Not Like Other Girls by Rosa N. Carey; a review.

I happened to read Not Like Other Girls only because it was among some old books I brought home after my mother's death a few years ago.  It was in poor condition and missing any publication data, so I didn't know what period it represented. I was surprised as I read the first fifty pages or so to realize how firmly set it was in a past very far from my usual reading preferences. According to an internet search, it  was first published in 1884 and is one of the best-known of some forty novels by Rosa Nouchette Carey (1840-1909) a popular Victorian novelist. "Best-known", however, is a relative description: few contemporary readers know anything about Rosa Carey. And it takes a special interest to read something like this out of curiosity--to see, that is, what it meant to be a popular Victorian woman novelist.

Well, Victorian or no, I loved this book, despite the fact that my favorites are generally contemporary, postmodern, and--well--anything this book is not.  I have lately explored some older writing, for the sake of learning about historical values: George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Wilkie Collins, Balzac.  The essential difference among these five is that Balzac, Eliot, and Wharton saw social hierarchies as cruel and tragic; Collins and Carey accept a more stratified society as inevitable and natural, and see its dysfunctions as accidental and correctable.  

This is a representative Victorian story, reflecting genteel English characters whose lives are ruled by money and class, but Carey is surprisingly moderate, or sensible perhaps, in her views, and often amusingly critical of the rules governing women's propriety. The plot's dilemma is a problem of losing and attaining caste (and money, of course) but the characters are complex and caught between acceptance of how things are and a basic refusal to be ruled by 'society'  against their own needs. Since the author shows a partiality to the healthy and 'natural' impulses of youth, even in women, and moreover because in the end no one is shown to be particularly malicious or helpless, Not Like Other Girls belongs, I think, in the comic genre.  And this partly explains its appeal.  Besides, a woman who writes forty published novels in her life is not exactly a 'proper' Victorian gentlewoman. 

Carey is what I would call fatuously Victorian only in a susceptibility to mother-worship: although she sees and limns the faults in mothers in this book, she is surprisingly acquiescent to the idea that, although mothers may err, their children do worse when they resent it.  In the end, however, although she  may think the caste system harsh and unduly punitive, she also accepts its basic structure unquestionably. No one in this book will live happily ever after without servants and comfortable wealth.  They may threaten to, for the sake of love or for more practical reasons of necessity, but the book cannot end happily with Dick and Nan living without the blessing of Dick's hefty inheritance. Carey doesn't let herself imagine what would happen if needed money had not shown up.  

PLOT, CHARACTERS, DILEMMAS

Three daughters--Nan is twenty, Phillis is about nineteen, and Dulce eighteen--lead an idyllic life in an English country neighborhood with their widowed and semi-invalid mother who --Carey at one point confides to the reader--has "a weak nature" and is over-dependent on other people's opinions, especially those of men.  The author often indulges in these confidential remarks on personal foibles or sometimes on social manners, as if she is standing to one side with the reader smiling at unfortunate tendencies in her characters and their dilemmas.  While not defying convention, the author thus allows glimpses of different opinions on Victorian social rules;  in some ways Carey might be called a proto-feminist, but I get ahead of myself. 

What is "an idyllic life"?  First of all, it is a life without the drudgery of housework, cooking, cleaning, laundry.  It is a life without the demands of work at all.  The three daughters and their mother Mrs. Challoner have two female servants and adequate resources for festive, if not lavish, tennis and tea-parties with a circle of well-bred friends, male and female.  They are healthy and surprisingly free of neurosis, temper, selfishness, vanity or greed. Especially considering that their mother is so demanding and dependent, their generous care for her is hardly credible.  As I said, the sacredness of the mother figure is a concession to romanticism in Carey.   They gather with friends for long walks in open meadows and fields.  They play lawn tennis and a badminton-like game: "shuttlecocks and battledores." Nan has long had an unspoken but assured relationship with the son of a wealthy businessman nearby, a credentialed member of this social class. Phillis is happily uninterested in such relationships herself, and Dulce seems almost a precocious child devoted to her mother.

     The book's opening paragraphs sketch the nature of things to come and set the tone of light-hearted, even impertinent, joking.

      Five-o'clock tea was a great institution in Oldfield.

      It was a form of refreshment to which the female inhabitants of that delightful place were strongly addicted.  In vain did Dr. Weatherby, the great authority in all that concerned the health of the neighborhood, lift up his voice against the mild feminine dram-drinking of these modern days, denouncing it in no measured terms: the ladies of Oldfield listened incredulously, and, softly quoting Cowper's lines as to the "cup that cheers and not inebriates," still presided over their dainty little tea-tables and vied with one another in the beauty of their china and the flavor of the highly-scented Pekoe.

I was at once lulled by Carey's sense of humor and the fine awareness of style in choice of words and structural rhythm.  After two short introductory sentences, almost intentionally affected, the third,"In vain did Dr. Weatherby," launches a light and comic flight in a parody of over-refinement.  Mellifluous but humorous.

     The Challoners are" middle class,", as are most of the characters in Oldfield:  their father was a baronet's son but, alas, a younger son, so the title and estate went to an elder and unpleasant brother with whom there is no current relationship.  Sir Francis was, Mrs. Challoner shudders, not a nice man.  Their father left his money invested but since the income is limited, the girls have cleverly learned to make their own dresses which are no less admired than those of their friends.  The other neighbors (of any status) are all significantly wealthier, but we are assured that the fresh gracefulness of the girls and their mother so distinguishes their company, that friends "flocked eagerly into the pleasant drawing-room where Mrs. Challoner sat tranquilly summer and winter to welcome her friends."   Although Carey does not specifically say so, it is also true that the three daughters, at least, are sensible and kind-hearted.  Not flawless paragons, just free of any particular meanness. 

 

Two events expel the Challoners from this English Eden.  First, Dick's father, Mr. Mayne, decides that, as Dick is coming of age and finishing a degree at Oxford, it is time to put a stop to such easy intimacy as he observes between his son and Nancy Challoner.  He expresses the intention magisterially to Dick and, at an all-day party before the Mayne family leaves for Switzerland for the summer, the patriarch makes his disapproval of Nan unpleasantly clear to her as well. He has his eye on a wealthy daughter-in-law. 

Then a solicitor visits Mrs. Challoner: the family's investments have failed. There is no more money. Mrs. Challoner receives the news with melodrama, collapsing, sobbing, getting "one of her headaches," and needing both the maid and her youngest daughter to help her to her room. Nan and her only just younger sister Phillis, meanwhile, take stock.  They own a small country house near the coast so they can give up their leased home in Oldfield but they will not even have enough for food and a maid (!) (a necessity for their mother in their opinion) unless they make up their minds to earn money somehow.  The usual fate would be to hire out as governesses and let Dulce, the youngest, help her mother "let rooms" at their cottage.  Phillis, however, realistically points out that they are under-educated for teaching children; they don't have a firm knowledge of any languages, nor of music or mathematics.  Besides, above all, they want to keep the family together.

So they decide to use the one skill they have and to become dressmakers.  Which is considered non-genteel and will expel them from their caste--the word is explicit.  It will be disgraceful and scandalous in a way it is hard to understand today in the U.S.  Do we have comparable social shames? We have castes of course, but those of us in the great formless middle class don't even know how far out of "A-Society" we are, and we take the attitude that we don't care.  Among us prison, drugs, prostitution, alcoholism, homelessness and other disastrous marks of "low life" are the primary signs of social degradation. Most of us, however, would not "refuse to know" people in such conditions. It is hard to comprehend why it is so scandalous that girls without money would make dresses for a living.  Woody Allen's film Blue Jasmine is insightful about just this kind of falling out of society, but for the great middle class our lives don't seem burdensome just because we work to earn our livings. 

It is curious how we even pretend to understand Victorian attitudes toward class when we read historical stories like this.  For instance, Jane Austen's books are readily comprehensible as contemporary cinema. They should not be.  They are stories of ludicrous snobbery, of a Europe made rich from subduing, dominating and impoverishing the rest of the world by means very far from genteel and then doting on a newly acquired hypocritical 'elegance.' Balzac wrote devastating attacks on the French version, and Edith Wharton and Henry James have made it abundantly clear that American society was no exception  in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I myself, when an undergraduate, idolized the Romantic poets.  I wanted to live like that, going to Italy for a month, stopping in France, then back to London.  I had absolutely zero understanding of why I too couldn't have a life of freedom and leisure in which to exercise aesthetic tastes and literary preferences.  True.  What a shock by age 25 or 26 to understand that it was either marriage or "a job" for me, and probably both. It's true that my relatively free and comfortable life is still cushioned by the spoils of 500 years of exploiting countries that had not the aggression or militance to resist when first invaded and subjugated by Europe's 'civilization.'   But I am not of that gentry which was such a 'natural' locale for literature until the twentieth century. 

There are dozens of interesting side-stories in this clever and amusing book.  A very young and raw "Oxford man" has been newly appointed parish minister, or 'vicar,' in the town the Challoners move to.  Archie disapproves strongly of the Challoner girls' decision to 'do business,' and he expresses himself firmly. And officiously. But he nevertheless learns to like them, and even falls in love a little bit.   Archie's overweening and immature self-importance make him first a comic figure, and at last an earnest and caring pastor. His older sister Mattie who comes to keep house for him is somewhat dowdy and fluttery and talkative and he had not wanted her, but another sister he likes better, so Archie is disgruntled with his mother and his whole family, who are in financial straits also.  He treats Mattie with disapproval and sharp remarks which hurt her feelings, but she musters on. Mattie will have her own appealing and surprising story in the mix as well.

Then Nan's beloved Dick, back from summer vacation, finds out where the girls are and comes to visit, chaperoned by his suspicious father. When the girls' occupation is revealed, a war of wills begins.  Dick will have Nan or none.  He will have Nan as a dressmaker or not.  Father will not have Nan even spoken of.  Dick insists.  Nan concedes in private that she will either marry Dick or no one.  Father threatens.  Nan concedes that she must not marry without paternal consent.  And --so it goes.  Beautifully, feelingly, but humorously written and Dick is revealed as a sturdy and courageous friend.

Viewed as nineteenth-century melodrama the situation is banal and would be tiresome, except Rosa Carey is a skillful writer.  Her characters feel real.  Their dialog, actions, hesitations, indecisions, bursts of temper and impatience ring true, although their social mores are perhaps almost laughably colored with incomprehensible rules and shibboleths.  Parental power over their grown children's lives seems peremptory and heartless to us today perhaps.  Nevertheless, Carey creates such individuated personalities with such unconventional characteristics and such piquant dialogs and understated comedy that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. 

Well, by the end, every impasse in the plot is eventually removed via a kind of deus ex machina.  A familiar deus, in fact, who arrives miraculously to solve the plot's problems. It is of course a rich, and generous, and aristocratic relative; nothing new in that. And the machina--i.e., that which allows this god to appear suddenly-- is British Colonialism*.  And when I realize how there is nothing new in that, either, I am reminded of Edward Said's powerful study of the interplay of the whole Colonial past of Europe with every feature of its arts: Culture and Imperialism.

THE COLONIES AS PLOT DEVICE

It is almost a cliché of English Victorian literature that instead of merely having a wealthy relative show up to save the day, that convenient hero is someone who has been far away, "making his fortune."  How did the Challoners not know they had a wealthy relative and one kindly disposed toward them?  Why, Harry Challoner has been in one of the British colonies where he "struck it rich."  Even more vividly, he has "made a killing."  We all know what that means and never think about it.  It means going "out there" somewhere and finding some precious valuable commodity that hasn't been claimed by anyone else yet.  Inconveniently, when we look more closely, we see that anyone who lives "out there" doesn't count as anyone.  In Australia the native population was considered so non-human that they were shot for sport, but in the literature the colonies are dangerous and rough for the Europeans who went so innocently and righteously forth to 'discover.'*  Or maybe what they 'find'  has been claimed, but by such inferior, almost inhuman nonentities that a man (inevitably European)  has a right to kill them and take what he wants. And to bring wealth "home."   After all, you risked a lot to go discover it. And they were just 'natives.'  That says it all.  How amusing it is to realize that many folk tales from Europe start with "the sons who go out to seek their fortune."  That didn't happen during feudalism.

(*I was stunned and dismayed when cinema director Tim Burton ended his Alice in Wonderland, a bittersweet and poignant coming-of-age fable for Alice, by constructing her as joining the male business of Colonialism to symbolize her emancipation from Victorian strictures on women.)  

  

Like nunneries in earlier literature as places of refuge, concealment, withdrawal and punishment for women, and like wars (the infamous Crusades, for instance) for men, the "colonies" are places for Victorian denouement: fled to, retired to, arrived from, lay concealed in, brought wealth from, disappeared into.  More, colonialism is the invisible source of inflowing wealth that creates this "genteel class" at home. In fact, Colonialism is the heart and soul of European art: poetry (Kubla Khan), painting (the Levirates), music (The Nutcracker, The Pearlfishers, Turandot, Aida), drama, ­(from The Tempest to Lawrence of Arabia) until at least the middle of the twentieth century. 

 

So the Challoner mother and daughters are dumbfounded when a jolly red-haired giant shows up at their small cottage door.  Remember, the deceased father was a younger son of nobility and the plot made clear that there was no hope of help from that direction, the elder son being a ne'er-do-well, a scoundrel who spent all the wealth 'out there.'  But Harry, that baronet's son, has come into both the title and a fortune "out there."  And everything is resolved to everyone's satisfaction.  Minor characters as well as the Challoners all benefit equally.  Several surprising but logical turns are taken in the story and the last scene is free of a humorous undertone, as the 'main characters' finally come together. In other words, because jolly cousin Harry got rich in Australia, all ends happily.  In this England.  Maybe not for Australians.

NOTES   

             

1.  The title was tantalizing to me for I am conscientiously feminist and consciously idiosyncratic, let us say. In the 1950s as I grew up, the phrase "not like other girls" was loaded with ambiguity.  It could mean many things.  It could mean, lightly, a tomboy or a girl who liked sports or horses or other 'unmaidenly' diversions.  It could mean, tragically, someone mal-adapted to the point of social rejection or psychological breakdown.  It could mean, with a derogatory side-glance, a lesbian.  It could refer to someone who broke social conventions but by having a big heart and no fear earned warmth and respect from the very people who scorned her behavior (viz. Girl of the Golden West) . More commonly, however, it was a back-handed compliment, used by men to imply the inferiority of women generally but the exceptional quality of the 'girl' addressed.  The girl, of course, believed in her exceptional quality, not knowing that this was common and complicated flattery.  Why was it flattery?  It attributed the girl's attractiveness to her ability and willingness to distance herself from those 'other girls.'  Divide and conquer.  A hesitation to pursue something proposed by the man?  All he has to say is, "I thought you weren't like other girls."  And the pressure is on. 

