10 - Naturalized Imperialism in The Danvers Jewels: Reworking The Moonstone

Summary

It has been rightly noted that Mary Cholmondeley's 1887 novella The Danvers Jewels resembles the writings of Wilkie Collins, specifically in echoing significant aspects of The Moonstone published nearly two decades earlier. Nevertheless, the correspondences between the two texts have been virtually untapped in scholarly discussion. Yet The Danvers Jewels presents an important response to The Moon-stone, ultimately imparting a pessimistic message on the issue of empire. While Wilkie Collins's 1868 novel can be read as an indictment of the British imperial mindset that nevertheless leaves open the possibility of resistance and change, The Danvers Jewels closes the gaps of the earlier text to suggest not only that disturbing conceptions of empire and a sense of British entitlement continue to prevail but have, in effect, been naturalized at home, with injurious results.

The two texts appeared during and are set under somewhat different historical conditions, which help illuminate their diverse readings of imperial effects. Collins's novel takes place in the late 1840s, about a decade before the 1857 Indian Mutiny that left such a marked impression on the British psyche and was still a fresh memory when The Moonstone appeared. The enormous significance of the Mutiny on British perceptions as well as on fiction about India has been abundantly catalogued, of course, both by contemporaneous accounts and modern scholarship. As Patrick Brantlinger puts it, ‘[n]o episode in British imperial history raised public excitement to a higher pitch’. In citing an Orientalist tenor, Brantlinger remarks that writings about the Mutiny reveal ‘an absolute polarization of good and evil’ in service to ‘an imperialist allegory that calls for the total subjugation of India and at times for the wholesale extermination of Indians’. Afterward, accounts continued such Manichean portrayals, and ‘racist and imperialist attitudes toward India grew more dogmatic’, even in the decade preceding publication of The Danvers Jewels, during which Queen Victoria was named Empress of India.