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Prologue: 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moonstone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Detective Methods and Genre Standards
Intention, Identity, and Personality
Science and Religion
Gender and Victorian Morality
Class, Wealth, and Nobility
British Imperialism
Summary
Analysis
The narrator recounts one such story about a famous yellow diamond called The Moonstone, originally from a statue of the Indian moon god, which shone with the cycles of the moon. (There was a similar myth in Rome and Greece.) In the 11th century, Muslim invaders pillaged a famous temple in Somnauth and took everything but this statue, which three Brahmins preserved in a new shrine in Benares. That night, the lord Vishnu visited these Brahmins in a dream and told them to guard the Moonstone “to the end of the generations of men.” Their descendants did this until the 18th century, when the Mughal emperor Aurungzebe ordered the new Benares temple pillaged and the Moonstone stolen. The next generations of priests followed the Moonstone in disguise; by the end of the 18th century, the Sultan of Seringapatam had set it in a dagger’s handle.
In recounting the earliest history of the Moonstone, shrouded in secrecy and conflict, Collins’s narrator makes a few moves that demonstrate an unusual attitude towards India for his time. First, he compares Indian religion to the Roman and Greek ones considered at the foundation of Western civilization, challenging the narrative of European cultural superiority that Britain used to justify colonizing India (an attitude which many of his characters share with his readers). Secondly, he points out that the Moonstone was already stolen various times, before it ever came to Britain, which (in addition to foreshadowing its violent plunder by the British) raises a fundamental question about who rightfully owns the Diamond. As it is stolen from the Benares temple, the Moonstone transitions from a symbol of religious power and the illustriousness of the divine into a store of material value, reflecting Aurungzebe and the Sultan’s wealth and military power. Already, it is clear that it means different things to different people, who put different kinds of claims to ownership on it.
Themes