 

It was therefore fascinating that this book's main characters do such an unconventional and sensible thing as rejecting pretensions to class in order to stay together as a family.  The girls are brave in the face of ostracism and disapproval although they find working life more difficult than they'd imagined, and of course soon long for their freedom, exercise, fresh air, parties, friends, socializing, and Nan's courageous resignation of the impossibility of her liaison with beloved Dick turns to tortured longing.

Carey puts the authorial seal of approval on their bravery and sensibility but of course finds a solution for their 'suffering.'  It is interesting to compare the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, a more tragic book that also treats what happens when a young woman of 'society' becomes impoverished, especially a girl who fails to capitalize on her ability to fascinate and manipulate men, for it is an ability that requires pretense and being bored.  She is used to disingenuousness, but she longs for fun and sincerity.

2,  Colonialism may be not just the enabling device for sudden plot turns, it seems, but the enabling device for English literature in general since the rise of the novel in the late seventeenth century, or perhaps all literature related to the novel genre, which just coincidentally happened to arise at that point in history.   From Robinson Crusoe to Pamela or Moll Flanders.

The wealth brought home from colonies supplied the wherewithal for the creation of a new Europe. It enriched for the first time many who began outside the aristocracy and thus arises a new privileged class which took political power over the next two or three stormy centuries, ousting the aristocracy (though never acquiring quite the "panache" of the titled). The very concept of a merchant class, of wealthy firms and manufacturers, of investments that fail or soar is derived from all those innocuous 'discoverers," "explorers," and 'conquistadors" which, although the names are given an innocent significance, are still important enough to teach to children in Eurocentric curricula. Magellan, who brought back (kidnapped) natives of South America, the survivors arriving in Europe seasick and homesick: frightened disheartened captives.  Vasco da Gama, who had his crew cut off the hands of men, women and children to fill a basket on his "voyages of exploration."  Cortez, Ponce de Leon, all the degradation, exploitation and genocide spread worldwide, to create also a "Third World." The slave trade, and in North American unimaginable eradication of the very language and cultures of the Americans Europe encountered. In the twentieth century that Third World would soon be called the "undeveloped world," as if those countries were poor because of their lack of 'our' civilization, and not poor because the First World had enslaved the people, brutalized them, stolen their wealth and their property.  Today we are advanced; we say they are "developing nations."  We should call their status "in recovery." And God forbid they should develop into "us." 

 It is sobering indeed to understand that for all non-Europeans (with the marginal exception of the Japanese) the year 1500 was at the beginning of an apocalypse, a tsunami we are still witnessing in the turmoil of the Middle East and the absolute degradation of the starving and refugees in much of Africa.

As a literary form, the novel itself derives from the same phenomenon. It arose in England as new middle class wealth began to consolidate after the century of the English Civil War, in late sixteen hundreds.  It depended for its existence on a leisured class with education, with leisure time to read for "diversion," and time to expend on the writing of something that would not repay the writer for all that labor. The early writers had independent income or they could not have spent their time writing and pontificating in coffee houses.  True, all societies in one way or another secure life support for those who draw or decorate or tell skilled stories, play music (fife and drum as it were at least) and dance and make ceremonies and rituals. Or for at least some of the 'artists,' as we call it,  since we are a fractured society and thus even the creators have to compete.

But the relationship of a novelist to society is of new devising in 1700s Europe, a creation of a wealthy, leisured self-conscious class. Early novels, interestingly, concerned themselves importantly with marrying "up" or "down," of increasing, or retaining, or losing status and wealth, and of male predatory piracy on female 'chastity.'  But then that was the great social upheaval: they were all busy establishing a completely new system of status and social identity.  Only one hundred years before (1600), it was considered virtuous to stay in the social position to which God had appointed you.  The Elizabethan "Great Chain of Being." But the possibility for Europeans to 'make a fortune' in the colonies changed all that.  The first unmistakable sign of the upheaval was the British Civil War (mid-1600s) when the monarchy was overthrown, a 'Commonwealth' declared, and the king of England beheaded.  Cromwell, the new leader, perhaps took his religious Puritanism too seriously and didn't adequately understand the financial changes necessary to accommodate the new merchant class;  he was overthrown and a new modified Monarchy was 'Restored':  thus the society and culture and period called the Restoration.  Reaction against the straight-laced Puritanism was expressed in an excessively materialist and frankly sexual culture.  Plots of theatrical comedies turned to legalistic trickery and marital infidelity:  all expressing an acquisitive viewpoint. But all that went a little overboard and the resulting pendulum return gave us Puritan and Sentimental and Adventurist novels.  The economic behavior of the nation was not to be examined from a morality point of view, so its private and social behavior, sexuality and status, were substituted as Christian virtues.  The Puritan worries about having and behaving.  Not about oppression or exploitation.  Coveting?  No longer a problem unless it's your neighbor's wife you covet, and even then, if you are caught, it's her problem.

What creates the self-consciousness of society in England (and Europe in general) and also gives rise to the writing of novels, to the career of being a writer, is a sense of domination and superiority among "the privileged," who now procure for themselves education (necessary to keep track of wealth), leisure time, and the sense of the"brave new world" that Shakespeare apostrophized.  And what provides those abstracts is unlimited aggression toward "others," who are named the backward and uncivilized.  What makes us civilized and them barbaric or savage is the fact of "us" going out there and ruling and using "them."

