The Transatlantic Moonstone Part XII

Although Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone was published simultaneously in the United Kingdom and the United States of America through serialization, All the Year Round and Harper’s Weekly respectively, the presentation of the novel differs greatly between the two publications. Recent scholarship has argued for the evaluation of the difference in content and form on both sides of the Atlantic, using what Linda Hughes refers to as ‘sideways reading’ across genre to analyze Victorian literature, in this case on both sides of the Atlantic.

The twelfth weekly instalment begins on chapter XXI and spans partway through chapter XXII and is comprised of Sargeant Cuff’s investigation of the Moonstone in the wake of Rosanna Spearman’s suicide. During a meeting with Lady Verinder, Cuff reveals his suspicion of Rachel’s guilt and his theory of her behaviour. Lady Verinder travels to Frizinghall to ask her daughter if she is guilty, and after having being assured that despite her mystique, Rachel has done ‘nothing to make [her] mother blush for [her]’ (Collins, 175), and Cuff is promptly fired as a result.

In Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas, Silvia Spitta argues that the misplaced object ‘causes a rift in understanding,’ that once having “lost its place in the culture that created it and that anchored its meaning,” the role of the misplaced object was to “upset European certainties” (5). While her argument is founded mostly in the appropriation of Indigenous Latin American cultural items in European museums such as headdresses, this exhibit will be discussing, through exoticism, commodification, and globalization, the narrative of justification and blame that was imported from the United Kingdom to America, as is visible in the publications that are found in Harper’s Weekly and All the Year Round, as well as how it parallels the misplacement of the diamond the Moonstone in the novel. The exhibit will also discuss the importance of objects in context and their construction via thing theory.

 

Works Cited

All the Year Round: A Weekly Journal. 21 March 1867, pp. 337 – 343.

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

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. 21 March. 1868, pp. 129-144.

Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture." Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-30.

Spitta, Silvia. Misplaced Objects : Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas. U of Texas, 2009. Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Ser. in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture.