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The link information below provides a persistent link to the article you've requested. Persistent link to this record: Following the link below will bring you to the start of the article or citation. Cut and Paste: To place article links in an external web document, simply copy and paste the HTML below, starting with "<a href" To continue, in Internet Explorer, select FILE then SAVE AS from your browser's toolbar above. Be sure to save as a plain text file (.txt) or a 'Web Page, HTML only' file (.html). In FireFox, select FILE then SAVE FILE AS from your browser's toolbar above. In Chrome, select right click (with your mouse) on this page and select SAVE AS Record: 1 Title: Collins's "Moonstone": The Victorian Novel as Sacrifice, Theft, Gift and Debt. Authors: Blumberg, Ilana1 Source: Studies in the Novel; Summer2005, Vol. 37 Issue 2, p162-186, 25p Document Type: Literary Criticism Subject Terms: *CRITICISM *ESSAYS *GIFTS in literature *ENGLISH literature -- 19th century *THEOLOGIANS Reviews & Products: MOONSTONE, The (Book) People: COLLINS, Wilkie, 1824-1889 Abstract: This essay discusses the representation of an ethically flawed textual and material exchange in the novel "The Moonstone" by Wilkie Collins. Way of considering economic transactions in the novel and in Victorian novels; Reason behind the difficulty of Collins in describing an ethical form of exchange; Views of temporary theologians on the fate of the concept of gift in the realm of political, economic and social thinking. Author Affiliations: 1 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Full Text Word Count: 12235 ISSN: 00393827 Accession Number: 17682807 Persistent link to this record (Permalink): https://login.proxy.hil.unb.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a ph&AN=17682807&site=ehost-live&scope=site Cut and Paste: <A href="https://login.proxy.hil.unb.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=aph&AN=17682807&site=ehost-live&scope=site">Collins's "Moonstone": The Victorian Novel as Sacrifice, Theft, Gift and Debt.</A> Database: Academic Search Premier

COLLINS'S MOONSTONE: THE VICTORIAN NOVEL AS SACRIFICE, THEFT, GIFT AND DEBT
In November 1869, Wilkie Collins turned his wit to a request by Dutch magazine publishers for permission to print a translation of his forthcoming novel. The publishers did not propose entering into commercial negotiations with Collins; instead, they offered the novelist a complimentary copy of their magazine in return for "the rights," as Collins well understood, to all the revenue they would generate on the basis of his well-known name and eagerly anticipated new story. Replying that a free magazine was hardly tempting for an English novelist who did not read Dutch, Collins suggested the following alternative: "Permit me to suggest that you might acknowledge the receipt of the right to translate 'Man and Wife' in a much better way than by giving me the magazine. It is quite a new idea--you might give me some money" (Letters 2: 328). When the publishers expressed their reticence, Collins replied without a trace of humor: "I declare any publisher who takes my book from me with a view to use it in any form for his own benefit--without my permission and without giving me a share in his profits--to be guilty of theft" (Letters 2: 331). Collins's correspondence describes three circulating objects: a magazine copy, a book, and money--that participate in three sorts of exchange: a gift, a theft, and a fair exchange. Yet, in an association that this paper will take as one of its main concerns, Collins distinguishes gift and theft only to expose them as opposite sides of the same coin. In offering Collins an unreadable, hence, useless copy of their magazine, the publishers propose to give the novelist a superfluous token, incommensurate with what they wish to take from Collins. The "gift" is the sign of their unwillingness to participate in an evenhanded reciprocal exchange and their intention to circumvent it through the exchange relation that Collins describes as theft.[1] In the under-legislated world of mid-nineteenth-century authorship and publication, exchange seemed to Collins and not a few of his contemporaries to be fraught with ethical danger and practical loss. Not only attempted thefts or ostensibly neutral exchanges but even gifts demanded a suspicious eye. Collins explored precisely such ethical difficulties of textual and material exchange in his popular novel of 1868, The Moonstone. Collins's Moonstone, modeled on a number of actual gems including the Koh-I-Noor Diamond that eventually became Queen Victoria's, fantastically embodies a history of theft and gift, two relations that follow so closely one upon the other that they become difficult to distinguish in the novel. Collins's Moonstone is plundered by the British at the critical siege of Seringapatam in 1799. The stolen gem then reappears in a quiet Yorkshire estate where it is given as a bequest from uncle to niece. Within hours, a mysterious intrusion into the heroine's darkened bedroom results in the unrecoverable loss of the valuable gem. Critical treatments of The Moonstone have reasonably responded to the looting of India and the symbolic violation of Rachel with analyses of the novel's representation of imperial and sexual relations.[2] These two hierarchical relations, it is worth remembering, were understood by many Victorians to be benevolent and socially productive in their very inequality but were questioned by Collins in both his essays and novels in a fashion unmatched by many of his contemporaries.[3] While The Woman in White (1860), for instance, and No Name (1862) address such questions quite directly, I want to suggest that The Moonstone addresses them as they take shape in the particular idiom that concerned Collins deeply in the late 1860s: the idiom that conjoined ethics and economics and that foregrounded the egoism lurking in supposedly altruistic exchange. Methodologically, then, I am proposing a particular way of considering economic transactions in The Moonstone and in Victorian novels more largely. Rather than applying a Freudian hermeneutic that looks for traces of the repressed, that reads plot as metaphor and object as symbol, I want to work in the opposite direction, to read on the surface of the text, so to speak. Even some of the most brilliant readings of The Moonstone, those offered by Tim Dolin, Tamar Heller, and D.A. Miller, for instance, tend to look past or 'under' the central material transactions of the novel.[4] The novel's dramatic events of theft and gift call out to be read as economic and social exchanges, the everyday or not-so-everyday affairs of taking and giving, before they can indicate truths about enlarged or extrapolated systems of exchange.[5] As acts of giving and taking, the novel's transactions embody, I suggest, the ethical challenges faced by Victorians--and particularly a Victorian novelist--attempting to organize a socioeconomic order whose coherence was threatened by the competing forces of a still-pervasive puritanical Christianity, on one hand, and a

burgeoning individualist capitalism, on the other hand.[6] A model advocating spiritual riches, worldly poverty, and selfless charity did not sit easily with one that promised vocational and material success as the reward for ambition, literary or otherwise. Where writers from Chaucer forward had descriptively treated the ironies, complexities, and concords of a conjoint spiritual and economic order, Victorian novelists had a different task at hand. In a world of unprecedented social and economic mobility, where, as Michael McKeon has reminded us, virtue was becoming unbraided from possession, and rank from status; in a historical moment in which writers were professionalizing rather than professionalized, learning to see themselves as players in a market of prices and bills as well as ideas, the relation between spirit and matter was hardly stable enough merely to be described. In simple terms, the dramatic earning of money beyond one's needs required a revised notion of ethics. While the correspondences of even such socially conscious writers as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Collins indicate that they were elated when their earnings achieved high sales--Collins gleefully writes to his mother on 31 July 1861, "'Five Thousand Pounds ! ! ! ! ! ! Ha! ha! ha!nobody but Dickens has made as much'" (Letters 1: 197)--a novel such as The Moonstone reflects the more somber need to resolve individual benefit, particularly benefit linked to textual production, with ethical human relations. The novel thus bears the particularly Victorian burden of articulating a relationship between sympathy and potentially divisive wealth under capitalism; fellow-feeling, on one hand, and Marx's "credit is the measure of a man," on the other. While a wholly critical position was taken by such thinkers as Ruskin, Carlyle, and