The Restoration of the Nightgown

            The analeptic image of Rosanna hemming Franklin’s new nightgown is the first thing that greats the eye of the Victorian reader—an image that “would have resonated with the many other images of night work by worn seamstresses, a pathetic theme made famous by Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” (Leighton & Surridge, 229). To further this effect, Rosanna’s “deformed shoulder” (Collins, 23, 45, 46), the visual demarcation of her cultural otherness, is practically non-existent in her depiction here, evidence of “the visual material surrounding Rosanna in the American text [de-emphasizing] her disability in favour of pathos surrounding her class status” (Leighton & Surridge, 229). Where Collins’ original work is articulated by disability critics as “”a grappling with identity” rather than an enforcement of a single kind of body identification, an experiment with difference that is meant to trouble and disturb the pleasures of articulation and embodiment, the ordering of the normal and abnormal,” (Mossman, 486), the illustration of Rosanna caves to a stratification of society that privileges the culturally ‘normal’.

            The implementation of linework (specifically tide lines, per Leighton) in Rosanna’s other illustrations throughout Harper's are used to represent her “liminal social position as woman, as disabled person, as criminal, and as servant,” (Leighton & Surridge, 222), and while her disabled body is erased in part 23, her status as socially inferior is reinforced by the heavy cross-hatching that marks her figure, which provides a gloomy backdrop for the crystalline white of Franklin’s gown. The action of her hands, hands that are distinctly Other, are insufficient as a means of access to Franklin’s social reality, despite her ‘restored’ body.  

Works Cited:

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Edited by John Sutherland. Oxford University Press, 2008. pp. 23, 45, 46. Print. 2 Dec. 2019

Leighton, Mary Elizabeth and Lisa Surridge. "The Transatlantic Moonstone: A Study of the Illustrated Serial in Harper's Weekly." Victorian Periodicals Review Vol.42 No.3, 2009, pp. 222, 229. Web. 2 Dec. 2019

Mossman, Mark. “Representations of the Abnormal Body in “The Moonstone.” Victorian Literature and Culture. Vol.37, No.2. Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 486. Web. 2 Dec. 2019