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Prologue: 2
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
When this story was told in the army camp, the narrator continues, John Herncastle was the only one to take it seriously, because of his “love of the marvelous.” He ridiculed the others for treating the story as a myth and declared that the diamond would be on his finger by the end of the assault. On the critical day, the writer did not see Herncastle until the assault was over and the sultan, Tippoo, was dead. They were sent together to prevent the other officers from unnecessarily plundering the palace, and Herncastle was distraught at the “terrible slaughter” and behavior of the other soldiers. During their disgraceful plunder, the soldiers continually joked about the Moonstone.
Herncastle’s appetite for “the marvelous” points to the fantastical, romantic dimension that Collins hopes to wed with realism: while everyone else sees the story of the Diamond as a fiction, an (Eastern) religious tale opposed to supposedly rational (Western) knowledge and governance, Herncastle takes the Moonstone’s story seriously and appears to see Indians as human beings, unworthy of the cruel British soldiers’ slaughter. Again, Collins shows the reality of indiscriminate slaughter and plunder that most British narratives of colonialism hid behind the guise of the “civilizing mission" or "white man’s burden.” This would have been particularly daring given the First Indian War of Independence, about a decade before the novel’s publication, in which such slaughter was common—but seldom discussed and firmly supported by British public opinion.
Themes
The narrator heard a cry from across the palace and discovered John Herncastle holding the bloody dagger above the body of an Indian who proclaimed, “The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!” before dying. The frenzied Herncastle disappeared for the night, and in the morning, after the General threatened to have any thieves hanged, the narrator met his cousin again. He asked about the Indian’s death the previous night, and Herncastle, now calm, proclaimed that he knew little, and that the man’s last words were equally meaningless to both of them. The narrator asked if that was “all you have to tell me,” and Herncastle said, “that is all.” They “have not spoken since.”
Suddenly, Herncastle loses the sympathy and regret the narrator just reported; his 180-degree turn to a treasure-hungry, cold-blooded killer seems to attest to the Moonstone’s mystical power: it can break family ties, reform personality, and bind people to secrecy. The dying Indian’s last words also point to the ostensible myth’s incorporation into the novel's reality, as well as foreshadowing the events to come for Collins’s audience. Of course, the gentleman Herncastle’s sudden transformation into a murderer for the sake of money—and the Indian’s promise of revenge—is also a metaphor for British colonialism as a whole.
Themes