Newman who saw Mammonism as the greatest enemy to moral life, Victorian novelists, I suggest, sought a way to integrate the inevitably commercial element of their enterprise with the predominant novelistic credo of expanding human sympathy. Beyond the Gift, Beyond the Market: Finding the Language of Sacrifice As the Victorian socioeconomic order became one that was increasingly structured by contractual obligations, the cash nexus, and a red-clawed individualism, novelists drew scenes of exchange whose context was shaped not by the ideals of caritas or imitatio dei recognizable in earlier works such as Joseph Andrews (1742), The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Emma (1816), but by the terms of free-market trade that had come to characterize their own economic world. In The Moonstone, we see Collins's difficulty as he attempts to cordon off a space for ethical exchange only to see the attempt fail over and over. The girls that appear throughout the novel may seem to come as a "lavish intrusion" into the world of objective, reciprocal exchanges (Webb 91). Yet the novel's representation anticipates Marcel Mauss's theory that, despite appearances, girls are nevertheless part of reciprocal exchange systems; the gift is always on its way back to you, increased. One must always respond to a gift, on pain of punishment. The party who does not respond to a gift with a return is understood to evince signs of hostility. Insofar as a gift begs its own return and then some, it partakes of the logic, if not the sentiment, of robbery.[7] As in the letter Collins received from his would-be publishers, gift-giving can function like robbery as an uninvited, unilateral act whose consequence is a demand or claim. Collins's extreme difficulty in describing an ethical form of exchange can be helpfully understood in light of the assessment made by intellectual historian Stefan Collini. Collini has suggested that the extreme poles of "altruism" and "egoism" constituted an exhaustive moral framework for educated Victorians: if an action was not positively altruistic, it might well be described as egoistic (66). Collini points out that this logic might easily be extended to condemn as egoistic the middle space in which an act might not obviously benefit another party but would, however, avoid harming him or her; or the space in which an act would benefit another party but would benefit the giver as well. We might say that in attempting to articulate an ethical form of exchange, Collins was actually working to formulate an altruistic or self-sacrificial form of exchange. The Moonstone's representation of ethically flawed exchange unfolds against the unattainable measure of the free gift, the gift that exacts no recompense from its recipient and thus affirms its giver's generosity rather than his or her rapacity. Nearly all the novel's gifts fail this high standard; one by one, the "gifts" are exposed as thefts, bribes, or assignments of debt too great ever to be repaid. Yet this failure only revitalizes the search for the "free gift" that would escape the reciprocal, self-interested logic of the market. Today, this response calls to mind the way in which Mauss's diverse intellectual successors in the fields of philosophy, literature, anthropology, and theology have attempted to preserve or refine the possibilities of the gift against a compulsorily reciprocal model.[8] A central motivation for rescuing the category of the gift is clearly to resist the colonization of so many spheres of life by market values. Related to this, a social model that assumes the total dominance of what C.B. Macpherson has called possessive individualism

comes to seem insufficient for describing the more communal social structures and forms of exchange that persist even in largely capitalist culture. Yet contemporary theologians have recently demonstrated in a spate of works dealing with gift theory that the fate of the "gift" is fundamental not only for social, political, and economic thinking, but for Christian thinking as well.[9] In fact, gift theory itself is seriously if often silently indebted to Christian theology in its attempt to define exchange in light of the gift and the gift in light of exchange. The major spiritual exchange of the Western tradition is the free gift of Christ's death, the sacrificial gift to humanity that repays their debt of sin. This inimitable act of altruism--the hallmark of Christian moral thought, but also the foundation of the ideal of sacrifice ceaselessly preached by Victorian secular humanists--is obviously, necessarily, not an even exchange; its unevenness is precisely what catapults it to such spiritual heights. Yet the altruistic Christian act posed problems for theologians from Augustine to Aquinas to Anselm and eventually Luther: gift and theft seemed to coincide in this godly exchange. Here theft was not attributed to the giver who anticipated an increased return, but instead it was a consequence of receipt: no Christian, however pious, would be able to repay this debt. Thus how could Christ's sacrifice rightfully be a free gift of grace to a sinful humanity? Was not such a "free gift" simply another way of describing an unearned benefit that thus flouted personal justice and resembled a form of theft? To put it starkly, when the ordinary Christian benefited from Christ's death, why was he or she not considered a thief of grace? As John Parker has put it in his history of this problematic, "Christ had paid in humanity's stead; but thisleaves unspecified how Christians can partake of that payment, by what mechanism an undeserving sinner makes Christ's bounty his own" (124). For Luther, the mechanism was famously faith rather than works. Yet this innovation did not itself solve the economic difficulty: as Parker points out, the Latin term for faith was precisely the same term as "credit." Thus, John Henry Newman more than three hundred years later would address the same trouble, preserving the sense of "gift" but pressing Christians to engage in personal expiation nonetheless: We are ever sinning; and though Christ has died once for all to release us from our penalty, yet we are not pardoned once for all, but according as, and whenever each of us supplicates for the gift. it is at our peril if we go on carelessly and thoughtlessly, trusting to our having been once acceptedat the very time of the death of Christ (as if then the whole race of man were really and at once pardoned and exalted). (95-96) Newman's surprising ending here--his "as if" reminder that pardon is not automatic, that Christ's death assures nothing--reminds his listeners that the "free" gift of grace refers to God's freedom to give, more than their own to receive. And yet, however much the pious Christian responds by supplicating, by denying him or herself, by practicing good works, s/he still can never merit the gift of salvation; it will always remain a gift. This gift prompts, then, a chain of giving that can never truly be giving (one cannot give what does not belong to one) and can never truly be free (one is compelled to try to earn or return the gift one has been given), [10] This chain of giving might be described as Christian charity. While all humanity experiences Christian debt, individual Christians can take the example of Christ himself and attempt to lessen the debt through their own smaller acts of sacrifice and charity. Yet Christian charity is bedeviled by its inescapable effects: its givers automatically amass spiritual "credit" as they seek to do good for others. Nietzsche was a late critic of this logic, but the Third Earl of Shaftesbury took note of this problem, as did John Stuart Mill in 1854 when he accused Christianity of inspiring its adherents with "selfish motives": "the habit of expecting to be rewarded in another life for our conduct in this, makes even virtue itself no longer an exercise of the unselfish feelings" (10: 422). Though acts of Christian charity emulate the unapproachable ideal of selfless generosity embodied by Christ who died to redeem his people, they necessarily fall short. There is no charity without self-interest. Worse still, just as this form of charity threatens to turn people into objects, it celebrates their misfortunes as the occasions for one's own responsive benevolence (Milbank 52). In the conceptual shift from divine to human players; from an abundant and self-sufficient Giver to needy and desirous exchange partners; from a classless humanity to a massively stratified society; from the immaterial wealth of salvation to more scarce material possessions, even charity among Victorians was beset by the nemesis of "self-interest." In The Moonstone's conflation of the moral and economic spheres, Collins reckons with a Christian inheritance (the terms are simply inescapable) divided against itself, historically troubled by the overlap between grace and debt, gift and theft; in this way, the terms of The Moonstone are heavily sedimented.

