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Introduction
The modern novel is one of the most important moral agents of the community.
—Dinah Craik, “To Novelists – and a Novelist”Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone is a novel constructed through the repeated representation of the abnormal body. Reading The Moonstone in critical terms has traditionally required a primary engagement with form. The work has been defined as a foundational narrative in the genre of crime and detection and at the same time read as a narrative located within the context of the immensely popular group of sensation novels that dominate the Victorian literary marketplace through the middle and the second half of the nineteenth century. T. S. Eliot is one of the first readers to define one end of this paradigm, reading the novel as an original text in the genre of detective fiction, and famously saying that The Moonstone is “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels” (xii). On the other end of the paradigm, the novel's formal workings are again often cited as a larger example, and even triumph, of Victorian sensation fiction – melodramatic narratives built, according to Winifred Hughes and the more recent Derridean readings by Patrick Brantlinger and others,Footnote 1 around a discursive cross-fertilization of romanticism, gothicism, and realism.
Through contemporary disability studies it is possible to read the emergence of the detective and sensation genres or forms as the articulation of a larger cultural dynamic, so that these forms function as instruments of normative culture, specifically as discursive tools that solidify a rigid dichotomy of the normal and the abnormal in the nineteenth century. I argue here that the representations of abnormalcy in The Moonstone become the location of a disabled perspective on the workings of Victorian cultural practice. Collins's writing of physical difference in this 1868 narrative, his consistent placement of images of the abnormal body (usually female, impoverished, and impaired) against images of the normal body (usually male, privileged, and able), constitutes an early comment on and a potentially transformative critique of those modern practices (and resulting cultural forms) which in their origin intend to define, designate, medicalize, control, and exclude the body that is physically and cognitively different. By structuring The Moonstone around a set of culturally-scripted, dichotomous images and characters, and by then writing through this dichotomy (undermining it in the very moments of its construction), Collins is able to fracture and displace the entire discursive complex of the norm and its assertions of normativity through popular cultural forms. In this sense Wilkie Collins writes disability into the very composition or fabric of his “foundational” “melodramatic” “detective” “sensation” novel.
Victorian Culture, the Discourses of Disability, and “the shock of the new”
To reflect upon history is also, inextricably, to reflect upon power.
—Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle
The contemporary definition of “disability” is enmeshed within the wide dissemination and increasing contestation of the dichotomy between what is normal and what is not. In theorizing the normal and the abnormal, the notion or current category of disability emerges in part as a catch-all term tied to modern discourses of labor, industry, and the medical sciences, as well as a critically postmodern awareness of the negative social processes involved in organizing physical difference through the terms and dichotomous structures that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has defined in her work on gender as “a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century” (1). Disability, then, is located and defined by scholars as something “constructed on top of impairment” (Corker 3); disability is “not so much the lack of a sense or the presence of a physical or mental impairment as it is the reception and construction of that difference” (Davis, Bending 50); disability is “a linchpin in a complex web of social ideals, institutional structures, and government policies” (Linton 10). In turn, the current or “New Disability Studies”Footnote 2 is “a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations” and the “relationship between bodies and their environments,” an analysis of the “set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled,” and, ultimately, “a radical critique” of the “set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled” (Garland-Thomson, “Making Freaks” 132); disability studies grounded in humanistic or cultural studies methodologies is likewise something that allows a “biocultural approach” to occur, a method of analysis that uses a “culture-based way of knowing” to understand “the scientificized and medicalized body in history, culture, and politics” (Davis, “Stumped” 91).
When using disability studies to read backwards – to read Victorian culture and to re-interpret representations of physical difference in nineteenth-century texts like The Moonstone – one can detect both the pervasive emergence of a conceptual framework built around the binary of the normal and the abnormal, as well as the resulting establishment and far-reaching practice of normalizing cultural and institutional structures. Citing the OED, for example, Lennard Davis notes that, “If the lexicographical information is relevant, it is possible to date the coming into consciousness in English of an idea of ‘the norm’ over the period 1840–1860.” In this same essay, Davis further demonstrates that the structuring of the statistical norm as dominant ideological apparatus eventually appears throughout nineteenth-century British society, its actual administration occurring at base through the statistical assertion of the normal and the abnormal binary:
In England, there was an official and unofficial burst of interest in statistics during the 1830s. A statistical office was set up as the Board of Trade in 1832, and the General Register Office was created in 1837 to collect vital statistics. All of this interest in numbers concerning the state was a consequence of the Reform Act of 1832, the Factory Act of 1833, and the Poor Law of 1834. The country was being monitored and the poor were being surveiled. Private groups followed, and in 1833 a statistical section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was formed in which Quetelet as well as Malthus participated. In the following year Malthus, Charles Babbage, and others founded the Statistical Society of London. The Royal London Statistical Society was founded in 1835. (“Constructing Normalcy” 9–10, 13)
In this cultural work, in the formation of state and privately funded offices, boards, associations, and societies, the modern body is made, again formed through statistical formulas, and normalized through the mathematics and aspirations of romantic ideology. Throughout the nineteenth century, as Davis argues elsewhere, both in the evolution of the body and its formation through theory and institutional practice “the impaired body became disabled” and “the disabled body became ‘abnormal’” (“Nation” 18).