Can you imagine yourself in either role, discoverer or discovered?  Suppose I am a member of a small village and I hear the amazing news that we've been "discovered."  By strange aliens, humanoids, who "claim" our village for their king or gods or boss. And I'm supposed to leave my house and garden and move into barracks from which I will work in their fields of extraction of whatever they can "take home."  Or, on the other hand, imagine I am mountain climbing and come down in an area that has rich farms, so I "stake my claim" to the land and take away the produce and/or livestock as well as anything that strikes my eye: a beautiful stained glass window, some of their unique 'ceramics,' a couple of cute children, maybe.  I bring it all home and sell it for six million dollars and I'm set for life. When I am set for life, I suddenly apply to myself new maxims about "healthy, wealthy, and wise."  "If you're so damned smart, why aren't you rich?"  "Early to bed, early to rise."  "The early bird" (first one there gets it all). End of digression, but you see what I mean.  Unimaginable today, and yet we routinely read about it, see films about it, our children are taught about this being done by Europeans to people in all the other continents and the world's islands. We learn about it and honor the "explorers" and "pioneers."  So this naive book (we can't say anything is innocent any more) like how many Eurocentric novels, rests for its plot mechanisms and its very existence on Europe's aggressive invasions between 1500 and, say, 2000. Or 1950 perhaps, since resistance has arisen in the last sixty years.

I'll just mention that "the colonies" also play another role in Not Like Other Girls, in a subplot of great drama (perhaps overly so for here there is no nuance, no humorous undertone) in which a man thought dead returns from his ventures, this time in Africa.  All the conventions of brutality and savagery figure in the story of his "capture" by "a hostile tribe," although a woman, an "old negress. . . a poor degraded ill-used creature, half-witted and ugly" fed and nursed and protected him.  "They were a set of hideous brutes and the fetish they worshipped was cruelty."  He was saved and freed, but then fell in "with some Dutch traders who had come far into the interior in search of ivory tusks."  Get the picture?  And they all lived happily ever after.  (Not the brutes or the negress or the elephants, of course, but…as long as you "make a killing," that's all that matters.  I'm not bitter. )

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins; a review.

NOTE:  Goodreads friends, skip down to the section beginning Social Anxiety for material additional to the goodreads review. 

            This fall I found a used copy of The Moonstone, a Victorian Mystery novel by Wilkie Collins, 1868.  I had read it as an adolescent but I retained no memory beyond the title. I didn't remember it as a mystery because I had then no conception of "mysteries" as a genre, nor had I heard of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers or Arthur Conan Doyle. Neither did I have enough sense of history to remember it as "Victorian."  At that age—twelve and thirteen—all time was still eternal despite whatever history might have been taught in grade school.

            Reading it again, I was at first disappointed because the opening seemed "hoaky" if I can use that word to label a story replete  with evil relatives, stolen and cursed diamonds, a beautiful young (and rich) heroine, handsome suitors and humorous servants.  The frame work was a clutch of cliches  which, of course, are now familiar to me as they weren't at my first reading.  But The Moonstone is far more than a "mere" Victorian Mystery, and it is worth considering at some length. The mystery concerns a valuable "yellow" diamond from India, called The Moonstone, which is reputed to be cursed, and which a British officer in India illegally and immorally steals.  Later, in England, he bequeaths the stone to his niece and the night it is given to her, it is stolen from the country house, from her own sitting room.    

            Standard requisites of the nineteenth-century novel in general overlap with those of the mystery, and The Moonstone is well supplied with the necessities:  in addition to heroine, suitors, and servants, these include a famous detective, a no-nonsense solicitor, and additional satirical comic relief. Three other characters surprised me: two are hardly introduced until late in the book, but the character Rosanna Spearman figures importantly in early parts of the plot.  She is a novelty in a Victorian book, and lends a curious tone to the story.  Rosanna is a criminal, born into urban poverty and early prison, whom Lady Verinder (Rachel's mother) hires as a house-servant because a Matron there thought her rehabilitated.  Rosanna has never before been exposed to "fine people" and her expectations mislead her.  One of Rachel's suitors, handsome Franklin Blake, treats Rosanna with politeness and kindness, with the result that Rosanna falls in love with him, and Blake is completely unaware of it. Soon after the diamond's disappearance, Rosanna commits suicide in a gruesome manner, of grief for being beneath Blake's notice. 

            I don't know what structural functionality such a character and background would ordinarily serve in the Victorian era, or if it's as unusual as it seems to me, but it is a unique twist to the story and oddly unsettling.  Perhaps I am mistaken to find everything about the depiction of Rosanna Spearman unusual, and almost  modern.  In 1868, however, Ibsen was writing in Europe, Balzac had written, Flaubert and Zola were raising eyebrows, and Thomas Hardy, of course, was hardly Victorian. Even Victor Hugo treated seriously the theme of the daughter of criminals loving a young nobleman (Eponine and Marius).

