"Dirty Linen" : Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone

Abstract

"Dirty Linen":Legacies of Empire in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone Melissa Free Domestic, the Oxford English Dictionary informs, means "of or pertaining to one's own country or nation; not foreign, internal, inland, 'home.'" But what becomes of this definition when that which pertain[s] to one's own country or nation is inextricably, dependently intertwined with sites—nations, colonies, protectorates—abroad; when, like England in 1799, 1848, and 1868 (the years, respectively, of the opening scene of The Moonstone, its principal action, and its publication), the foreign shapes the domestic: empire defining (though not equivalent to) nation? To "be" English in the nineteenth century was to be of, and hence constituted by, (the British) empire, to claim the summary position not only of Britishness but of empire itself. English identity was superincumbent, pressing down on that which simultaneously held it up: the subject races, the colonized countries, the "foreign." Mutually constitutive of what it meant to be English, domestic and foreign were false binaries, ideologically and discursively produced and consumed, enabling the great white illusion of imperial necessity and generosity, and the refutation of lack that underscored the unidirectional and utterly false logic of imperialism: we are doing them a service.2 Wilkie Collins challenges this factitious binary in The Moonstone by constructing a private, domestic history as simultaneously imperial, collapsing not only home and away, but also private and public, and family and empire, and he does so through an archive—of family, by family, for family—that belies its own intent. Collected by the family's new patriarch, Franklin Blake, in order to remove the "suspicion" under which "the characters of innocent people have suffered" (Collins, 17) and may suffer in the future, his archive—that is, in fact, The Moonstone—actually documents not innocence, but collusion with the imperial project, enacted and perpetuated by a family collectively unable to identify imperial assault as a "crime [that] brings its own fatality with it" (16).3 In failing to recognize their part in the very guilt to which they attest, the voices that produce the archive do not merely bear witness; they actively participate in familial responsibility for imperial depredation through their denial of it. They inherit, in effect, that which they refuse to own, and in trying to distinguish the domestic from the foreign, demonstrate not their inevitable but their manifest inextricability [End Page 340] . The Archive, the Judge, the Detective, the Reader To underscore—to solicit, even—the reader's active interpretive role,Collins structures the text as an archival document, constructs the plot as a mystery, and positions fictional and actual readers as both judges and detectives. The compilation of letters, reports, notes, newspaper clippings, journal entries, wills, and even a receipt, "placed on record in writing" (17), serves as testimony for the reader's consideration. Franklin Blake organizes and submits the evidence to his family, while Collins, indirectly, submits it to us. The reader is asked to evaluate not just the theft of the diamond from a country estate in England but its earlier removal from a sacred Hindu shrine in India, presumably by John Herncastle, "the Honourable John" (39), "the well-known nickname of the East India Company," whose "theft of the Moonstone comes to represent the legally sanctioned robbery of India by the British government" (Nayder, Wilkie, 120).4 The stakes of the theft are greater than the loss of the family's (questionable, at best) treasure, for what is really on trial in this novel is personal and national responsibility in the violence of imperialism. Though an extract from a "Family Paper," describing events that took place in India in 1799, opens the novel, it takes the form of a "Prologue" (MS, 11); "The Story," as labeled by its assembler, Franklin Blake, begins with "The Loss of the Diamond" in Yorkshire in 1848 (17). Rather than introduce the story himself, Blake instructs Gabriel Betteredge, house-steward, to "take the pen in hand, and start the story" (18). Blake and the family lawyer, Mr. Bruff, have decided that "this strange family story [. . .] ought to be told [by] certain persons concerned in [the] events who are capable of relating them. Starting from...

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