This location of a shift from impairment to negative disablement or abnormalcy, from premodern identity to a modernized subject status defined by what is normal and what is not, is further augmented by the research of scholars working on the history of medicine and medical psychology through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 3 As Michel Foucault's work has famously shown, an entirely new terminology and definition of cognitive, physical, and sexual difference was being organized and implemented in Western Europe and North America during the nineteenth century. The institutional emergence of definitive categories for the body and for mental, physical, and sexual disorder, categories again supported by the rise of statistics and the widely increased practices and simultaneous diversification of medical science, is the base upon which bodies work in modern culture and the foundation through which they are signified in modern cultural practice.Footnote 4
The category of disability begins to emerge within these conflicting modernized discourses on the function and significance of the normal and the abnormal body, within the constant constructions and reconstructions of what is normal and what is abnormal through nineteenth-century mathematics, science, and medicine, and within the constant pleasure derived from the cultural play within this same dichotomy (the pleasure of articulation and categorization, the pleasure of embodiment and resistance). According to Julia Miele Rodas: “the presence of disability in Victorian fiction indicates more than a mere reflection of actual disabled persons in the culture. It points also to an underlying anxiety and ambivalence regarding this presence, a grappling with identity, a desire to experiment with places and roles” (372). The wide, portentous presence that disabled characters have in popular Victorian forms is a characteristic of a larger cultural engagement with the meaning of physical difference itself and is an indication of an attempt to organize and order the potentialities of a new category of somatic identification. In such formal engagements with difference, the abnormal body often becomes easily emblematic of larger societal issues, anxieties, and problems, and is, as a disability studies framework suggests, often easily collapsed into a larger articulation of normative ideology. In the nineteenth century, specifically in Wilkie Collins's London and Kent of 1868, figuring the spectacle of the abnormal body in best-selling narratives, writing it into popular culture through the “the emotional excess of melodrama” (Holmes, Fictions 22–23) pushes that body's representation into an enormous, culture-wide role of signification and simultaneously attaches to it a powerful and persuasive metaphor of surface-level negativity.
As either a novel of detection or a novel of sensation (or both), in The Moonstone Collins is in a sense required by the dynamics of Victorian modernity, the emerging formulas of the real provided by science and medicine, and the function of the larger form or popular genre itself to represent bodies that are defined as “strange,” “provocative,” and “controversial” – in a word, abnormal. The abnormal body is the “raw material” or the instrument or prosthetic device through which a compulsory normative center renders and frames the irrational, deviant, resistant “disorder” that “plagues” the body of the society as a whole. Representations of the abnormal in a popular form like the sensation or the detective novel define and enforce the parameters of the statistical norm. In theory, popular literary forms and other kinds of representation enact the ideology of the normal body, which asserts that to be “disabled,” to be physically or cognitively impaired and thus unable to participate in the numerous economies of the norm, is to be “alien,” an object “off the map of recognizable human experiences” (Snyder and Mitchell, Narrative 5). Again, in this particular aesthetics of the body, the representation of the disabled figure perpetuates the uniformity, inevitability, and the stated reality of Victorian normative practice: “the disabled body represents . . . a projection of dominant ideology” (Snyder and Mitchell, “Introduction” 6), and is thus “largely, but not strictly synonymous with sites of cultural oppression” (Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural 6).
The theoretical key to my analysis of Collins's writing in this form is the recognition that these moments of representation, these larger uses of narrative prosthesis, are also potentially liberating devices that can be used as critical supplements. For example, Anita Silvers, in arguing that Snyder and Mitchell conduct a “flawed” interpretation of “the aesthetic,” writes that, “While everyday practical discourse is disturbed by anomaly, aesthetic discourse revels in the shock of the new. Understanding this capacity of aesthetic discourse can lead us to an aesthetic that makes disability possible” (230). In the same way that repeated representations of abnormalcy function as an imposition of the norm, in theory these representations of the different body – again, playing upon “the shock of the new” – can also lead to a transformative re-construction of that body, a transformation that can occur inside of representation, so that in terms of physical difference “disability” may occur – that is a new posture or cultural perspective that critiques negative representation through or inside of the embodied representation itself.
This kind of turn is exactly what occurs in the writing and reading of Wilkie Collins's fiction. Wilkie Collins's engagement with the abnormal body is often defined by a larger kind of anxiety or, as Rodas would have it, Collins's work is best defined as “a grappling with identity” rather than an enforcement of a single kind of bodily identification, an experiment with difference that is meant to trouble and to disturb the pleasures of articulation and embodiment, the ordering of the normal and the abnormal. When tracing representations of abnormalcy through the body of Collins's work – and again Collins is one of the first inventors of the popular sensation and detective forms – it becomes evident that writing these popular narratives leads to another formal “first,” that is to the discovery of such postmodern categories as disability and then to the problematic articulation and representation of the “disabled” body. Collins's novels, especially the later formerly neglected mission or thesis novels, become open vehicles for these kinds of politicized representations of bodies that are different, and then function as supplements to and revisions of originally oppressive frameworks of bodily meaning.
