Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel by Jean Arnold

Author:Jean Arnold [Arnold, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History
ISBN: 9781317002208
Google: FgPACwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-16T01:26:59+00:00

V. Giving and Receiving Gifts

The giving of a gift forms The Moonstone’s catalytic episode from which the remaining narrative action springs: Uncle Herncastle bequeaths the Moonstone Diamond to Rachel, his niece, on her birthday. A gift in its most literal sense is a material object passed from one person to another, yet here the gift endlessly proliferates with questions about the cultural context in which it is given, for it symbolizes the relationship between the giver and receiver—Uncle Herncastle and Rachel Verinder.

As a basis for critical analysis of culture and its texts, the significance of the idea of the gift first emerged in Marcel Mauss’s foundational essay The Gift, originally published in 1925, and ideas concerning gifts have been an area of scholarly interest ever since.27 Mauss’s vision of the gift in “archaic … societies” develops around the idea that a culture elicits three obligations concerning gifts: “to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.” Mauss then asks this question with emphasis, “What power resides in the object given that causes its recipient to pay it back?”28 Mauss argues that the gift cannot be perceived as a single object, nor can its giving be considered as occurring in a single moment; its diffuse ontology exists as a nexus within a web of interpersonal relations and across time as a token of future reciprocity.

Indeed, in Collins’s work, the prismatic transparency of the diamond embodies the idea of the gift, for, in The Moonstone, the gift is at once visible and invisible; a material object and an exchange of power; an ordinary gesture and a risk as it symbolizes and transfers values that bind the society in which it is given. What makes the diamond so valuable as a gift to be given and received makes it equally valuable as an object to be taken by others for whom the gift was never intended. In this way, gift giving and theft create value reciprocally.

Gift giving and theft involve a change in the possession of a material object and, as such, are both exchanges, albeit of different kinds. If giving and taking are parallel actions insofar as a material object passes from one person to another, how exactly do gift and theft differ with regard to the object’s transfer of ownership? What do the discourses about giving and taking tell us about The Moonstone and the problems of imperialism in Victorian culture the novel addresses? Answering these questions involves uncovering the novel’s narrative structure, discovering that it depends on gift, theft, and exchange.

Like many other scenarios in The Moonstone, Uncle Herncastle’s desire to give the diamond to someone in the Verinder family reflects historical precedent: we recall that, in 1831, the British East India Company had given King William the jeweled tiger’s head from Tipu’s throne; in following this precedent, the company celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1850 with a gift of the Kohinoor Diamond to Queen Victoria. Royal support for the British East India Company’s military actions in India was at stake in these exchanges.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.