Yet they are historically charged as well. In a decade that afforded many novelists their highest selling prices and offered the extended reading public the relatively cheap, competitive prices made possible by free trade in bookselling (as of 1852), genuine optimism about the possible social as well as personal rewards of industrial capitalism flourished alongside its stringent critiques. While the major mid-Victorian novelists depended on their profits and negotiated strenuously for the best deals they could get, nonetheless, when it came to their imagined relation to the reading public, they were typically unwilling to describe their enterprise as a purely self-profiting, commercial pursuit. It would be twenty or thirty years until the overtly mercenary logic of a Jasper Milvain negotiating New Grub Street (1891) would become an object of cultural recognition and representation. Collins himself took up an ethical posture informed by Christian values. Like many of his fellow intellectuals and writers, he openly lived an unconventional life and, by traditional Christian standards, a transgressive one. He never married, but supported and raised children with two women simultaneously over the course of his life. The outward forms of religion meant little to him and he despised hypocrisy in religious matters. Still, in a controversy over the discussion of religion in journals, he could clearly assert, "I am neither a Protestant, a Catholic--or a Dissenter--I do not desire this or that particular creed; but I believe Jesus Christ to be the son of God" (Letters 1: 85). As his biographer Catherine Peters sees it, Collins "took the life of Jesus to be the model for social behavior" (108), like many free-thinkers of his time. His novels, like his life, refused any equation between the "Clap-trap morality of the present day" and the "Christian morality which is of all time" ("Foreword," Armadale). That "Christian morality of all time" provided Collins with a language both of vocation and ethical human relations. In the revised edition of The Moonstone (1871), Collins's self-description of the serious labor of writing dips into a religious lexicon unlike the one he uses in the correspondence with his potential publishers. Suffering from illness over the course of his career, and particular mental and physical strain during the composition of The Moonstone, he envisioned himself as writing no matter what the cost in order to answer what he termed his "duty" and "obligation" to the public. The novel completed, I awaited its reception by the public with an eagerness of anxiety, which I have never felt before or since for the fate of any other writings of mine. Everywhere the public favour looked over my faults--and repaid me a hundred--fold for the hard toil which these pages cost me in the dark time of sickness and grief. (Moonstone 49)[11] Collins here spiritualizes the literary exchange. He excises the commercial middlemen--publishers, printers, editors, booksellers, libraries--who allow his book to reach the public, imagining an intense, unmediated relationship with his audience. Just as Christian theology acknowledges the paradox of reward, Collins, too, retains the literary exchange in the economic realm: the "cost" of the work has been "repaid." Not only that; it has been repaid with significant profit: "a hundredfold." Collins's letters to the Dutch publishers describe "benefit," "profit," and "rights" as quantities measurable by money; here, the currency is favor that can be bought by toil, suffering, and some mercy. "Spiritual propert[ies]" (MS 289) indeed. The spiritual exchange between author and audience clearly retains a structure of payment and return-with-interest. Collins's deep belief in the religiously-grounded terms of duty and responsibility, of mercy and selfless loss, nonetheless allowed him to delight in his hundredfold repayment; more, such ideals may even have increased his satisfaction once he was able to find a reconciling vocabulary. I want to suggest that in the shadow of the problematic resemblance between gift-giving and bribery, credit, or theft, Collins invents around textuality a model of sacrifice that sometimes is repaid with the grace of favor. As all writers know, the success of such a sacrifice of labor can never be assured until the sacrifice is made; this is what makes it a sacrifice, a risk whose value must lie in some inherent property of the task, or to put it in Collins's chosen terms, it must be its "'own exceeding great reward'" (MS 49). We have here, then, not a commercial sphere for literature, nor a gift economy, but a sacrificial sphere. Collins's model of sacrifice as it appears in his Preface and more fully in The Moonstone yokes a praiseworthy generosity with self-violence and suggests that only unnecessary destruction can produce a value that might escape selfserving, commercial logic. The Moonstone confines pure value to vain acts of self-destruction; at the same time, the novel couples such acts with the production of text. In adopting textual presence and authorial absence as the signs of sacrifice, The Moonstone makes the deeply Protestant suggestion that texts are the only free gifts. At the same time, the history of the production and circulation of Collins's work provides an alternative model of theft and gift against which sacrifice takes its heightened value. A Free Gift?: The Bequest and the Unpayable Debt

I give the Diamond to her daughter Rachel, in token of my free forgiveness of the injury which her conduct towards me has been the means of inflicting on my reputation in my lifetime; and especially in proof that I pardon, as becomes a dying man, the insult offered to me as an officer and a gentleman, when her servant, by her orders, closed the door of her house against me, on the occasion of her daughter's birthday. (96) A central instance of moral accounting opens the novel when Colonel John Herncastle, long ostracized by his family for his infamous plunder of the Moonstone, bequeaths the gem to his niece in a dubious act of generosity. The colonel's use of the gem as a "token of free forgiveness" sets up the novel's braiding of the moral and the material. At the same time, however, the word "token" poses the insurmountable problem of how these two systems of value might ever come into successful communication. With reference to the gem, "token" seems to emphasize how exceedingly, distractingly valuable is the sign of forgiveness the colonel has chosen. That the gem has been stolen from its rightful owners marks it from the outset as the novel's primary sign of violent appropriation. Moving between the national and familial frames of the novel, the colonel recapitulates the violent appropriation through the gift of bequest, rather than through theft. Hearkening back to mythic structures of "the fatal girl, the present or item of property that is changed into poison"--the terrible inversion of expectation and social meaning--the colonel's gift is his violent claim (Mauss 63). While the Indians believe that the gem brings ill fortune to those who possess it through dishonest means, the novel's naturalized--that is to say, economic--expression of this curse is debt. The colonel's claim that the gem symbolizes the precious yet unquantifiable commodity of forgiveness is belied by the indebtedness that must attend its receipt, especially given the terms on which the parties last separated. That neither Rachel nor her mother seems to consider herself indebted does not erase the register of debt. In a novel wholly concerned with the inability of human beings to recognize what they owe and what they have unrightfully appropriated ("I had discovered Myself as the Thief" [MS 377]), unconscious debt is the most common sort. If Rachel does not feel indebted, nor grateful, her mother's distress at the gift indicates its proportionate heaviness. The superfluity of the phrase "free forgiveness" emphasizes even further the inverted, grasping nature of this gift. All forgiveness is "free" in the sense that it exceeds the strict measure of law. In a system ruled by justice, one does not forgive an offense, but exacts its cost. In a system in which mercy plays its part, forgiveness is by definition free--it exacts nothing from its recipient. Operating as a "double positive," the colonel's free forgiveness is anything but free.