In this new framework Davis's definition above of the oppressive, formulaic linking in the nineteenth century of the impaired body with the disabled body, and then the abnormal body, is in part reversed: in Collins's work the abnormal body becomes the disabled body, in our sense of the term; representations of the abnormal become critical potentialities and locations of transformation, moments of disability perspective. Instead of inscribing and thus perpetuating normalcy, these narratives of the abnormal push towards a critique of the norm, articulating “disability” as a disruptive critical assertion. Thus in a narrative like The Moonstone the disabled body becomes a fracturing device situated in the very moments of the modern – those dichotomous moments when the normal body opposes directly the abnormal body. Rather than being caught in a binary, Collins's abnormal bodies fracture the binary. In the larger body of Collins's work, then, the formal mechanics of sensation slowly fade, and the complicated, politicized notion of disability slowly emerges.
With its complicated formal dynamics in mind, I argue here that The Moonstone is the textual embodiment and beginning of such a potentially transformative articulation. The Moonstone pushes the representations of the abnormal out of the standardized formal devices of the sensation and the detective genres and into the larger framework of an extremely progressive critical and cultural perspective. In using sensation and detection as a formal base, Collins pushes beyond rigidly defined and ultimately oppressive identity structures; by writing to shock, to cause “sensation,” and in writing the “detective fever” of Gabriel Betteredge and the other characters and multiple perspectives in this text, Collins opens up a possibility of a new status for “deviant” bodies, in a rudimentary way claiming – to use Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell's phrase – a “disabled perspective of culture” (“Exploring Foundations” 242).
Rosanna Spearman, Limping Lucy, and a Disabled Perspective of Culture
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has argued that “The history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous while being politically and socially erased.” Thomson goes on to define staring as a particular kind of rhetorical practice in modern cultures:
A more intense form of looking than glancing, glimpsing, scanning, surveying, gazing, and other forms of casual or uninterested looking, staring registers the perception of difference and gives meaning to impairment by marking it as aberrant. . . . Staring thus creates disability as a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form. (“Staring” 56–57)
In a similar analysis of the modern gaze, Lennard Davis has suggested that, “Normalcy, rather than being a degree zero of existence, is more accurately a location of biopower . . . Disability, in this and other encounters, is a disruption in the visual, auditory, or perceptual field as it relates to the power of the gaze . . . The visual field becomes problematic, dangerous, treacherous” (“Nude” 52–53, 55).Footnote 5
This dynamic of disruption is articulated and reinforced in each encounter between the subject performing normalcy and the subject prescribed as abnormal or deviant. It is within the visual field, within the perception of the body, within the moment of the stare that this power over another is articulated, when one body in possession of normalcy is able instantaneously to define, catalog, and exclude the body that is impaired or different. There is an innate violence attached to the stare of normalcy, and at the foundation of the normal/abnormal encounter: when the normalized stare is trained on or applied to the abnormal body, when the normalized person, like Franklin Blake in The Moonstone, looks at the person disfigured in the same way, the person who has a deformed shoulder like Rosanna Spearman for example, it is a moment of compulsory subordination, a moment where impairment translates irretrievably through disability into negative abnormalcy, an ordering of disorder where, in other words, a wild, undisciplined, incoherent, and irrational body is trapped, mediated, defined, administered, and controlled.
Representations of the abnormal body, and thus such textual negotiations of physical difference, are presented immediately in the The Moonstone, through Gabriel Betteredge's opening narrative. All these representations involve a rhetoric of the visual, of being looked at and then, in one way or another, looking back. Attempting to explain her lack of popularity with the other servants, Betteredge first describes the hapless Rosanna Spearman in the following way: “I hardly know what the girl did to offend them. There was certainly no beauty about her to make the others envious; she was the plainest woman in the house, with the additional misfortune of having one shoulder bigger than the other” (35; ch. 4). It is “the additional misfortune” that is the real determining factor in Rosanna's identity; Betteredge will continue these kinds of physical designations as his narrative unfolds, continue to define Rosanna for the readers as a “deformed” and an “ugly” body, implying most often that she is to be pitied. For example, in the same passage he describes first coming upon Rosanna at the Shivering Sand: “there she was, in her little straw bonnet, and her plain grey cloak that she always wore to hide her deformed shoulder as much as might be – there she was, all alone, looking out on the quicksand and the sea” (36; ch. 4). The reader, with Betteredge, defines Rosanna, is presented with her image and frames it appropriately. The message here is clear and the communication to the reader is plain: Betteredge is telling the reader that Rosanna must be pitied because she is physically different and pathetically so – she is female, poor, alone, and most of all, deformed.
Within the larger network of messages or communications inside of which the text is embedded, the surface of Rosanna's body is active and is what sets into motion the core representation of physical difference or abnormalcy itself. In other words, Betteredge's treatment of Rosanna demonstrates how such surface-level bodily difference is understood and stereotyped in normalized nineteenth-century English society. In this encounter a body that is disruptive in the visual field is framed or controlled by Betteredge, and in this readerly moment is simultaneously stereotyped in culture at large as a body to be pitied, a body that instantly invokes sympathy from those who are not so “unfortunate” (like many of the middle-classed, normalized readers of this text). Thus Rosanna's body is in a sense emptied of its dangerous visual difference, what Foucault would define as its “subrace” potentiality (History 44). Her body is regulated and controlled by Betteredge's attachment of pity and sympathy, by his constant construction of impairment and difference as abnormalcy.
