instead of one. There is an end of its sacred identity as The Moonstone” (109).

Collins narrates universal history (an explosion of national history into the vast and murky web of an international economy) in terms of what recent sociology calls cultural capital.²⁶ Expropriation and semiotic decomposition—literal and symbolic “loss of property”—become the joint principles of a historical progress and cultural transformation, of which property itself is classically the telos. The modern commercial economy is the terminus of a route from “sacred identity” to “marketable commodity” at which all symbolic value, including “character,” loses its integrity. The last and present change, from rentier estate to commercial world-city, will apparently bring the final loss: secret frauds and attritions at home while military force is brandished overseas.

It is important, however, to note the difference between Collins's scheme and Marx's commodity fetishism (the first volume of Capital appeared in 1867). Marx invokes an uncanny agency of objects to represent how a value-equivalence between the products of labor usurps the social relations of workers in a complex market economy. By displacing life from persons onto things, commodity fetishism falsifies the organic world of work. In the transition from sacred origins to exchange-value, the Moonstone signifies the persistence of an archaic ontology despite the displacements of modernity. Where Marx insists on the reality of the commodity, The Moonstone insists on that of the fetish.²⁷ The object's successful resistance to commodification and reversion to fetishism might represent the triumph of a fantasy of commodity fetishism by the author, except that Collins's solution is critical, anti-nostalgic. The Moonstone belongs to no world we might belong to; the home regained at the end of the novel is not our own.

STRANGE ROMANCE

As a world-historical subject that refuses the final transformation of modernity, the jewel occupies the position (no less commanding) of the subject of romance. In the last pages, after the Hindu conspirators have assassinated the man guilty of the jewel's theft, the Moonstone returns to its sacred origins. The fulfillment of a romance theodicy of justice and restoration accompanies a reversal of Western imperial history. If that history follows the diurnal track of the sun, India belongs to another planet, one occult, mutable, and yet recurrent. “There, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!” (526). Contingent and evanescent, the bosom of a woman's dress merely reflects the archetype. “India” no longer circulates through the system of exchange value; it becomes the transcendental symbol that refers only to itself. “So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!” (526). The last words announce the resumption of romance time, an immense cyclical repetition that precedes and outlasts the ephemeral forward glint of national history.

In Scott's novels the forms and figures of romance, signifying a vernacular narrative tradition, aesthetically redeemed local subjects and communities caught in the turbulence of historical change. Whatever social and economic convulsions of the world might occur, the novel builds a cultural idea of home in the familiarization of literary conventions. In Guy Mannering a ceremony of recognitions, the solution to old mysteries, and Indian profit ratify the young hero's return. Collins invokes the comic convergences of romance in the domestic plot of The Moonstone only to block and thwart them. The colonial treasure recedes to its origins; the romance return inhabits an inaccessible, alien domain. The “homecoming of the heir” is denied its conventional transparency: “In short,” says Betteredge, Blake's Eumaeus, “he baffled me altogether” (60). The only recognition of Blake (“like a prince in a fairy-story” [362]) comes from Rosanna Spearman, signally unlucky. He must accept the irrelevance of his will and action in the mystery's solution, a far more chronic condition than the receptive passivity of a Scott hero. Only after being radically severed from agency can the integrity of Blake's character be restored—he has indeed taken the diamond, but without his own will or knowledge, in an opium trance.

The experience of self-recognition is accordingly opaque. It comes in a shock of estrangement, when Blake recovers the garment that will incriminate the thief:

I found the mark, and read—

My Own Name.

There were the familiar letters which told me that the nightgown was mine. I looked up from them. There was the sun; there were the glittering waters of the bay; there was old Betteredge, advancing nearer and nearer to me. I looked back again at the letters. My own name. Plainly confronting me—my own name.

(359)

Scott's hero was prompted to recall his own identity by the aural cue of a familiar ballad, embedded in an ancestral landscape. “The familiar letters” of Blake's name can only be read and re-read in blank incomprehension amidst the scenery's alien glare.