[12] The forgiveness and the gem function as what Mary Douglas has termed "so-called free" gifts. They preclude return and thus bring the relationship to a close. "Free" gifts may not ever be repaid, but they do exact a price. The colonel's choice to leave Rachel the gem as a bequest rather than to give it to her as a gift emphasizes his desire to escape reciprocity. The death that transforms a gift into a bequest is as audacious as the diamond itself. The colonel gets the last word. He leaves the Verinders with a debt in memory that they cannot repay. The Gift as Bribe: Giving as Getting More than anyone else in the novel, Lady Verinder is associated with acts of mercy, kindness, trust, and pity. In the novel's paradigmatic incident, Lady Verinder goes beyond "common justice" (417) and welcomes into her home Rosanna Spearman, a reformed thief, crediting her with honesty even when the diamond disappears. (Later, this noble choice is recapitulated in Mr. Candy's resolute employment of Ezra Jennings despite his troubled reputation.) Lady Verinder's economy of mercy and credit is materialized in her many gifts, primarily to Betteredge, the house steward who has served the family over generations. If "friends make gifts," and "gifts make friends" (Sahlins 186), the non-reciprocal gift exchange between Lady Verinder and Betteredge--she gives, he takes--solidifies a system of patronage. As Georges Bataille notes, for centuries, gift-giving functioned to confirm social hierarchies: "social rank is linked to the possession of a fortune, but only on the condition that the fortune be partially sacrificed in unproductive social expenditures" (123). In the luxurious freedom to lose their wealth by giving it away in acts of charity or ostentatious sacrifice, aristocrats staged and exercised their power.[13] In addition to the mistress's innocent, yet deeply ironic presentation to Betteredge of Robinson Crusoe (1719), a book that he "[wears] out" with "hard work in [his] service" (61), the novel emphasizes one other gift in particular, a handmade waistcoat that Lady Verinder gives him on Christmas, 1847: "She remarked that, reckoning from the year when I started as page-boy in the time of the old lord, I had been more than

fifty years in her service, and she put into my hands a beautiful waistcoat of wool that she had worked herself, to keep me warm in the bitter winter weather" (65-66). Lady Verinder's desire to give Betteredge a handmade gift that will "keep [him] warm in the bitter winter weather," and Collins's specification of its presentation on Christmas--a day whose celebrations increasingly divided gifts from commodities and familial from commercial relations--is correctly understood by Betteredge as a "magnificent present" (65).[14] That the gift is clothing further underscores its intimacy. Quick to absorb the signs of both their human makers and wearers-sweat, smell, and shape--clothes are highly personal objects that emphasize the singularity of human beings. Yet for all the intimacy of Lady Verinder's gift, for all her kind intentions, it cannot help but testify to the contrast between the hours that go into making a waistcoat and Betteredge's fifty years of service in "hard out-of-door work" (65). Like the colonel's "token" gift of the Moonstone, Lady Verinder's gift also marks disparity and non-reciprocity. As a reward, it depends on the hierarchical relationship for its force; it also perpetuates that relationship, re-charges it. In a further irony, Betteredge perceives the gift as a "bribe" (65), since his mistress accompanies the gift with the request that he "tak[e] [his] ease for the rest of [his] days as steward in the house" (65). The "bribe," then, does not deprive him of anything, as bribes typically do, but tricks him into accepting a further gift from the mistress whom he desires always to give to, rather than receive from. The waistcoat is a meaningful gift, as is the reward of a comfortable end of days, yet Betteredge's understanding of it as a bribe discloses the substitution of his lady's needs for his own. Over the course of their relationship, Lady Verinder's various gifts have increased Betteredge's sense of gratitude and debt until her needs have been adopted as his own. The collapse of subjectivities here reminds us that for a gift to function, a critical divide must be preserved between giver and receiver; for Betteredge, this divide no longer obtains. Betteredge offers a criticism of the class structure only when he moves to describing the future master and mistress, Lady Verinder's daughter, Rachel, and Franklin Blake. Rachel and Franklin seem blissfully unaware of the gifts from which they benefit, Franklin occasionally borrowing money from Betteredge without ever repaying it and generally living in debt, and Rachel, blind to sufferings beyond her own romantic plot. In a telling passage concerning Franklin and Rachel, Betteredge gives voice to the distinctions between those who serve and those who are served. In response to the resourcefulness of the rich and idle who fill their time with projects that the serving classes must inevitably clean up, Betteredge says in jest, "It often falls heavy enough, no doubt, on people who are really obliged to get their living, to be forced to work for the clothes that cover them, the roof that shelters them, and the food that keeps them going" (106). Betteredge has worked a lifetime for the clothes that cover him, including the waistcoat, and the roof that will shelter him. The gifts of a good mistress ease that labor, no doubt, but they also prepare their own return. The Christian Impossibility of the Gift: Charity as Theft In a fascinating variation on how the gifts of a good mistress come back to serve her, Miss Clack's narrative exposes the impossibility of pure giving, or perhaps giving at all, for the Christian believer. The paradox of Miss Clack's narrative, which is the paradox of Christianity, is that in giving away, whether through personal suffering, charity, or general acts of kindness, the Christian amasses "credit." In a comical section that Collins noted as the public's favorite, the financially-poor, spiritually-rich Miss Clack desires to share her wealth by distributing her evangelical tracts. Miss Clack's moral paradox--the gift to others returning as the gift to the self--is literalized in the novel's description of her dissemination of tracts as a kind of antirobbery. When faced with a general lack of interest in her offerings, Miss Clack packs up a carpetbag with the "choicest treasures" (281) of her own library and returns to the Verinder household. Moving from floor to floor, despite the "risk" she entails, she "slip[s]" about the house (290), reminding the reader of the novel's other suspects in robbery, Rosanna Spearman, accused of "slip[ping] away to the town" (182), and the housemaids who have "stolen" upstairs (177). After "slipping" a tract between the sofa cushions, Miss Clack moves to the window "unsuspected," and, "instead of taking away a flower, I added one, in the shape of another book from my bag" (289); "in the drawing-room I found more cheering opportunities of emptying my bag" (290). In a parallel to Rosanna's removal of the nightgown linked to the robbery of the Moonstone, Miss Clack finds a dressing gown, but instead of removing it, she leaves it where it is and fills its pockets: "It had a pocket in it, and in that pocket I put my last book. Can words express my exquisite sense of duty done, when I had slipped out of the house, unsuspected by any of them, and when I found myself in the street with my empty bag under my arm?" (291). In a novel that uses the word "pocket" over twenty-five times in dramatic reference to ownership and robbery--receipts, money, and letters are kept in pockets, pockets are "rifled" (261), and Godfrey Ablewhite's theft of the Moonstone is described simply as,