This surface representation of the abnormal fits into the dynamic of reading difference outlined above. Rosanna is defined primarily by the surface of her body, specifically by her body's exterior physical difference (the deformed shoulder that, like her past, must be concealed) and its obvious deviation from the norm, its disruption of the normalized perceptual field. It is Betteredge, the house steward and the character most adept at management, who most often manages Rosanna, who always tries in his narration or representation of Rosanna to control her body, to define its interior essence and to manage its exterior's disruptive potential. The pathos of her first appearance, the sympathy invoked in Betteredge's initial description of Rosanna sitting by the sea in her little straw bonnet, constitutes the negative terms that determine the abnormal essence of Rosanna's unique body: a woman who is “the plainest woman in the house,” a woman with a “misfortune,” a woman with “no beauty,” a woman who is “alone,” and a woman with a “deformity.” The facts of Rosanna's past – that she has a criminal history in London – further develop the perceptual link between the physical status of her body and the morality of her inner “self” and outer actions. In actual cultural practice, Rosanna is “deformed” both physically and mentally, both outside and inside; her interior person is inseparably linked to her outer exterior, to the impairment/disability/abnormalcy of her body. It is through this chain of signification that she is marginalized as a character in the novel, indeed quickly disappearing in person, in body, from it: she is first literally not seen by Blake (Rosanna says in her buried letter to Blake “I tried – oh, dear, how I tried – to get you to look at me” [349; ch. 4], and his reaction to this letter is to claim, “I never noticed her” [362; ch. 6]), and then she is ultimately replaced, supplemented in the narrative by a letter buried deep in the Shivering Sand.
Significantly, like Rosanna, in Franklin Blake's narrative her friend Limping Lucy is also defined – literally named – by her bodily difference. Blake describes Lucy in the following terms:
A wan, wild, haggard girl, with remarkably beautiful hair, and with a fierce keenness in her eyes, came limping up on a crutch to the table at which I was sitting, and looked at me as if I was an object of mingled interest and horror, which it quite fascinated her to see. . . . My attention was absorbed in following the sound of the girl's crutch. Thump-thump, up the wooden stairs; thump-thump across the room above our heads; thump-thump down the stairs again – and there stood the apparition at the open door, with a letter in its hand, beckoning me out! (308; ch. 3)
Here, for Franklin Blake, the impairment of Limping Lucy overtakes any other perception of her body, or for that matter her entire person. Blake at first notices her “beautiful hair,” the “fierce keenness” of her eyes, but those perceptions are overwhelmed and replaced by the “thump-thump” of Lucy's crutch – her impairment, not her hair, her somatic difference, not her eyes, come to define the ultimate perception of her body. Like Rosanna, Lucy as a body represents disruption, a sudden disturbance to the normalized perceptual field working through Victorian culture and society. Like Rosanna, Lucy's exterior difference determines and defines her interior self or supposedly concealed person. Blake is fascinated and overwhelmed initially by Lucy's arrival and first appearance: she is not a person, but an apparition, a ghostly monster with a letter in “its” hand, “beckoning” him “out.”
This fascination, the suddenness of Lucy's initial appearance and its disruption of a normalized visual field, is quickly controlled by Blake, and the rest of the scene demonstrates once again how such disruption is managed by the norm, is incorporated into its framework of understanding. Lucy's body is ultimately defined by Blake (and Betteredge as well), a definition focusing on both her body's exterior difference and its interior “madness”; indeed, as with the stories of Rosanna's past, the link between the two, the outside and the inside of the body, is quickly established so that, along with Blake's stare and his reconstruction of her body's surface, Limping Lucy's “thump” radiates directly into her interior and defines her person-status in total.
In their encounters with Rosanna and Lucy, both Betteredge and Blake are possessors of the normalized gaze, and in that possession both represent the power of a normative center (gendered, and, as I am arguing, normalized by being able-bodied). Both are able to locate Rosanna and Lucy on the margins of cultural practice; both are able to exclude them because of their bodily difference, their impairments and visible disfigurements (literally, Lucy begins and ends the scene discussed above carefully hidden away in the attic). At the end of the scene above, Blake concludes with authority by providing the readers with a general interpretation of what has happened, and of what Limping Lucy really is: “The one interpretation of her conduct has, no doubt, been anticipated by everybody. I could only suppose that she was mad” (309; ch. 3). This interpretation is “anticipated by everybody” (emphasis mine) – in other words, Blake, as again a possessor of normalcy, is speaking for the norm, for other normalized readers/bodies in his account of this text, this body.
However, in the shifting interior of both of the representations of Rosanna and Lucy, and in the shifting logics and perspectives of this narrative itself, a narrative that, as many critics have noted, is in many ways about interpretation itself, there is an ever-present element of resistance, insubordination, and disruption that, as the narrative unfolds, simply cannot be managed or controlled. Into both of these marginalized female characters is written an impulse or desire for freedom and an ability to articulate and envision in one way or another such a possibility. In her conversation with Blake, for example, Lucy envisions herself living with Rosanna in London like a “sister,” and thus in this solidarity rejects the normalized male heterosexual economy, an economy that, again, she and Rosanna are both excluded from because of their bodily difference: “I meant to take her away from the mortification she was suffering here. We should have had a little lodging in London, and lived together like sisters” (191; ch. 23). This is a vision of independence and freedom; it is a vision of a world where the body/self is not defined by the normalized male heterosexual gaze, but instead by a fellow “sister,” a fellow impaired, female body. And in this way, in this attempt at solidarity and connection with Rosanna, Lucy claims a kind of personhood – she rejects her impaired body's status as a marginalized, negative, insignificant object to be either pitied or ignored or dismissed as “mad”; she envisions a social space where her body and her self could be legitimate and have a legitimate status and power; she claims disability, a disabled perspective of culture.