            In his "Preface" Collins avers that one object of his writing was to reveal "the influence of circumstances on character," definitely a trait of some modernity.  In The Moonstone, however, he purports conversely to trace the "influence of character on circumstances," aiming to show how the unexpected firmness of intention of an eighteen-year-old girl influenced events so strongly because no one could have guessed her discernment of alternatives.  I had not thought about how "modern" Rachel's behavior is, but certainly the cunning of the plot of The Moonstone does owe much to the fact that Rosanna Spearman's character is misinterpreted, in the story and by readers as well. 

            What makes the story rise even more markedly above a normal "good" mystery, I think, is the device of having it told by four different characters who witnessed events at different stages. How much the structure was influenced by its initial appearances in three serial segments I can't say, but certainly the stylistic variety in itself enhanced my pleasure in its reading. 

            The first section, by far the longest, is told by Gabriel Betteredge, the steward, a man seventy years old who knew Lady Verinder before she was married. His is the voice of the loyal retainer:  prosaic, undignified, and sometimes a little crusty—especially when his stubborn faith in the young Mistress Rachel is questioned--but shrewd and practical nonetheless.  Most of all, he is amusing in the stereotypical way that a good country serving man is "supposed" to entertain us cosmopolitan literary types.

            In the meantime, here is another false start and more waste of good

            writing paper.  What's to be done now?  Nothing that I know of, except

            for you to keep your temper, and for me to begin it all over again for

            the third time.

Betteredge treats a volume of  Robinson Crusoe the way some people superstitiously treat the Tao Te Ching or the Bible, as a kind of fortune-telling talisman.  Whatever page he opens it to, he finds solutions to riddles, answers to questions he didn't realize he had; sometimes even the foretelling of events.  So between his dithering about the difficulty of having to write, his recourse to Robinson Crusoe, his frequent naps in a chair in the sun, his attention to details of the household, his long history with the family, and his sentimental warmth, the first half (40%) of the book which introduces all the major characters, including the noted Sergeant Cuff, flows briskly along through family history, the arrival of the diamond and discovery of its theft, subsequent suspicions and uproar, and initial investigations, with the clarity of the below-stairs view.

            The narrator of the second segment is the most caricatured portrait in the book, and other than the ostracized uncle who bequeaths the diamond to Rachel, she is one of only two mean-spirited characters, both of them proselytizing Christians. Miss Clack is an eager bearer of tracts of "good works" such as "The Devil in the Hairbrush" (about women's vanity). Among Miss Clack's misguided spiritual companions there are men and married women available for this role, so I frowned a little at the presumed prior inferiority of the "spinster," which I felt verged on the heavy-handed. But the ridicule is funny and this particular kind of smug proselytizing well deserves savage mockery.  Like Gabriel Betteredge, Miss Clack constantly comments on her writing style too, but without his humility, a trait Miss Clack lacks absolutely:

            Oh, be morally tidy!  Let your faith be as your stockings, and your

            stockings as your faith.  Both ever spotless, and ready to be put on

            at a moment's notice!

                  I beg a thousand pardons.  I have fallen insensibly into my Sunday-

            school style.  Most inappropriate in such a record as this.  Let me try

            to be worldly. . . .

The charities of these devout Christians are also ridiculed: the best one being the

"British-Ladies-Servants'-Sunday-Sweetheart-Supervision-Society."    But the "Mothers'-Small-Clothes-Conversion-Society" also has its charms: this committee buys in trousers that have been pawned and converts them to children's clothes, primarily to punish the profligate fathers who will not get their pants back! I also want to hint toward a contemporary "silly single woman:"  Effie Trinket, in

            Before I leave Miss Clack, there is one passage that well be the creed of some of our own twenty-first-century  know-nothings: 

            "Taxation may be the consequence of a mission; riots may be the

            consequence of a mission; wars may be the consequence of a mission:

            we go on with our work, irrespective of every human consideration

            which moves the world outside us. We are above reason; we are beyond

            ridicule; we see with nobody's eyes, we hear with nobody's ears, we feel

            with nobody's hearts, but our own.  Glorious, glorious privilege!   And

            how is it earned?  Ah, my friends, you may spare yourselves the useless

            inquiry! We are the only people who can earn it—for we are the only people

            who are always right [emph. mine].

            The final segment of the book is written primarily by the rejected suitor Franklin Blake.  Two minor characters play decisive roles here.  First, there is a crippled, embittered girl of "low rank" who holds a clue almost completely unexpected although it was foreshadowed in Gabriel Betteredge's part of the tale.  After everyone but the servants had left the estate, Lucy Yolland appeared, a nearby fisherman's daughter, both lamed enough to use a crutch and desperately lean and haggard.  She hails Gabriel "as if she could have eaten me alive," looking for Franklin Blake, "the murderer"!  Lucy has a letter for him from Rosanna, written before her death.  "Murderer," she calls him because he ought to have seen Rosanna was in love, he ought to have taken pity of her, he ought to have noticed when someone was suffering.  He therefore caused her death..  She even argues in general:

            "Where is this gentleman that I mustn't speak of, except with respect?

