Jaime Grassmick Moonstone Project Part 24, Chapter V and VI

The Moonstone by Willkie Collins is a mystery novel published in 1868. This novel was serialized in both the United Kingdom in All Year Round and the United States of America in Harper’s Weekly. The serialization of this novel consists of 32 parts spanning from January to August, each containing one or two chapters. The Moonstone text itself is the same in both serializations of the text, however, the surrounding images and stories are very different. Harper’s weekly consists of many advertisements and images surrounding the pages of the narrative, whereas All Year Round has few pictures and mostly consists of other narrative stories. The inclusions of the images in Harper’s Weekly significantly changes the way in which The Moonstone can be read.

In the article, “Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone,” Mark Mossman discusses the way in which disability of the body is presented in The Moonstone, arguing that “the representations of abnormalcy in The Moonstone become the location of a disabled perspective on the workings of Victorian cultural practice”(483). The Moonstone highlights the way Victorian culture thinks about disability by presenting characters that have typical characteristics Victorians would have defined as abnormal. Mossman further points out that Willkie Collins defines the abnormal body as female, impoverished and impaired and highlights the abnormal body by comparing it to “normal” bodies which are male, privileged and able (483). This binary causes the “establishment and far reaching practice of normalizing cultural and institutional structures” (484). This exhibition will demonstrate how this idea of the disabled body and the normalized culture is reinforced in the serialization of The Moonstone. The United States version of The Moonstone alienates the reader because it highlights the aspects of the Other presented in the novel by promoting advertisements that are “solutions” to the Otherness, whereas the United Kingdom's serialization highlights themes of the novel through stories but does not attempt to “cure” it.

Mossman, Mark. “Representations of the Abnormal Body in ‘The Moonstone’” Victorian Literature and Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2. 2009. pp. 483-500. www.jstor.org/stable/40347242. Accessed 29 November 2019.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford University Press. 1999.