And I argue it is in this vision that Rosanna and Lucy are not totally without power in the narrative. Such visions as the one above are consistent in the unfolding of the plot; they are neither dismissed nor excluded from the narrative's larger framework of reality. For example, at another point Lucy says to Betteredge: “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 [Blake]. I pray Heaven they may begin with him” (192; ch. 23). Lucy's confrontation with Franklin Blake is in no way docile or subservient or calm. Blake describes the interaction in the following way: “She abruptly thrust the letter (as the phrase is) into my face. ‘Take it!’ she exclaimed furiously. ‘I never set eyes on you before. God Almighty forbid I should ever set eyes on you again.’” As just quoted above, Blake then describes her parting at the scene's end: “With those parting words she limped away from me at the top of her speed. The one interpretation of her conduct has, no doubt, been anticipated by everybody. I could only suppose that she was mad” (309; ch. 3).
The novel's complex positioning suggests that Blake's supposition, a thought he again believes to be “anticipated by everybody,” is not true, is shaky at best. Lucy is not “mad,” not the silly, frustrated character Blake sees and assumes everyone else sees thumping away from him “at the top of her speed.” Instead Lucy is given a voice here, a voice backed up by a highly significant letter, a voice backed up by the very tools Blake uses to disempower her; she says to him quite simply that she has “set” her “eyes upon him,” and hopes to never do so again. She has returned his stare; she has looked back. In doing so, she has dismissed him. Though Blake does not perceive this, again fails to notice what Lucy has actually said to him, the larger point is that she has, and that certainly some readers of this text have as well.
Thus the cultural configuration that marginalizes subjectivities and bodies like that of Limping Lucy, the controlling stare of normalcy possessed by Franklin Blake, by servant Betteredge, and then adopted by many of the normalized middle class Victorian readers of the text, is critiqued through Lucy, through Rosanna's letter, through, as we will see shortly, both Ezra Jennings's extraordinary ability to prove Blake's innocence and the construction of the Shivering Sand, which is the image that in many ways defines the entire novel. Both Lucy's “vision,” her desire to live like a sister with Rosanna and her ability to look back at Blake, and Rosanna's letter, which enacts Rosanna's own ability to gain control of the narrative by writing, are visions of a world outside an oppressive norm. They are both critiques, then, couched within the representation of abnormalcy itself.
I should note that these oppositions, these “visions,” originate from the outside, from the margins, from the peripheral subject (and not from the chief female character in the text, Rachel Verinder). In writing on the disabled female body in Victorian culture, Martha Stoddard Holmes has argued:
disability tends to place a woman character on the margins of the plot, making her an adult consigned to eternal childhood, a celibate version of the ‘fallen’ woman, or some other form of ‘odd’ and superfluous female. Her chief importance in the plot is to generate emotion and moral development in others by being innocent and saintly, surprisingly cheerful, justifiably melancholy, tragically frustrated from achieving her goals as woman, suicidal or dead – or simply by being disabled, without any of these other conditions. . . . Most Victorian literature, then, produces the consistent message that disability, almost by definition, removes or diverts a young woman from the normative sexual economy. Whatever social status or significance she gains, these narratives assert, she will not gain it from marriage. (“Bolder” 60–61)
This is true for both Rosanna and Lucy. Despite the efforts of Rosanna and her inspired love for Blake – significantly love at first sight – neither she nor Lucy are a real part of the “normative sexual economy.” In their disfigurement, both characters are unable to participate in normative culture; both are profoundly excluded from the normative center. It is not surprising that Rosanna commits suicide, and that the very last image of Limping Lucy is of her thumping away from the dismayed Franklin Blake, into the obscurity and silence of the attic.
However, in the complicated texture of shifting representation that defines this narrative, there is again an element of resistance and of the unmanageable here, again a critique of that normative center and a kind of claim of normalcy by those who are the most abnormal, the most marginalized – the disabled, lower-class women pushed through the fast-moving sensationalized plot structure. In this way the novel is an example of an emerging disabled perspective on culture. In this text Collins effectively constructs an alternative to Blake's and Betteredge's world of oppressive norms. The various narrators do not control this text – a letter buried in the shifting sand does; Blake does not prescribe madness to Limping Lucy – she refigures it upon him. And indeed, to further demonstrate my point, the great detective from London does not ultimately solve this crime, does not save Franklin Blake's reputation and eventual union with Rachel Verinder – a mixed race, opium-addicted, second-rate country doctor does instead.
Ezra Jennings and the Instability of Shivering Sand
Everyone is virtually disabled . . .