"He put the Moonstone into his pocket" (530)--Miss Clack's link to "pockets," compounds the illicit nature of her activity. Miss Clack's narrative foregrounds the confusion between giving, getting, and owing; charity, fair pay, and theft. Her narrative begins with an acknowledgment of a debt that is both longstanding and unpayable--"I am indebted to my dear parents (both now in heaven)" (255)--and the narrative in full meditates upon the problem of a status quo of debt. When one begins in debt, fair pay is hardly enough. Insufficient to meet the giver's bare obligation, fair pay begins to resemble robbery, gift-giving turns to fair pay, and true giftgiving simply eludes the realm of human relations. This structure is comically represented when, to aid a pious mission, Miss Clack indulges in the expense of a cab and pays the cabbie "exactly his fare. He received it with an oath; upon which I instantly gave him a tract" (280). To the cabbie, the tip is not a gift freely given, but part of the contract; subsumed into requirement, its absence is a form of robbery. Though Miss Clack's attempt to make up the difference of the tip with a tract exposes the metaphoricity of her "true riches" (291), and the impossibility of translating from one economy to another, the tract as currency also suggests just how economic the spiritual register is.[15] Just as we have seen the Moonstone serve as a token of forgiveness, merging economic and moral registers, and just as the novel generally sets up what is literally a moral economy in which "Accounts" are kept of "Good and Evil" (254), Miss Clack's narrative is based upon an explicit braiding of two economies, spiritual and monetary. Her narrative begins with reminiscences of a "happy, bygone time," "before papa was ruined," and her subsequent adult attempts to "discipline the fallen nature which we all inherit from Adam" (255): default and the Fall come together. Imagining an Edenic period of solvency, before sin and before ruin, Miss Clack's narrative of adulthood describes working against an inherited debt that can never be paid off. Giving away her tracts allows her to feel temporarily "relieved, in some small degree, of a heavy responsibility towards others" (258); for a night, she can sleep "as free from all anxiety as if I had been a child again" (291), pre-Fall arid ruin; yet the next morning, she must begin again to pay. Perhaps we can understand Miss Clack's massively caricatured personality, the ceaseless repetition of the same behaviors, the giving of her tracts, then their return, then her renewed attempts at giving, as not only a commonplace jibe at evangelicals, but a consequence of the economy in which she operates. Condemned to work at a debt that can never be paid, Miss Clack must repeat and repeat. Planning to bequeath the aurallyrepetitious "Life, Letters, and Labours of Miss Jane Ann Stamper" (330), (hear, too, the pun: aunts tamper) to Rachel Verinder, Miss Clack means to pass on the unpayable debt to her niece. Retention As Robbery The primary example of the "retention of robbery" variation involves Mrs. Yolland, a friend of Rosanna's and a fisherman's wife. In a moment of weakness, Mrs. Yolland has agreed to accept Rosanna's money for a tin box and some old chains. Later, regretful at having taken any of the "poor thing's little savings" (188), notwithstanding the "money's [being] welcome enough in our house" (188), Mrs. Yolland asks her visitors, Sergeant Cuff and Betteredge, to return the money to Rosanna: "Please say she's heartily welcome to the things she bought of me--as a girl. And don't leave the money on the table. For times are hard, and flesh is weak; and I might feel tempted to put it back in my pocket again" (188-89). Mrs. Yolland's belatedly willing spirit wishes to turn the commercial exchange retroactively into a gift exchange. But her request of Cuff to take the money off the table, because "'times are hard, and flesh is weak; and I might feel tempted to put it back in my pocket again,'" casts the pocketing of her own money as a form of temptation and sin, rather than the justifiable choice not to give a gift and to take care of one's own. Yet Rosanna has bought the items from Mrs. Yolland in an act of marketplace exchange. Commerce is the very practice that is supposed to guarantee fair, neutral, isolated instances of exchange in which nothing is owed and no followup transactions are necessary. Commerce is meant largely to circumvent gift and robbery and to neutralize their inevitable social element. But here commerce has gone on between friends, where it has no place; thus it appears a form of sin and theft. As with Miss Clack and the cabbie, in this episode, too, a free gift becomes the normative obligation. Sergeant Cuff alters the terms of debate and refuses to allow Mrs. Yolland to return the money to Rosanna, arguing that Mrs. Yolland "'charged her cheap for the things'" (189). In an inverse of the way we have seen tip become fair pay, here, in Cuff's economy, forgoing the acceptable proceeds of commerce merges with gift. At the price for which Mrs. Yolland sold them, Cuff says, the items are, "'Clean given away!I can't find it in my conscience, ma'am, to give the money back. You have as good as made her a present of the things'" (190). From Cuff's hard-nosed perspective, the commercial transaction has been not a robbery, nor even a fair exchange, but a gift, in which Rosanna has gotten the better end of the deal. In the end, Mrs.

Yolland cannot resist temptation. She takes the money back, but is not converted to Cuff's way of thinking. Collins's description suggests that she steals her own money: "Bother the money!" says Mrs. Yolland. With these words, she appeared to lose all command over herself; and, making a sudden snatch at the heap of silver, put it back, holus-bolus in her pocket. "It upsets one's temper, it does, to see it lying there, and nobody taking it," cries this unreasonable woman, sitting down with a thump, and looking at Sergeant Cuff, as much as to say, "It's in my pocket again now--get it out if you can!" (190) Reminding us of the "hole in Mr. Franklin's pocket that nothing would sew up" (68), Franklin's propensity for debt, Mrs. Yolland puts the silver back "bolusbolus in her pocket." Her pocket's hole and the ethic of Cobb's Hole is the hole made by gift, not debt. But as we have seen, the two are opposite sides of the coin in this novel. Among friends, gift is debt. Sacrifice The episode at Cobb's Hole provides a transition between the two dominant economies of the novel: the economy of gift, theft, and sale that we have seen thus far, and the economy that the novel describes as "sacrifice." Sacrifice is the novel's form of non-reciprocal exchange, of gift-giving outside an economy that mirrors the marketplace. Marked by an abnegation of self-interest, sacrifice demands personal suffering on behalf of a higher cause. The servant Rosanna kills herself out of love for Franklin, calling him a man "worth dying for" (248), and Rachel, too, "sacrifice[s] [her]self" (273) for Franklin, giving up her faith in him, her reputation, even the valuable Moonstone, all in order not to charge him with theft: "'I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my own character is at stake'" (417). The novel coyly plays upon the sexual metaphor of a precious, stolen gem, keeping its own secret from the reader as to whether Rachel's virginity has been stolen along with the Moonstone.[16] Collins endows Rachel with the ability to produce mystery, doubt, and story out of her own strong tendency toward secrecy, her willingness from childhood to "[suffer] the punishment, for some fault committed by a playfellow whom she loved" without speaking a word then or later (109). The salient characteristic of the novel's concept of creative, productive sacrifice is secrecy. Both Rosanna and Rachel offer sacrifices in the form of not-offering information, keeping secret what they know, or think they know, in order to spare Franklin. Their secrecy perpetuates the mystery and, in so doing, allows the novel--the history of the crime and its complicated solution--to come into being. By the same token, Rachel's exclusion from the project of retrospective narration that makes up the novel is a logical effect of her excessive knowledge. Having seen Franklin walk into her room and take the gem in his hand, Rachel, unlike Betteredge, Miss Clack, even Franklin himself, is in possession of too much information to narrate any stage of the mystery and allow it to remain unsolved. Months later, when Rachel finally reveals to Franklin that she saw him take the gem, he upbraids her for her delay, suggesting that if she "had spoken when [she] ought to have spoken" (417), the true mystery would have been brought to light. Yet if speech would have solved the mystery, it would also have precluded Rachel's sacrifice. The novel presents us with what amounts to a structural equation: when Rachel keeps silent about what she has seen, the possibility for her sacrifice exists; her silence precludes the correction of her narrative and