The dissociation of character from agency is rehearsed in a strange ritual performance that is the opposite of dramatic. In drama one knowingly assumes another character for a hyperbolic representation of agency—in short, one acts. Jennings's “experiment,” in which Blake is once more fed opium to simulate the night of the crime, constitutes a brilliant variation upon the nineteenth-century novelistic topos of amateur theatricals. In Austen's Mansfield Park, Scott's St Ronan's Well, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and Collins's own No Name, the morally inauthentic and socially subversive practice of acting invades the domestic scene. With Blake's unconscious reenactment in front of witnesses, Collins reverses the convention: the performance redefines purity of character in the divorce of act from ethical intent. The player rehearses a script of which he is not the author.²⁸

To reach the spectacle of a split between agency and meaning, the narrative stages a virtuosic alienation of its own dramatic convention of confessional witnessing. It too must rehearse unconsciousness. Once again Collins works against a convention formulated by Scott, whereby the narrative that represents theatrical mimesis as inauthentic itself appropriates, and makes true, the principles of dramatic representation. In particular, it renders psychology transparent by claiming the register of voice as speaking thought.²⁹ Suffering from a mysterious amnesia, unable to remember administering the opium to Blake, Dr Candy cannot however narrate the crucial event directly to the reader, as do the other participants. Jennings must reconstruct a conjectural “confession” by filling in his own fragmentary written record of the doctor's delirious babblings. Dr Candy's complaint is another case of metonymic contagion, as though the touch of opium dissolved the distinction between dispensing and consuming it.³⁰ Earlier Betteredge had found lying outside the house “a small bottle, containing a thick sweet-smelling liquor, as black as ink” (82), presumably the medium of the Indian gang's clairvoyance (50). Opium, writing, and the disjunction between agency and meaning are uncannily combined. Jennings himself alludes to De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, that classic text of imperialist panic, in which “confession” iterates no recovered integrity of character and voice by its author but the dreadful sovereignty of an alien imagination.³¹ Opium, the Moonstone's familiar spirit, is the true author of the diamond's removal. Its secret influence and the jewel's role as cultural talisman together produce the estranged function of agency in Collins's novel.

To restore character through its performative disassembly requires a dislocation of agency from meaning. Collins deconstructs Scott's dramatic principles of romance representation: action and voice. The Moonstone: A Romance turns from the aesthetic of Scott's romance revival, which reclaims familiar oral-cultural origins (exemplified in the ancestral ballad remembered from childhood), to the De Quinceyan confession, in which writing is a shattered remnant of the terrifying splendors of a daemonic imagination. That the shift occurs, all the same, within a romance plot secures the author in a position of (Scott-like) allegorical control rather than (De Quinceyan) pathological rhapsody. The domestic romance yields a comic remnant after all: although the diamond goes back to India, Blake's name is cleared and he finally marries Rachel. But what shadow of England is limned in the De Quinceyan vision of an infernal India?

SUBLIME AND DOMESTIC

Blake's homecoming—private, erotic, and sentimental—corresponds to neither of the world plots of history or romance. Instead, in a disconcerting reduction, Collins relies on the tradition of the English novel itself as the literature of modern bourgeois domesticity. Betteredge insists that everything that happens in The Moonstone is prefigured in Robinson Crusoe, parodying the function of romance convention as an allusive body of cultural meaning in Scott. When Betteredge informs Blake that his marriage and paternity are foretold in those pages, Blake may admit only ironically the recognition that he is a character in a book:

Here was an opportunity of producing Robinson Crusoe! Here was a chance of reading that domestic bit about the child which I had marked on the day of Mr Franklin's marriage! I read those miraculous words with an emphasis which did them justice, and then I looked him severely in the face. “Now, sir, do you believe in Robinson Crusoe?” I asked, with a solemnity suitable to the occasion.

“Betteredge!” says Mr Franklin, with equal solemnity, “I'm convinced at last.” He shook hands with me—and I felt that I had converted him.

(519)

It is Blake's last gesture. “You are welcome to be as merry as you please over everything else I have written,” Betteredge admonishes the reader, “but when I write of Robinson Crusoe, by the Lord it's serious—and I request you to take it accordingly!” (520). Betteredge's harping on Robinson Crusoe, and the thematic containment of one novel inside another, exemplifies not so much quixotism (since Betteredge does not act on his reading and enjoys his hermeneutic triumph undisturbed) as the romance trope of miniaturization, described by Susan Stewart. That special case of ekphrasis, the book within the book, joins with micrographia, the miniature book, the tableau, and the dollhouse to represent the interiority of nostalgia, secure from the immense chaotic dissolutions of history.³² Here, with the relegation of the marriage plot to Robinson Crusoe (the fable of an earlier cultural dispensation, the tale of childhood), we glimpse its domestic scenery as indeed luminous, timeless, perfect, and remote, through the other end of the telescope of literary realism.