            Ha, Mr. Betteredge, the day is not far off when the poor will rise

            against the rich. I pray Heaven they may begin with him.  I pray

            Heaven they may begin with him."

             Ezra Jennings is another disabled 'freak,' a parallel to Lucy Yolland and to Rosanna Spearman: someone out of place, someone unacceptable to society, whom, however, Collins treats with empathy and in a realistic manner, and who I expected to be somehow culpable, because of the stereotypes I've encountered in the three British mystery authors I know:  Conan Doyle, Sayers, and Christie.  Jennings has three afflictions. First he had a mother of an "other" race, which partly explains why his appearance is unusual in Victorian England.  "I was born, and partly brought up in one of our colonies. My father was an Englishman; but my mother was –."

             Second, perhaps as a corollary, he has suffered an unjust accusation which destroyed his reputation and prevents him from having a profitable practice of his own.  His third affliction he does not disclose to Blake, but Collins 'omnisciently' imparts the knowledge by including pages from Jennings' journal:  Ezra Jennings suffers from a terrible crippling disease which accounts for his gaunt skeletal look, and the pied black and white of his hair.

            The entire mystery is bookended by two stories witnessed in India:  the initial theft of the Diamond in 1799  and a later post-script sent by a traveler in India. The prologue tells of an assault by British Colonial forces on a town in India. The postscript is a report from India which closes the story.  For what I've omitted is the Orientalist twist to the story—the "Curse of the Moonstone" and the eerie presence of three "dark" men, Brahmin descendants of descendants of descendants, who have pursued the diamond since "the lawless Mohammedans" first stole it from the temple of the "Hindoo god of the moon"—"whose seat is on the antelope," and whose four arms "embrace the four corners of the earth."      

            In my reading, the Hindu deity associated with the moon is Chandra who has only two arms and usually rides in a chariot carrying the lunar disk across the sky, although it is possible to associate him with being seated on an antelope.  The four-armed gods, however, are the great Trinity, Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, and they are not associated with either the moon or the antelope.  Imagine reading a story about Americans who worship a Great Christ that holds the graven tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's what I call irresponsible representation.  And this kind of irresponsible appropriation  and invention of symbols, themes, and stories from "the East" is what is meant by "Orientalism" in Postcolonial Theorizing.

Social Anxiety, Orientalism, and the Mystery Genre: Ambivalence in "The Moonstone."

            It has been argued that the mystery genre came into being with industrialization and urbanization, that is, when nineteenth-century life was becoming urbanized--full of strangers, chaotic and unpredictable, and stories of "the Other worlds" abounded.   Urban danger and chaos reached out to destabilize even the familiar and inviolate hierarchies of the country.  And what could be more sinister, lurking in the city of lost innocence, than delegates from the lands of "our" inferiors?  Dark people.  Dark dangers.  Sayers with all her 20s feminist savvy still uses the N-word quite casually, at least once specifically of native of India who had studied at Oxbridge. 

            Several historical events occur together in the 1840s.  The first detective story is generally considered to be Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," (1841) in which the mysterious violent culprit is an "ourang-outang" escaped into a city, a "danger from the East." Poe had recently seen  an "orang-utan" (current English) exhibited in Philadelphia, and the coincidence of the exhibit and the Orientalist shape of the story brings together all the tropes of colonial trophies, exoticism, fascination and dangers.  The 1840s also saw the establishment of the first professional police forces in a number of cities, American and European.  Poe's "little story" set a template for Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and others, but also for the role of "the Orient" and Colonialism in mysteries, including The Moonstone.  Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty figure, and such Christie stories of global criminal conspiracies as her repellent racist and reactionary book The Big Four, point to a perceived social hunger for the reassuring rationality of the detective or mystery story: to set time back, to reestablish a safe and stable social hierarchy in the books, and to end change which threatens those hierarchies: revolutions, uprisings, mutinies, resistance, labor struggles and strikes, feminism and the danger—moral as well as physical-- of cities.

            The Mystery or Detective genre of literature soothed the "white" urban psyche in several ways:  it identified and arrested the guilty, it cut through the disorder with a supremely intelligent, observant, rational investigator—the unique power of the European, and until well into the twentieth century, the European male!—and, finally, it acknowledged the social anxiety

            According to some psychological theory, victimizers often hate and fear their victims because they project the suspicion that their victims must hate them and crave revenge.  Slavery advocates used to claim that their "blacks" were happy and childlike and would not be able to take care of themselves if emancipated, but on the other hand, and at the same time they maintained that "blacks" were savage, dangerous, lustful, unruly, bloodthirsty.  In the nineteenth century in Europe, the great fear was from the East (which included the Arab countries, or the "Middle East" and sometimes, unwittingly, Africa and South America)—as if Europe were half the world and the 75% of the world Europe dominated were a roughly equivalent sphere, an opposite, in fact.

