Depiction of the Races

The page on the viewer’s left shows a gathering of primarily black men below a large portrait of a white general. The contrast of these two images is sharp in the sense that the white man is depicted with great detail and attention to his individual characteristics. However, when looking at the picture of the group of men, they all have the same face. The men depicted are not given individual features to distinguish one from the other. Ezra Jennings, while being insignificant in relation to race at the time, was distinguished with a very unique face that contrasts those depicted on the previous page. He has a distinct face, one that caused hesitation: “At the first sight of me Miss Verinder stopped and hesitated. She recovered herself instantly, coloured for a moment, and then, with a charming frankness, offered me her hand” it says on the page depicted. The excerpt from The Moonstone begins with a picture of a man that is not named although, it is fairly certain that it is not Ezra Jennings given the lack of originality of the features. The image on the bottom right is of a gathering of three men and a woman, one of whom is Ezra and the woman, Miss Verinder. Ezra is depicted as having the hollow cheeks of a sick man and the black and white hair as described by Mr. Blake in previous chapters. While reading The Moonstone, the reader is predisposed to view the images in a “black and white” sense given the previous page’s illustrations. Harper’s Weekly makes a clear effort here to push Ezra’s difference onto the reader in an attempt for them to view him as lesser, other, different, or unimportant when in reality, “The hero is the opium addict Ezra Jennings; the villain is the seemingly respectable Godfrey Ablewhite (who is, of course, “able” and “white,” and who is then, in the end, found dead in disguise)” (494).