The Moonstone Essay -- essays research papers fc

                                             Alexandra LloydWhat role did 19th cytosine 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, still was published in instalments in a popular Victorian magazine, All the Year Round. Upon its first publication it was thirstily read by the general British public, for its readership not only include the ruling and upper classes, but the cost and availability meant that a facsimile would have a wide circulation amongst all members of a household. The tales images and ideas of India thus r all(prenominal)ed many social groups in British culture.To Wilkie Collins, the gem, part of whose tale we follow in The Moon stone, the novel of the same name, is the signifier of all things that munificence strives for, material and spiritual. He begins the novel by demonstrating that the hi degree of the Moonstone gem is a history of thefts. In having his initial narrator state "that crime brings its throw fatality with it" (p.6 Ch. IV of the prologue), Collins underscores the fact that nemesis attends every secular 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 really 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 " compose in India"(p.1)) and closes with Murthwaite, the famed fictional explorers, account (dated 1850) of the restoration of the gleaming " yellowness Diamond"(p.466) to the forehead of the Hindu deity of the Moon "after the dip of eight centuries"(p.466, "The Statement of Mr. Murthwaite"). The date of Murthwaites account of the restoration of the diamond whitethorn be ironic, for in 1850 a Sikh maharajah, exiled from Indian after the Anglo-Sikh struggle of 1848-9, presented a gem, which is thought to be the ... ...l conciliation and transcendent faith if India were to mature from bloody, mutually destructive, strife and take her rightful place in the nine of nations. Today, Collinss The Moonstone may be viewed not as a response to a national insurgency and/or European determination to keep the intrinsic 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 considerable self-sacrifice.Bibliography scalawag references to passages from The Moonstone come from the Oxford Un iversity Press, 1999 edition of the novel.Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.Sutherland, John. Introduction and A Note on the musical theme 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 pooves 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.