Such a glimpse was at once promised and baffled in the Moonstone itself:

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. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed.

(97)

The alluring glow of the miniature becomes the glare of the abyss. The charm of interiority yields to the fearful fascination of an exteriority as infinite distance, absolute space, a confusion of height and depth.

Murthwaite's Asiatic Pisgah vision describes the content of this void:

Looking back down the hill, the view presented the grandest spectacle of Nature and Man, in combination, that I have ever seen. The lower slopes of the eminence melted imperceptibly into a grassy plain, the place of the meeting of three rivers. On one side, the graceful winding of the waters stretched away, now visible, now hidden by trees, as far as the eye could see. On the other, the waveless ocean slept in the calm of the night. People this lovely scene with tens of thousands of human creatures, all dressed in white, stretching down the sides of the hill, overflowing into the plain, and fringing the nearer banks of the winding rivers. Light this halt of the pilgrims by the wild red flames of cressets and torches, streaming up at intervals from every part of the innumerable throng. Imagine the moonlight of the East, pouring in unclouded glory over all—and you will form some idea of the view that met me when I looked forth from the summit of the hill.

(525)

According to Stewart the gigantic, the trope of exteriority, signifies the natural landscape, wilderness, but also public space, monumentality and state power, and city life (70-103). What converts the merely picturesque to the agoraphobia of the sublime is the very human presence that should have guaranteed the opposite conversion: “tens of thousands of human creatures.” The unreckonable crowd literally covers and absorbs the landscape: “In three different directions, I saw the crowd part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white mass of the people closed together again. The track of the doomed men through the ranks of their fellow mortals was obliterated. We saw them no more” (526). The life of the mass reanimates the landscape: the crowd has taken over not only the sea but, in its opening and closing, “the meeting of three rivers.” But to the English stranger's lonely and illicit gaze this humanization appears dehumanizing in its obliteration of the individual careers of the heroic agents who restored the Moonstone.

The anxious apprehensions of a global capitalism, writes Leask, incorporate “Malthusian fears of an enormously expanding metropolitan population” into the “material sublime” of De Quincey's imperialist terror (227). The sources of panic lie at home as well as abroad. After all, The Moonstone's conception occurs in 1867, not 1857. The portent of the crowd vexed fiercer minds than Collins's in the turbulent years around the second electoral Reform Act, and he would not have been the only one to intuit a connection with the troubles of empire. Bernard Semmel, the historian of the Governor Eyre controversy, notes the “identification of the Jamaica affair with the … reform riots” in journalistic commentary, as “perhaps the first [case] in which it might be said that the realities of a heavy-handed imperial rule were confronted by the growing acceptance of democracy in the homeland.”³³ It is as though the last pages of The Moonstone glimpse Matthew Arnold's phantasm of anarchy, the Populace, in the robes of oriental despotism. World-historical agency discloses itself at last in a primeval, titanic, ideologically unified collectivity that coincides with an alien nature, as of life on the moon. If nostalgia is the turn from dread, this vision occupies an uninhabitable future rather than the past.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WORLD

The fetishistic displacement of agency from persons onto the relic of an apocalyptic collectivity constitutes The Moonstone's figure of mystery, its own twist upon a familiar problematic in Victorian representation. Collins refuses to follow Scott in the restoration of the ethical subject (individual or national) to the center of historical process, even by the ruses of romance. The mystery of the modern world coincides with its discursive status as a complex, dynamic, and global economy. Regulated by its own occult mechanisms, too immense for any personal determination, this universal economy binds heterogeneous spaces and temporalities of historical development into a violent and fearsome synchronicity. A total synchronic system of metonymic exchanges has usurped the narrative stations of both history and romance in Collins's text to generate the compensatory formation of the Indian sublime, which contains those discarded categories in all their original, but now lethal, metaphoric power. As nation decays into crowd, the British themselves turn out to be the colonized subjects of empire at its global zenith. In taking away their history, so to speak, our history is no longer our own.³⁴ The future may belong in the end to that most alien of collectivities, the people.

