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  • Chapter 3 - Listening to the Radiant Voices of Others

  • Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, University of Colorado Boulder
  • Book:
    Embodied Experience in British and French Literature, 1778–1814
    Published online:
    19 December 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025, pp 124-158
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  • Summary

    Diamonds and jewels – their brilliant refractions providing prototypes for intellectual elasticity and insight into connections between things and gender, colonialism, marriage for hire, and ecosystems – spring forth in Belinda and Les bijoux indiscrets to teach characters to become better interpreters. This chapter argues that in these novels gems become “mouths” that kinesthetically narrate and enact material histories: the labor and commerce that produced them, the deleterious enmeshment of women and objects, and women’s right to be human – that is, honest, rational, fragmented, stained, and radiant. Belinda’s allusion to the historic 48-carat Pigot links domestic larceny in matchmaking to colonial theft in India and Ireland. Markets collide as Belinda demonstrates how the lexicon of purity and perfection dominates the commercialization of courtship and of advisory treatises instructing the public how to buy authentic diamonds. In conclusion, the chapter analyzes how a diamond leads to Lady Delacour’s restoration by teaching her how to belong with the human–nonhuman network.