—Robert McRuer, “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence”
As with Rosanna and Lucy at the beginning and the middle of The Moonstone, the critique of normative culture through the radical assertion of the disabled figure dominates the narrative at its end as well. Here the disabled figure is Ezra Jennings:
The door opened, and there entered to us, quietly, the most remarkable – looking man that I had ever seen. Judging him by his figure and his movements, he was still young. Judging him by his face, and comparing him with Betteredge, he looked the elder of the two. His complexion was of a gipsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer people of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown – eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits – looked out at you, and (in my case, at least) took your attention captive at their will. Add to this a quantity of thick closely-curling hair, which, by some freak of Nature, had lost its colour in the most startlingly partial and capricious manner. Over the top of his head it was still of the deep black which was its natural colour. Round the sides of his head – without the slightest gradation of grey to break the force of the extraordinary contrast – it had turned completely white. The line between the two colours preserved no sort of regularity. (326; ch. 4)
Like many of the characters and issues in this text, Ezra Jennings's body is built through contradiction and polarity: this body is old and young, black and white (in both its hair and its skin color), “ugly” and “beautiful.” Like Rosanna and Lucy, this body is introduced into the text through the rhetorics of the stare – Ezra Jennings's hair, specifically, like Medusa's snakes, immediately disrupts the norm, is described as “some freak of Nature,” and causes Franklin Blake and the reader to pause and to stare, and at once pushes both out of the comfortable space of normalcy. Like Rosanna and Limping Lucy, Ezra Jennings is defined by his body: his body's contradiction, his body's past, his body's basic physical difference. And, like Rosanna and Lucy, Ezra Jennings's body is primarily defined or understood through its disruptive strangeness, and through a comparison with Betteredge, who, with Robinson Crusoe in hand, is so often emblematic of the norm.
Significantly, though Ezra's is a body that is not clearly “deformed” like both Lucy's and Rosanna's, it is a body that is strange, unusual, and provocative, and thus embodies certain specific interpretive clues for the other characters in the narrative and for the normalized Victorian readership of the text. The initial keys or clues in this detective dynamic are Ezra's “gipsy darkness,” his “dreamy” eyes, and his “fleshless” cheeks – that is, the fact that Ezra Jennings is a character of exotic “mixed race” and a character who is an opium eater, an addict of an exotic drug. As a person of questionable or tainted heredity, and as a person physically dependent on an exotic, foreign substance (and no less a devotee of De Quincey), the suggestion here for the Victorian readership is that Ezra Jennings is a kind of moral monster; like his exterior physical contradictions and deviances, the assertion is that his interior, his “self,” is also disordered, chaotic, and the site of moral degeneracy.
So once again in Jennings we see the stereotype of physical difference in play, and (once again) we see the stereotype simultaneously being critiqued as well. For example, to Betteredge and Mr. Bruff (the family lawyer), Jennings is different, strange, unusual, and, therefore, suspicious and likely guilty of something. When he first appears in the narrative Betteredge informs Franklin Blake that Jennings's “appearance is against him,” and that “Nobody likes him” (327; ch. 4). It is this very strangeness and unpopularity, though, that eventually draws Franklin Blake into a fascinated sympathy with Jennings:
It was impossible to dispute Betteredge's assertion that the appearance of Ezra Jennings, speaking from the popular point of view, was against him. His gipsy-complexion, his fleshless cheeks, his gaunt facial bones, his dreamy eyes, his extraordinary parti-coloured hair, the puzzling contradiction between his face and his figure which made him look old and young both together – were all more or less calculated to produce an unfavorable impression of him on a stranger's mind. And yet – feeling this as I certainly did – it is not to be denied that Ezra Jennings made some inscrutable appeal to my sympathies, which I found it impossible to resist. (369; ch. 8)
Blake, who can reject or ignore Lucy and Rosanna due primarily to their physical difference, is touched with sympathy for Ezra Jennings; indeed such sympathy becomes a kind of temptation, an opiate itself, that is “impossible to resist.” In a sense this turn by Blake – his engagement with Jennings as opposed to his continued rejection of Rosanna and Limping Lucy – confirms the normative male heterosexual economy that governs the narrative. Ezra Jennings is male, is thus in the framework of Victorian patriarchy and heritage more economically viable and more likely to garner status and at least recognition by Blake. It is only recognition, though; in his sympathy or pity for Ezra, Blake, like Betteredge in his portrayal of Rosanna, is simply performing stigma and gender, and is thus again controlling Jennings's problematic and disruptive body through those same frameworks of signification. Indeed, all of these disruptive bodies are put into manageable categories by Blake: Rosanna is unseen, Lucy is mad, and now Jennings is pitiful and a text upon which to locate sympathy and, in doing so, perform normalcy. Thus, in all of these relationships Blake remains in the position of power and privilege, is always able to define and determine the meaningful essence of the other character, the “reality” or “truth” of the circumstance.
But in the structural machinery of Collins's popular novel what is most significant here is that Blake's fascination and sympathy allows Jennings to become “the hero” of the narrative, the savior of Franklin Blake, the best “detective” in the narrative, better even than the legendary Sergeant Cuff. In Jennings, Collins takes difference, takes strangeness, and, in a kind of coded, indirect message, makes it necessarily heroic, in fact central to the resolution of the problematized narrative. In the “troubled,” disruptive logic of the plot, Jennings, the most fantastic, unreal character in the narrative, has the ultimate detective ability, is the character most able to discover the “truth” or the reality of the crime.
In recent Collins studies, critics have noted the progressive positioning outlined here, the consistent motivation in Collin's work to turn inside out seemingly normalized structures, like the Victorian marriage plot, Victorian patriarchy, or Victorian diagnoses of racial difference. For example, one critic writes the following on Collins's representations of race and of his use of mixed-race characters working within the frameworks of Victorian society: “this penetration for Collins is not cause for hysteria, as it was for his peers, but an opportunity for the English to detoxify a contaminated past of slavery and colonialism. Incorporating mixed-race people into traditional English society allows Collins to reimagine his world and restore Victorian values” (Fisch 314).