Collins resists an ideologically closed justification of empire by grimly but far from mournfully depicting India as a powerful alien origin that constitutes the limit or end of English national historical identity. Only the transparency, the factitious familiarity and certainty, imposed by an act of retrospection may dispel the aura of a fatal obscurity—the threat of authentic prophecy—investing the historical present and future predicated in Collins's text. As we decipher the imaginary of the past, our satisfaction is more confident and hollow than any offered in these fictions, since we convert the menace of oracle into just another illusion.

Notes

1. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Suvendrini Perera, Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

2. Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

3. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51-62; on Guy Mannering, 111-35.

4. Viswanathan, “Raymond Williams and British Colonialism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (spring 1991): 47-66; see also Suleri, 10, 22.

5. Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” in Selected Essays (1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 413. Ian Ousby reiterates Eliot's dictum: “Its commonly accepted status as the first English detective novel” (Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976], 117).

6. Cited in Kenneth Robinson, Wilkie Collins: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 218.

7. Again, subsequent tradition has made the “fallibility of the police detective” into a convention (Ousby, 123). In Bleak House (1853), Dickens's Inspector Bucket solves crimes and catches criminals but (as the murderess taunts him) fails to save or restore lives.

8. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone: A Romance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 501.

9. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 56. For an overtly metaphysical account of this problematic see W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 10-15. Shaw reads The Moonstone as an allegory of the dialectical relation among the historical hermeneutics represented by H. T. Buckle (logical positivism), D. F. Strauss (symbolist mysticism), and F. H. Bradley (analogical sympathy) (288-99).

10. Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 163. Heller's analysis of a continued “ideological doubleness” is more responsive than most to “the interpenetration of the realms of empire and domesticity” in The Moonstone, though even here the imperial theme tends to remain subordinate, as a figure for the domestic plot of class and gender dominations (144-7).

11. For a survey of nineteenth-century British representations of India as the site of archaic, eternal, and natural essences outside history, characterized by Hinduism, image-worship, and oriental despotism, see Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), esp. 12-21, 49-74, 86-9, 109-15, 165-72. On Manichaeanism and empire see Abdul R. JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), esp. 3-4, 264-5, who cites Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968), 41-2. On the imperialist sublime see Suleri, 27-44.

12. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 331.

13. Mary Louise Pratt analyzes the uses of sympathy in an imperialist rhetoric of “reciprocity” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 69-85.

14. On British reactions to and representations of the Mutiny see Brantlinger, 199-224; and Sharpe, Allegories of Empire (“a pornographic nightmare” [65]).

15. I do not share John R. Reed's view that Collins simply redistributes sympathy to heroic Indians. While Reed is acute about the use of India as a frame for a critical view of English society, his conclusion is more sentimental than the novel's: “If imperial depradation is the true crime of The Moonstone, [the] discovery of the authentic value of individual humanity is its true subject” (“English Imperialism and the Unacknowledged Crime of The Moonstone,” Clio 2 [1973]: 281-90). On the other side, Ashish Roy's blunt indictment of The Moonstone as “an imperialist text and a justification of imperialist rule” is still less satisfactory (“The Fabulous Imperialist Semiotic of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone,” New Literary History 24 [1993]: 657-82). Heller gives a subtler account of an obliquely anti-imperialist critique, noting the contrast between Collins's measured response to the Mutiny in “A Sermon for Sepoys” (Household Words, February 1858) and Dickens's effusions of genocidal wrath (Dead Secrets, 190 n. 8).

16. Modern critics often read these trials of character psychoanalytically. In the standard account by Albert D. Hutter, the diamond represents repressed desire (“Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction,” Victorian Studies 19 [1975]: 181-209). Jenny Bourne Taylor argues that Collins investigates social and psychic identity as radically unknowable (In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology [London: Routledge, 1988], 174-206). According to Ronald R. Thomas, the psychoanalytic allegory transforms the political plot of imperial exploitation into “a romantic intrigue” susceptible of resolution by the tropes of “scientific romance” (“Minding the Body Politic: The Romance of Science and the Revision of History in Victorian Detective Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 [1991]: 233-54).

17. Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

18. Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 231-2.

19. On the nineteenth-century nationalist mythologies that elected the Anglo-Saxon freeholder to be the original English gentleman see Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), esp. 13-41, 76-87, 103-8.

20. See Thomas's account of Jennings as a figure of repressed Indian origins, the emblem of “a guilt and anxiety that are imprinted upon the mind and body of even [the empire's] most innocent citizens” (241-2).

21. Colley, Britons: Forging the National Identity, 1707-1832 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 101-5. The Romantic tradition is brilliantly analyzed by Nigel Leask (British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992], 2-5, passim).

22. The curious assonance of Collins's names for the novel's professional agents, detective Cuff and attorney Bruff, echoes if not alludes to a Dickensian trope of the interchangeability of individual identities in an institutional economy: Boodle, Coodle, Doodle, and Buffy, Cuffy in the government satire of Bleak House (chap. 12). Cuff and Bruff are serially related in the plot; only the intervention of the Indians saves the narrative, no doubt, from an interminable regression of detective agency through Gruffs, Fluffs, and Duffs.

23. Long before Ian Watt's canonical account in The Rise of the Novel (1957), Robinson Crusoe appears as the romance origin—the literary model of masculine identity formation—in several Victorian bildungsromane, notably Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) and George Borrow's Lavengro (1851). Behind these works lies, perhaps, the fascination with Robinson Crusoe in Rousseau's Confessions.

24. For the history of opium see Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin's, 1981). On opium as metonymic figure of imperial commerce and alien contagion see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); Leask, 199-228 (on De Quincey, who will be discussed below); and Perera, 102-22 (on Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood).

25. The great Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of Light) diamond had been presented to Queen Victoria in 1850; the metonymic transformation of India to “the jewel in the crown” would take place at Victoria's titular promotion to Empress in 1876. See Sharpe, 150-2.

26. The concept, although not the term (which is Pierre Bourdieu's), had long been available in the imperial mythology of Western civilization as the translatio studii, the cultural analogue of the translatio imperii.

27. Thomas Richards interprets Marx's theory within the broad cultural transformation of Great Britain from a production-based national polity to a consumption-based imperial one (The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising as Spectacle, 1851-1914 [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990]). For a discussion of a later romance development in these terms that illuminates Collins's project see Nicholas Daly, “Victorian Commodity Culture and Fictions of the Mummy,” Novel (forthcoming).

28. My emphasis here differs from Thomas's account of the curative function of Jennings's “scientific public theater,” which stresses its performative reunion of a gendered rift between mind and body (240-2).

29. See the debate between Pattieson and Tinto, representing the faculties of dramatization and depiction, in the first chapter of Scott's Bride of Lammermoor (1819).

30. Nor would the hint of oriental sweetmeats in Dr. Candy's name have been missed by many of Collins's readers, fifty years after the British conquest of the kingdom of Kandy (Ceylon). Compare Dickens's erotic improvement of the figure, Rosebud's “Lumps-of-Delight,” in his opium-steeped, Moonstone-influenced, Oriental-Gothic last work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 58.

31. See Barrell, passim, and Leask, 170-228. De Quincey lived to write, characteristically, about the Indian Mutiny (Barrell, 168-81). See also Heller's excellent discussion of Jennings, the manager of the opium ceremony, as Collins's authorial figure of a De Quinceyan and Gothic “erasure of Romanticism” (156-63).

32. Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 37-69. “The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulable, version of experience, … which is domesticated and protected from contamination” (69). Welsh registers the quixotic theme and its unsatisfactoriness (219).

33. Semmel, Jamaican Blood and Victorian Conscience: The Governor Eyre Controversy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 95, 140. Sue Lonoff suggests that The Moonstone reflects the controversy that followed Eyre's ferocious repression of the 1865 Jamaica uprising (Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship [New York: AMS Press, 1982], 178-9). Collins took no public stand in a debate pitting novelists and poets (defending Eyre) against men of science (censuring him).

34. Or as a character puts it in Rushdie's Satanic Verses: “The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means” (cited by Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration [London: Routledge, 1990], 317.