The Moonstone Essay -- essays research papers fc

                                             Alexandra LloydWhat role did 19th Century popular serial novels such as Wilkie Collins The Moonstone play in British understandings of India?When Wilkie Collins first wrote The Moonstone in 1868, it was not published in the form available today, scarce was published in instalments in a popular prudish magazine, All the Year Round. Upon its first publication it was eagerly read by the general British public, for its readership not only included the ruling and upper classes, but the cost and availability meant that a copy would have a wide circulation amongst all members of a household. The tales images and ideas of India thus reached many social groups in British culture.To Wilkie Collins, the gem, part of whose fib we follow in The Moonstone, the novel of the same name, is the signifier of all things that humanity strives for, material and spiritual. He begins the novel by demonstrating that the history of the Moonstone gem is a history of thefts. In having his initial narrator state "that crime brings its own fatality with it" (p.6 Ch. IV of the prologue), Collins underscores the fact that nemesis attends both worldly expropriator of the Moonstone, which to its temporary European possessors is a bauble and a commodity but which to its faithful guardians, the Brahmins, is a sacred artefact beyond price. The Moonstone is never unfeignedly English or Englands, for the novel begins with an account of its various thefts. It opens in India with Rachel Verinders Uncle Herncastles purloining the gem in battle (the opening lines are specifically "written in India"(p.1)) and closes with Murthwaite, the famed fictional explorers, account (dated 1850) of the restoration of the gleaming "yellow Diamond"(p.466) to the foreh ead of the Hindu deity of the Moon "after the lapse of eight centuries"(p.466, "The description of Mr. Murthwaite"). The date of Murthwaites account of the restoration of the diamond may be ironic, for in 1850 a Sikh maharajah, exiled from Indian after the Anglo-Sikh War of 1848-9, presented a gem, which is thought to be the ... ...l conciliation and transcendent faith if India were to arise from bloody, mutually destructive, strife and take her rightful place in the society of nations. Today, Collinss The Moonstone may be viewed not as a response to a national insurgency and/or European determination to keep the native in his place, but rather as a love story between two people who only come to see each other for what they are after misjudgements, misunderstandings, accidental and intended deceptions, and tidy self-sacrifice.BibliographyPage references to passages from The Moonstone come from the Oxford University Press, 1999 edition of the novel.Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.Sutherland, John. Introduction and A Note on the Composition Wilkie Collins The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.Stewart, J. I. M. A Note on Sources. Wilkie Collins The Moonstone. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966, rpt. 1973. Pp. 527-8.Fraser, Antonia, ed. The Lives of the moguls and Queens of England. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Peters, Catherine. The King of the Inventors A Life of Wilkie Collins. London, Minerva, 1991.