            For nineteenth-century Britons, and Europeans generally, the Asian colonies were an increasing source of  national power, pride, and profit: a place to build careers and  acquire wealth. Above all, the East was a topic to discuss, to lecture about, to gossip about, to fantasize over, to "own."  Ideological references run a gamut of types and sources, from political speeches and legislation, explorers' tales, advice for investors and administrators about how to rule "the Orient" and why it was incumbent on modern civilizations to provide rational and enlightened supervision to these sadly decadent dens of iniquity, sensuality and chaos—"the white man's burden"—to the taking and displaying of trophies and cultural icons: ivory, beaten brass tables, elephant-foot umbrella holders, tiger and snow leopard rugs, an endless list.  The East was repellent and fascinating, dangerous and inviting. Novelists, painters, musicians, poets ("In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree"), and dancers all as readily rendered "Oriental" themes as we children of the 40s used to do "Indian dances" and go "on the warpath" with chicken feathers tied to our heads, a kitchen pot as "tom-tom," bows and arrows with suction cups, and toy tomahawks.  Crude and now-embarrassing though it is if  looked at clearly, such appropriation of the vanquished has proved a common historical thread.

            The best primary source for a thorough understanding of the phenomenon is the detailed and masterly examination of the function of Eurocentric representations of 'the East' over a five hundred year period: Edward W. Said's seminal primer in Post-Colonial Studies, entitled simply Orientalism, a model of deconstructing social fantasies and also of a meticulous and overt avoidance of re-constructing  a counter-fantasy.

            Said, a classics professor at Columbia, examines how the first European images and ideas about a definable construct called "The Orient" coincide precisely with important political and military interactions of Europe and some object imagined to be Europe's opposite—i.e., the world was essentially divided into two spheres—the West and the East.  These 'Eastern' empires were now deemed decadent, sick, turgid, stagnant and backward, in the ideology, and it was up to Europe to rule them and bring them into contemporary civilization (Europe's domain).  No distinction is made between Arab, Berber, Afghani, Indian, Pakistani, Malaysian, Chinese, Siberian, Japanese, etc. and in fact many of the national borders were created by Europe.  But still one would think that Daoism, Shinto, Confucianism, Hindu, Buddhism and Islam would be seen as quite distinct. No, 'the East"is mystical.  "We"  in 'the West' are not.

            Of special interest to me  in  The Moonstone is the ambivalence shown by Collins toward "the East".  In 1868, when Collins published the book, a notorious Indian Mutiny was just over ten years in the past (1857).  The Mutiny's reported atrocities inflamed English popular opinion, and during the aftermath no less a personage than Charles Dickens had advised exterminating the Indians across the board.  Yet Collins, Dickens's protege and friend, only a decade later, sets The Moonstone in the past without reference to tensions in India, and the final entry in the book, a peaceful resolution, takes place in India in 1850.  So Collins is particularly interesting not just because of the marked Orientalist tone and theme of his book, but in the ambivalence he displays.  Yes, there is cast over the whole story the suspense of the "dark" Brahmins from India and their mysterious behavior and "mien,"  but alongside the danger theme is a counter-theme of noble bearing, of restraint—i.e., they do not harm the men they kidnap, except in the end the villainous thief.  Yes, the diamond may be cursed, but in the end it finally does not harm those who, though they had no moral right to it, came by its possession innocently. The curse serves to enable the Brahmins to return the Moonstone to its Hindu culture and in the end leaves no lasting harm. 

            The Brahmins, like Rosanna Spearman, Lucy Yolland and Ezra Jennings, all are presented to the reader as somehow distinguished by the phrase Collins uses to describe Ezra Jennings, as having an "unsought self-possession."  Perhaps Jennings can be seen as a particular embodiment of Collins's ambivalence.  Like the crippled bad-tempered and bitter young Lucy, and the non-comprehending Rosanna Spearman, Ezra Jennings is someone that earlier sleuthing could not have foreseen, nor can the reader turn to typical construction to interpret.  I cannot say much, without perhaps spoiling the end, about how he functions in the plot, except to say that his insight is not that of the detective, but of the scientist (another nineteenth-century trope, certainly, in 1868), and the object which allows his insight is a tricky import, again, from the Orient. 

            I have pointed out that Jennings suffers from two apparent misfortunes:  he has been followed by an undeserved bad reputation which has haunted his fortunes, and his appearance is partly due to a mother of "some other race" (i.e., "other" than British).  So here we have the supremely rational man being invested with a dual nature: West and East, Ruler and Colony.  His skeletal appearance is also related to a condition that makes him dependent upon opium, a fateful drug, and a medicinally useful drug: again the book's ambivalence toward a token of 'the East.'

            Thus a weapon in service of the unfortunate victims of the "curse" from the east is in fact also a hybrid of the east. Collins' depiction of Jennings resembles the development of the three "Brahmins":  'other'-ness makes him, and them, seem sinister; they are all three outside the normal social lives and they represent both an attraction and a repulsion felt toward the "other."  It is Blake's freedom from suspicious prejudices which endears him to Jennings, and thereby clears the way to the solution of the mystery of the diamond's theft. Who took it?  Well, quite literally, 'something from the east'  -- so – no one.  No one at all.   How's that for mystery?