My reading of Ezra Jennings shifts this kind of specific focus on race and racial ideology in nineteenth-century culture onto the body in general, and the often oppressive structures that define it in Victorian cultural practice in regards to ability and disability. In this critical context, Collins pushes beyond the binary of the normal and the abnormal; he does so by incorporating such characters as Ezra Jennings into Victorian society, making Rosanna and Lucy the shifting focuses of his text, and then Ezra the unlikely hero. And in an even larger sense, then, within all of these characters and these textual structures we see a version of the Shivering Sand; the form of the novel, the structure around which it is built is a similar kind of shivering ambivalence, a lack of certainty when it comes to exterior appearances. The hero is the opium addict Ezra Jennings; the villain is the seemingly respectable Godfrey Ablewhite (who is, of course, “able” and “white,” and who is then, in the end, found dead in disguise). The narrative becomes a kind of critical prosthesis, a supplement of the original toxic past, a transformation of reality, a re-writing of social categories and the categories of physical difference.
***
Inside of all of these representations of the abnormal body – the bodies of Ezra, Rosanna, and Limping Lucy – is always a countering structure of the normalized body which frames and instructs the interpretive dynamic. The problematic that The Moonstone develops is that none of these oppositions are stable, and thus as we have seen, the representations of the body in the text are in no way uniform and are in fact layered with resistant potentialities. The basic instability of these representations of difference, as well as the larger instability of the dynamic of the norm in which they are situated, is present in the very central, organizing device of the entire plot of The Moonstone – the configuration and textual significance of the Shivering Sand.
The overarching plot structure of the Shivering Sand is built on the principle that dynamic change and profound instability are the ultimate determinants of meaning; the Shivering Sand functions then as the ultimate demonstration of the reality that the text attempts to configure. Betteredge first describes the Shivering Sand in these terms:
The sand-hills here run down to the sea, and end in two spits of rock jutting out opposite each other, till you lose sight of them in the water. . . . Between the two, shifting backwards and forwards at certain seasons of the year, lies the most horrible quicksand on the shores of Yorkshire. At the turn of the tide, something goes on in the unknown deeps below, which sets the whole face of the quicksand shivering and trembling in a manner most remarkable to see, and which has given to it, among the people in our parts the name of The Shivering Sand. (36; ch. 4)
This is a reality that is changeable, defined by its “unknown,” “deep,” fluid interior, an interior that sometimes causes its “face” to shiver and tremble in a remarkable manner. Again, as critics have suggested, it is this emblem of dynamic instability and danger that comes to define the uncanny “reality” of the entire narrative:
Collins presents us with an understanding of reality in which the familiar and the alien, the knowable and unfathomable, are equally present. . . . In placing the Shivering Sand in the middle of a narrative which attempts to portray ‘what actually does happen’ when recognizable characters are placed in mysterious circumstances, The Moonstone questions not only the possibility of arriving at an objective view of truth, but also the moral implications of domestic crime and British imperialism. (Roberts 169)
Further, the “detective-fever” that most of the major characters experience through the course of the detective novel always becomes a pursuit of this “profound,” uncanny discovery – that objective truth itself – is defined by the problematics, ambiguities, and the simple errors of subjective interpretation, translation, and inclination. And thus Tamar Heller can describe the novel in these terms:
in The Moonstone detection defers rather than fixes meaning, uncovering mysteries only to suggest that others stay covered up. . . . With greater subtlety and complexity than the works that preceded it, this novel written at the end of the decade of his greatest achievement simultaneously expresses and suppresses the ideological and generic tensions that animated his fiction from the beginning of his career. . . . he creates a narrative that self-reflexively focuses on the fate of subversive fictions. (142–43)
It is significant that, whether they read it as a critique of British imperialism, an analysis of subversive activity in the Victorian manor house, or an analysis of subversive genres in Victorian culture at large, both critics cited above read the narrative as a critical posture rather than a realist account: rather than delivering a standard mimetic representation of the real, the novel is attempting to redefine notions of what “the real” really means. The detection in which the novel engages is “realist” in that the game within the text itself is to engage self-reflexively the projects of realism, and thus to critique such postures within the realist narrative form itself. It is the nature of such popular forms, and of the sensation genre in particular, to engage such motivations, to brush against such larger kinds of realist frameworks. Writing on pornography, obscenity, and spectacle in nineteenth-century forms in regards to Flaubert and obscenity trials, Frances Ferguson defines the form of the nineteenth-century novel as a critical engagement with representations of the real: “For Flaubert, . . . the novel is in league with criticism insofar as criticism participates in the process of justification: the novel checks over its own demonstration to see how far it is correct in its deductions” (103). The novel as a progressively realist form becomes increasingly engaged in the binaries of modernity. Again, The Moonstone, written and now read inside of these traditions, actually pushes against these accounts, pushes towards the bliss of the unknowing, towards the postmodernity of formal self-reflexivity.
