The Death and (R)Evolution of the Colonial Binary - The Transatlantic Moonstone: Part XXXII

Melissa Free in her “'Dirty Linen': Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone” thinks that Collins “by constructing a private, domestic history as simultaneously imperial collaps[es] not only home and away, but also private and public, and family and empire” (341). In this way, he deconstructs the colonial binary of the paternal colonizer and the infantile foreign colony by criticizing the domestic microcosm of colonization; namely, the Verinders, their extended family, and staff.  

However, this reading is problematic because the issue of race and The Moonstone’s audience extends beyond the colonial narrative to America. Oppression of the racial other in America, while certainly a legacy of colonialism, cannot be deconstructed the same way as with the imperial England because America itself was once a colony not a colonizer.  

Linda Hughes in her article “SIDEWAYS! : Navigating the Material(ity) of Print Culture” proposes that analysis of text should be done “sideways”, “across genres; texts opening out onto each other dialogically in and out of periodicals” (1-2). Thus, the discussion of race in The Moonstone can perhaps be elucidated by the other works published specifically in Harper’s Weekly or All the Year Round, for the American and English publics respectively. Including a sideways analysis, I argue, like Free, that the colonial hierarchy is fundamentally reversed – the racial other is paternalized and the American and English publics infantilized. However, unlike Free, this reversal and the inclusion of American race issues is not merely a deconstruction of colonial binaries but evolves beyond an anti-colonial discourse to establish a new truly familial, global relationship in which international/interracial authority is gained by setting a passive example, not by active expansionism.  

Works Cited: 

All The Year Round: A Weekly Journal, 8 Aug. 1868.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Edited by John Sutherland, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Free, Melissa. “‘Dirty Linen’: Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's the Moonstone.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 48, no. 4, 2006, pp. 340–371.

Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization, 8 Aug. 1868.

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