Told by a Skipper
This is the sole item in this exhibit that sourced from All the Year Round, an English publication, of a short story which has evident racially charged language, evident in the way a Chinese man’s speech has been racialized. Even the word “’fan-kwei’ (meaning foreign devil)” is appropriated from its native language and speaker and even turned against the Chinese man. The appropriation of the language is similar to that of the appropriation of an object; there are layers of item misplacement that are traced both through the English and American publications of the Moonstone. Although the Moonstone itself is the most notable misplaced object, its meaning being adapted although still incorporating the lore of its native India, there is also an idea exchange visible in the increasingly globalizing world in which these items were taking on new meanings. Tea, adopted from China and used as a symbol of status in English society, was transplanted similarly into America. As America fought for its independence from English rule, the legacy of tea as a symbol of socioeconomic status is still visible, but had again taken on a new, layered, and complex identity of the legacy of English occupation. However, as visible in the previous item, tea was sourced from China and Japan, and it is the exact aspect of being foreign, or the exoticism of it that lent it more value, despite the ability of the English the simultaneously devalue this otherness as is made visible in this item.
Although Leighton and Surridge argue that “Collins thus unleashed in America a notably different version of his novel, one that through its layout and visual material created markedly different ideological effects” and “underline the text's treatment of racial divisions,” I believe it is unfair to assume that troubling racial divisions, and in addition the cultural meaning attached to objects that is emphasized by these racial divisions, would not be visible in every iteration of The Moonstone’s publication. Racial division is treated by the novel in a troublesome way – people, like objects lose meaning when ‘displaced,’ like the Indian priests – and had the illustrations or accompanying texts treated race in any way more favorably than Collins’ had, I don’t believe that they necessarily would have changed the narrative of exoticism and relocation of blame that is found in the overarching novel and in the twelfth section. A racialized other is implied in any sort of declaration of blame regardless of what meaning the Moonstone had come to inhabit, and as such, items, people, and even texts – the Moonstone itself on both sides of the Atlantic – extend globalization and in the same sense, the narrative of justification of colonization. In The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience, Lauren Goodlad claims that Collins’ The Moonstone is a “quest for integrated histories of transnational experience” (14), and I believe this to be a more comprehensive understanding of the experience of globalization, with blame, misplaced objects, and commodification found on both sides of the Atlantic and in the twelfth section of The Moonstone is a more open understanding of the complexities of the differences in reading due to publication of The Moonstone.
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.
Goodlad, Lauren M. E. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic. Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. 2015.
Iskin, Ruth E. ""Savages" into Spectators/Consumers: Globalization in Advertising Posters, 1890s-1900s." Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 29, no. 2-3, 2007, pp. 127-49.
Leighton, Mary, 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. 207-243.