It is in this way, in the novel's constant construction and re-construction of opposite truths, of stark polarities, that a problematic “reality” is most symbolized in the text by the Shivering Sand – a reality that lacks stability, a reality where “unknown” depths of interiority come to displace and redefine the seemingly solid exterior, a reality where, potentially, there is always hidden an incriminating letter or a blood-stained nightgown (or both). It is a profoundly dangerous, unsettling, and paradoxical reality because it can potentially undermine the hegemony of class, gender, race, and, for our purposes, bodily stereotype. And it is in these terms, then, that disability, or the critical prosthesis of a disability perspective, can occur: in these terms, in this proposed reality, a formal critique of the standardized norm is written; the novel becomes a work that asserts a critical perspective on the way the body is constructed or made, a work that, through its configuration of the heavily symbolic Shivering Sand, becomes “a way of describing the instability of the embodied self” (Garland-Thomson, “Making Freaks” 132).
As suggested above, it is the complicated formal emphases of the novel that actually enhance this critique. The “sensational” element of the text requires a focus on strange bodies, what Collins called elsewhere (in reference to blindness) an “exhibiting” of the body “as it really is” (Poor Miss Finch xxxiii); likewise, the methodology of crime and detection in The Moonstone is in part used to discover and articulate the truth of this shifting reality, to write “the truth” of the Shivering Sand at large. Each major character has the impulse or the desire for detection, what Betteredge calls “the detective-fever.” Betteredge describes the desire for detection to Franklin Blake in these terms: “Do you feel an uncomfortable heat at the pit of your stomach, sir? And a nasty thumping at the top of your head? Ah, not yet? It will lay hold of you at Cobb's Hole, Mr. Franklin. I call it the detective-fever; and I first caught it in the company of Sergeant Cuff” (308; ch 3). The detective-fever, described by Betteredge both as a material, physical illness – nausea and a headache – and a kind of obsessive mental or cognitive disorder, is understood ultimately in the larger framework of the narrative as a particular point of view or critical posture. I would argue, again, that this critique prepares the way for a disabled perspective of culture.
Conclusion: Wilkie Collins as In-Valid
There is nothing but translation when it comes down to it.
—David Wills, Prosthesis
In her foundational book on Wilkie Collins and sensation fiction, Winifred Hughes argues: “The final consolation of The Moonstone, for the reader as well as the self-conscious narrators, most of all for Collins himself, is the triumph of form” (165). My argument above agrees in part with Hughes's assertion: an element of The Moonstone's significance is its “triumph” of form – its formal roots in the genres of sensation and detection, its structured or formal dynamic of opposition, of constantly and consciously writing out the normal and the abnormal, all allow what are now more contemporary representations of the impaired body to be worked through the text and inserted into cultural practice.
But it is through the critical transformations embodied in both the form and the theoretical methodology used to account for the form that the real triumph of The Moonstone appears, and likewise that the significant connection begins to emerge between the single author, Wilkie Collins, and the construction of the significant cultural category, disability. In The Moonstone, Collins knowingly writes the body as an artificial construction in cultural practice. His translation of this construction into the narrative equates a potentially liberating transformation through the prosthetic of the representation itself. David Mitchell has argued that the disabled body's “presence” in “literary narrative is twofold: disability pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and second, as an opportunistic metaphoric device. . . . disability's centrality to these two principal representational strategies establishes a conundrum: while stories rely on the potency of disability as a symbolic figure, they rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions” (15–16). My argument here is that The Moonstone does, in fact, take up disability as a social and political assertion. The Moonstone becomes a critical prosthesis pushing towards the transformation of the construction of physical impairment, a redefinition of disability, then, through disability itself.
As a final assertion of this point, I would like to consider briefly the legend that surrounds the writing of this text. In the marketing of the novel Wilkie Collins represented himself as not knowingly writing but rather translating the end of the narrative, the solution of the crime. Supposedly, when The Moonstone was written Wilkie Collins was bedridden and claimed to have composed the end of the novel from his bed in an opium haze. When he was writing the novel, Collins writes that “the bitterest affliction of my life and the severest illness from which I have ever suffered, fell on me together. At the time when my mother lay dying in her little cottage in the country, I was struck prostrate, in London; crippled in every limb by the torture of rheumatic gout” (5). Indeed, later Collins would claim that he had no memory of writing the conclusion of the narrative, the final unveiling of Godfrey Ablewhite as the real, disguised thief of the diamond.
This image that Collins creates of himself as an invalid, as a “stricken” and “crippled” author – bedridden by gout and in an opium haze – furthers the larger image of the disabled figure in nineteenth-century British culture. In a recent book Maria Frawley defines the invalid in nineteenth-century culture in the following terms: “invalidism might more profitably be thought of as cultural mentality, a mode of thought that shaped and a posture that expressed the way men and women conceptualized, experienced, and represented a wide range of afflictions” (3). The Moonstone is at its base a book about somatic difference, about affliction and difference; it is written by a person who claimed at the time to be an invalid. I believe that, while avoiding individual agency through a claim of invalidism, in effect Collins is able to invoke a real agency in positioning his novels as moral commentaries on Victorian cultural practices. In a larger sense, his invalidism constitutes an active re-writing of structures that marginalize and oppress through designations of difference. His work is defined by the active translation of individual, unique experience into a larger social framework and set of meanings, and thus Collins's narratives, like The Moonstone, reflect a particular “mode of thought” or “cultural mentality,” which I have defined here as the emergence of disability being defined as a perspective on cultural practices.