the prevention of her self-destructive acts. When Rachel speaks, the possibility for sacrifice evaporates; her speech demands the correction of her narrative and empties her sacrificial gestures of purpose. If we pose this equation against the schema of theft, gift, and neutral exchange, we can see that, in sacrifice, we face a variation on the problem of the free gift. To remain a free gift, sacrifice must avoid indebting its beneficiary. The novel's resolution is not wholly satisfying. For Rachel to offer the free gift--her sacrifice--is possible; for her to give the free gift is not. If the sacrifice is the secret suffering for Franklin, the shielding of him from even his own personal shame, Rachel cannot both give the gift to Franklin and preserve its integrity. The gift simply disappears into thin air; once told, the secret is no longer secret. In order for the novel to reach its end, Rachel must speak, she must give up the secret, but her gift, her secret, must be worthless if it is to avoid indebting Franklin. When Rachel finally does speak, the free gift turns out to be empty at its very heart. At the very moment of telling Franklin what she has done for him, in extending to him her free gift, Rachel discovers that although he did indeed take the Moonstone, there was no need for her to shield him. She has imagined his debts, sins, and guilt: she has been the "victim of some monstrous delusion" (413).[17] Maybe so, but the delusion is the necessary feature of her gift. For her gift to command no

return, it must be, at its heart, empty, without content. She has given, but--this is the crucial caveat--he has not received. Text as the Sign of Sacrifice Just as Rachel gives a gift that asks no return, so does Rosanna, yet her sacrifice is far more terrible than Rachel's. It is her life. Facing with Rosanna, too, the problematic excess of knowledge, the novelist provides a solution in the form of a posthumous letter. We find out Rosanna's story not in retrospective testimony, as in the case of Franklin and Rachel, but in a letter addressed to Franklin, read only partially by him, because its reading becomes too painful (385). With Rosanna's half-read letter, the novel aligns and simultaneously distinguishes the two girls. Both girls, we discover, have written letters to Franklin in sign of their sacrifice. While Rosanna's survives to tell us her side of the story, Rachel's has been torn up prematurely; we never read it and neither does Franklin. After all the novel's damage has been done, Rachel tells Franklin that a letter was the only way that she could imagine responding to his theft of the gem. She intended, she later tells him, to offer to pay the debts she thinks have motivated the theft. In order to do this without shaming either of them excessively, Rachel "'thought and thought--and I ended in writing to you'" (418). But the letter never reaches Franklin. In anger at Franklin's audacious offer to lead the search for the gem, Rachel rips up the letter. Rosanna's letter faces a different fate, as does her body. Though Rachel imagines her letter as an agent that might prevent sacrifice, Rosanna right away recognizes the letter as the sign of self-sacrifice: the difference that will remain once she has sacrificed herself. In chiastic fashion, Collins has Rachel enact the sacrifice upon the letter and preserve herself, while Rosanna, the servant-girl, enacts the sacrifice upon herself, leaving behind the letter. Rosanna composes her letter knowing that either one or the other, her letter or herself, will survive, but not both: "'It would be very disgraceful to me to tell you this, if I was a living woman when you read it. I shall be dead and gone, sir, when you find my letter'" (380). More revealing than anything she could say in person, Rosanna's letter is written as an intentionally posthumous document, an assurance that if she cannot communicate with Franklin directly, he will still "find out what I have done for you, when I am past telling you of it myself'" (398). While she writes, Rosanna expresses the hope that the decree may yet be reversed: Why not believe, while I can, that it will end well after all? I may find you in a good humour to-night--or, if not, I may succeed better tomorrow morning. Who knows but I may have filled all these weary long pages of paper for nothing?It has been hard, hard work writing my letter. Oh! If we only end in understanding each other, how I shall enjoy tearing it up. (398) Rosanna makes a clear equation here of the living letter with her dead self and the dead letter with her living self.[18] In similar fashion, Rachel, too, imagines the medium of the letter as a form of the self that is severed or alienated from the living person. Just as Rosanna sees the letter enabling her to say the things she cannot say in person, Rachel imagines writing a letter that would offer Franklin help without requiring them to acknowledge any shame aloud: "'(not a word, mind, to be said openly about it between us!)'" (419). Both girls see letters as a form that capitalizes upon the difference between a person and her textual selfrepresentation. The letter signifies the difference between actual persons--bodily presences--and the traces of them in writing. This difference--the abstraction of language--makes certain texts what we might call "sacrificial." The pattern resembles the Christian theology that understands God's Word as the result and sign of Christ's willingness to die on behalf of a sinful humanity. As Defoe's Crusoe announces in the process of converting Friday and himself, nothing but divine Revelation can form the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and of a redemption purchas'd for us, of a mediator of the new covenant, and of an intercessor at the foot-stool of God's throne therefore the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; I mean, the word of Godare the absolutely necessary instructors of the souls of men, in the saving knowledge of God, and the means of salvation. (173) Word is what is left when suffering flesh is gone. In The Moonstone, the posthumous testimonies of two suffering souls, Rosanna and Ezra Jennings, come as the material signs of sacrifice. Rosanna Spearman and Ezra Jennings, a second physically marked social outcast, are themselves the sacrificial victims.[19] As Ren Girard has explained, sacrifice is a symbolic system that deflects violence from a protected, valued object onto a "'sacrificeable' victim" (4). The defining feature of the "victim," however, whether it be

animal, person, or thing, is that it "bear a certain resemblance to the object [it] replace[s]; otherwise the violent impulse would remain unsatisfied. But this resemblance must not be carried to the extreme of complete assimilation, or it would lead to disastrous confusion" (Girard 11). While in the symbolic world of The Moonstone, Ezra and Rosanna are sacrificed for their privileged doubles, Franklin and Rachel, the outcome of these sacrifices is the novel itself. From Rosanna's letter and Ezra's diary, whose readings are both contingent upon their deaths, come the pleasures of the events of the novel, its comic ending of marriage and regeneration, as well as its very text, the "documents" that make up the novel. To make use of Girard's terms in another fashion, perhaps the "'sacrificeable' victims" of the novel are persons, while the "protected, valued object" is text. "Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things" (Bataille 119) through loss. The Freedom of The Reader, The Authority of The Author Elsewhere in the novel, the distinction between persons and texts is explored in a manner that suggests that the deaths of Rosanna and Ezra, while heightening the Christian basis of the model, are not necessary factors in the sacrificial identity of certain kinds of texts. These texts whose definition we are working towards are sacrificial because, as they circulate in the absence of their authors, they approach the condition of free gifts: gifts that are offered, but do not compel their own acceptance nor, consequently, reciprocation. In a complicated passage narrated early in the novel by Betteredge, the unpracticed author confronts the possibility Rosanna faces, the possibility that shadows all efforts at communicative, audience-directed writing: his work may not be read, he may expend a great deal of effort for nothing. Authorship, while authoritative, is only half the story; the success of writing depends also on the willingness of readers. The paradox of the author's simultaneous power and subjection finds Betteredge propitiating his audience anxiously even as he asserts his own freedom from this writerly liability in commands and claims: Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit. Pay attention to it, or you will be all abroad, when we get deeper into the story. Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can't forget politics, horses, prices in the City, and grievances at the club. I hope you won't take this freedom on my part amiss; it's only a way I have of appealing to the gentle reader. Lord! haven't I seen you with the greatest authors in your hands, and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person? (83-84) Here, the garrulous Betteredge sets himself apart from the "greatest authors," even as he admits to being himself a "book." Like Collins, who attempted to replicate the language of conversation rather than literature in his novels and dictated sections of The Moonstone ("Preface to the Revised Edition," MS 49), Betteredge first claims the privilege of talk rather than text, the immediacy of bodily presence rather than the mediation of text that always represents rather than presents. The pause and break occasioned by the announcement, "Here follows the substance of what I said, written out entirely for your benefit," suggest that what has come before has somehow not been "written out," but has engaged the reader in a completely unmediated fashion. Betteredge is unwilling to give up the immediacy of the speaking person to become the disembodied voice narrating the speech that once took place. What follows, he says, in a paradox of terminology, is the "substance," "written out." In fact, substance is the one thing that cannot be "written out"; substance, body, eludes text. To become a part of a text, substance--whether of the author or of the represented object--must be subsumed into words. Victorian authors, particularly of serialized texts, experienced far more direct communication than most previous prose writers with their audiences.[20] The blurring of the distinction between book and person, person and author, person and reader, had its roots in lived experience. Accordingly, Betteredge's "speech" alternates between an insistence upon an equation of book and person, and the recognition that the narrating "person" no longer retains the full claims of personhood: "don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?" If the narrating person is not equivalent to an embodied, speaking person, Betteredge's imagined reader is not identical with the person either. The third and fourth sentences of Betteredge's exhortation use the second-person vocative to produce an implicitly gendered, living "listener": "Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not. Try if you can't forget politics, horses, prices in the City, and grievances at the club." The "you" is double, divided into he who cares for politics and she who cares for children, he who is preoccupied by horses, and she, by dinner. But by the end of the fifth sentence, Betteredge has transformed listening persons into

imagined readers: "I hope you won't take this freedom on my part amiss; it's only a way I have of appealing to the gentle reader." The "gentle reader"'s absence of marked gender further emphasizes the representation of the reader as the not-fully-person, the person without body.[21] The passage's conclusion-the necessarily rhetorical, because textual, questions, "Haven't I seen youand don't I know?"--imitates dialogue between real persons, but simultaneously re-emphasizes the boundary between the interchange of real persons and the one-sided, finished speech of literature. To whose advantage is this difference? While the writer appears to have the authority of address, it is the reader who ultimately chooses whether or not to listen. If "the fictional text can only striveto mandate, without ever being able to monitor your response" (Stewart 19), then it is a certainty that the fictional text, unlike a speaking person, cannot compel its "hearing" or reading, let alone the responses to it. Betteredge's series of powerful imperatives--"pay," "clear," "try,"--and his confident sense of offering readers a gift "entirely for [our] benefit," ends in the recognition that despite having the authority of the page, even the "greatest authors," do not possess the privilege of persons to command being heard. Betteredge's own habit of reading Robinson Crusoe piecemeal, "[taking] a turn at it" (65,89), rather than submitting to its authority in linear fashion, suggests precisely the sort of limited attention and various motivations that readers bring to "sacrificial texts." This is not to say that these texts are powerless; it is only to say that they cannot assure their own complete reception. Robinson Crusoe certainly possesses authority for Betteredge; as many critics have noted, the novel is a kind of secular Bible for him (Farmer 59, n.2). Yet Robinson Crusoe himself describes his religious reading practice by marking his freedom as a reader: he opens to the point he chooses and reads only as long as it holds his attention: "In the morning I took the Bible, and beginning at the New Testament, Iimpos'd upon myself to read awhile every morning and every nightas long as my thoughts should engage me" (Defoe 77). Even in the case of the Bible, the reader can leave off when he pleases. Mirroring Crusoe's reading of the Bible, Betteredge's reading of Crusoe depends on the latter novel having a store of maxims, portable bits of wisdom not limited by the particular context and short enough to be read in a moment. Accordingly, the first quotation Betteredge records in his section of narrative regards the difficulty of sustaining a project over time, the very opposite of his "quick fix" reading practice: Crusoe bemoans "the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it" (qtd. in Farmer 61). Betteredge applies this epigram to his own difficulty in writing, the trouble of not knowing where to begin and then staying a linear course. Betteredge's difficulty seems perhaps overdetermined when we consider that the reading of the Christian Bible, like Betteredge's own reading of Crusoe, is so rarely a linear process. The very way in which the New Testament took its historical, material form as a codex in distinction from the Hebrew Bible's form as a scroll underscores a reading practice particular to Christianity.[22] Since a verse in the Hebrew Bible is read to indicate its typological fulfillment in the New Testament, a Christian reading cannot consider either the Old Testament or the New Testament solely as unfolding narratives; the force of a passage or episode then borrows much of its force from its unexpected indication of another passage. The New Testament allows and calls out for a reading that the original material form of the Hebrew Bible materially never permitted: opening the book in the hand to a random, but providential, page; skipping pages; making sense of a passage without considering its immediate context. Given this typological reading practice--not the only one practiced with the New Testament, but a defining one and the object of the Crusoe parody--we can see the departure effected by novel reading or the reading of any necessarily linear narrative. The New Testament does not require a reading from start to finish in order to be meaningful, nor do any texts that are made up of maxims or discrete, very short passages. Yet all non-episodic novels, as well as any explanatory text that traces a process over time--some letters and journals, all historical accounts--do require a reading from start to finish. As mystery novels, Collins's works particularly called out for full and careful reading. An anonymous reviewer for Lippincott's Magazine (December 1868) pointed out just this quality in The Moonstone: Let the impatient reader, hurrying to reach the denouement, skip half a dozen pages. Instantly the thread of the story is broken, the tale becomes incomprehensible, the incidents lose their coherence. The Moonstone is a perfect work of art, and to remove any portion of the cunningly constructed fabric destroys the completeness and beauty of the whole. (qtd. in Farmer 559) It is striking just how different this aesthetic is from the "prophetic" (61) qualities Betteredge so admires in Robinson Crusoe.

If Betteredge reads only independent fragments from Crusoe and freely applies them to his circumstances without regard for context, we see in the case of the amnesiac Mr. Candy the risks of a text produced only of fragments, absent all explanatory context in a form that desperately requires it. Mr. Candy's incomplete text and what it signifies--the Moonstone's theft and all the ensuing events--evoke the opposite of an "extracting" reading practice. Ezra Jennings, like the biblical Ezra who recorded narratives on scrolls, first transcribes the spoken fragments, then makes of them an incomplete text, then, finally, a linear narrative. For the novel's mystery to be solved and for the transcription to be meaningful, the reader must bow to its order. Conclusion In The Moonstone, then, there are two sorts of texts: those that can be read in non-linear fashion, plundered or mined for "portable" nuggets of wisdom, and those sacrificial texts that demand the "hard, hard work" (398) not only of writing, but of sustained reading, too. Of course, what this distinction recalls is the central object of the novel: the Moonstone. This diamond inspires its Indian pursuers to sacrifice their caste and their lives. The jewel that, like a book, "you could hold between your finger and thumb" (118), lays "such a hold" (119) on its observers that "when you looked down into [it], you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else" (118). The Moonstone leaves its viewers no choice but to receive it. And it requires no extended process of reception. While a text is an "art of time," "never present as a whole in an instant of time," the gem is immediately apprehensible, with "no parts or sections, no areas or segments" (Fisher 21,157). Unlike texts that must be read to be received, the Moonstone, as a discrete object, is perceptible instantaneously in its entirety: Betteredge describes Rachel "flash[ing] the jewel before my eyes" (118). The gem has no body but itself. That is to say, unlike a text, it is not both inscription and object. It is simply an object. It can be in only one place at one time, it cannot be replicated or reproduced, it cannot be replaced with a newer copy, like Betteredge's worn-out volumes of Robinson Crusoe that he exchanges for ever cheaper copies (61). Perhaps it is this distinction that lies at the heart of The Moonstone and also at the heart of Collins's debates over copyright and earnings. Texts, as the novel represents them, always possess two identities: material and symbolic.[23] It is the non-material nature of texts--their identity apart from paper, ink, binding--that bears value in The Moonstone. Many texts that are mentioned in the novel appear in more than one form--Miss Clack's tracts transcribed in letters, Lady Verinder's and Rosanna's letters copied into Betteredge's narrative, Jennings' transcription of Mr. Candy's speech--and they all appear in the reproduced form of the novel. The only text materially fetishized is Ezra Jenning's incomplete book manuscript that he begs to have buried alongside him, and it is fetishized because it has no communicative end: he is certain no one will ever read it. Theft is aligned with singular objects--the Moonstone itself and perhaps even the gemlike maxims that Betteredge plucks from what is, after all, not just a novel, the linear narrative of a life, but Robinson Crusoe, a foundational text for the genre. The Indian idol worship that Betteredge judges as primitive is juxtaposed with his perhaps equally primitive bibliomancy. Traces of the deeply complicated relation between Jewish and Christian biblical textuality-the appropriation of Old Testament by New--are evident here as well. The novel's privileged texts, however, its sacrificial texts penned by Rosanna and Ezra Jennings, are distinguished from relations of theft. They retain their purity as gifts that beg no return, as gifts whose offering and acceptance depend on mutual willingness. And Collins's novel itself, completed with an "eagerness of anxiety, which [he had] never felt before or since for the fate of any other writings" ("Preface to the Revised Edition," Farmer 49), greeted finally by public favor, eludes relations of theft for the sacrifice of uncertainty, here happily redeemed. The very same text, however, took on another look in negotiations with the thieves of the market. Unlike Ruskin who argued that "the market may have its martyrdoms as well" (24), Collins limited the relation of sacrifice to the non-commercial sphere he imagined occupying with his readers. What Collins objected to in the copyright debate was the suggestion of the Dutch publishers that his novels were all symbol, that they were no one's property or wholly public property. Thus the professional Collins, addressing himself no longer to his public but to particularly untrustworthy purveyors of his writing, re-described his text as an object of commerce. Rather than representing and depending on an extended relation with his reader, his novel was now a valuable thing to be possessed, sold, bought, and, ruefully, stolen. His novel became an object that, in its solid entirety, was not unlike the brilliant, rocky Moonstone he wanted pictured on the cover of his novel to attract the attention of buyers (Letters 2: 345). By further contrast, with trustworthy publishers, the American Harper Brothers, Collins saw the exchange of his novel for money not as a neutral, commercial transaction that rendered things quits, but as a gift relation that imposed upon him the

requisite gift-debt, in this case, a welcome one: "I acknowledged the receipt of the five-hundred pounds which I have this day received from you "on account," not only with a sincere sense of your liberality, but with sincere pleasure in accepting an obligation which I owe to your friendly regard for me, and to your sympathetic appreciation of the merits of my story" (qtd. in Farmer 601). The Moonstone thus reminds us that the identity of a circulating object is hardly stable, that it takes its identity in exchange. The plundered, bequeathed diamond "whose splendour had last shonein England, from the bosom of a woman's dress" sits a few years later, "raised high on a throne.in the forehead of the deity" (542). The mid-Victorian novel of sympathy--whatever else it might have been, sensation novel, novel of ideas, realist novel-occupied a spectrum of definitions. In Collins's case, it ranged from a personal, sacrificial offering, labored over in anxiety, whose value, still undetermined, lay in the willingness of discerning readers to keep reading, to follow out the line of the tale; to a public, marketed form whose value was calculable, and had necessarily to be calculated, even before exchange and sometimes before composition; to a gift that renewed and enriched a relationship through its anticipated reciprocation. In the simultaneity of these conceptions--and their separate, though mutually dependent maintenance--we can see the complexities of a culture of sympathy and a profession of profit. NOTES My thanks to the members of the Nineteenth-Century Forum at the University of Michigan, to Jonathan Freedman, Cathy Sanok, and John Parker, and to the anonymous readers for Studies in the Novel whose suggestions have improved this essay considerably. 1. Not until the Berne Convention of 1887 and the American Platt-Simonds Bill of 1891 were writers legally protected against rampant international piracy. 2. For an exhaustive bibliography of critical approaches to the novel, see Nayder 162-63; 168-69. 3. See Collins, "A Sermon for Sepoys,'" for Collins's consideration of Muslim values. See also Heller 190, n. 8, for a short comparison of Dickens's and Collins's distinct approaches to British imperialism. 4. While critics debate the manner in which Collins's novels relate to hierarchical structures, most agree that the novel "represses" its troubling inequities; that they are the "unconscious" of this novel, itself tellingly preoccupied with the untold, unspoken, and buried. See Dolin (83), Heller (8), and Miller (50), for examples. An important exception to the rule of "repression" is Taylor's history of the novel's treatment of the unconscious (17). 5. Following the lead of much of the criticism on the novel, I understand empire and gender here as economic categories in their effects. Of course, they can be scrutinized from other angles. 6. For a full discussion of this rift and a complicating response to Weber's classic account of the relation between capitalism and Protestantism, see Herbert. 7. See, too, Georg Simmel for an analysis that places theft and gift on the extreme end of a spectrum of exchange relations that reaches from more "subjective" to more "objective" exchanges. Though, unlike Mauss, Simmel sets up a distinction between more "subjective" and more "objective" exchanges, his distinction is not hard and last. Turning to psychology, Simmel explores the ways that reciprocal trade resembles theft and gilt; in so doing, he fills out the space left by Mauss's analysis of the resemblance of gilt relations to reciprocal exchange. 8. For some examples of an extensive literature, see in anthropology Sahlins, Strathern, and Weiner. 9. For theological treatments of gift theory, see Milbank, Post, and Webb. 10. For other interpretations of the "chain" or "cycle" of responsive giving, see Post; Webb. 11. The Moonstone is hereafter referred to as MS. 12. In The Moonstone, the offer of forgiveness is tantamount to accusation. While false forgiveness is characterized as a gift exchange, true forgiveness is represented as a request, a favor one party begs from another (MS 212, 220, 308). 13. By the mid-nineteenth century in which the novel is set, the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a self-made middle class had effaced the "fundamental obligation of wealth" (Bataille 123) to give itself away. The social practice of giving impersonal charity, giving hierarchically, was yielding to the inclination to consolidate wealth horizontally, through exchanges among family and acquaintances. 14. Between the 1830s and the late 1860s when Collins was writing, the ideology and celebration of Christmas underwent significant change. From having been a holiday marked by predominantly "vertical" gifts that "celebrated hierarchical structures of faction, patronage, and allegiances" Christmas became a largely familial holiday that marked the distinction between the worlds of

commerce and the haven of home (Carrier 182). The novel's specificity in noting the date of Lady Verinder's homemade gift as Christmas, 1847, emphasizes both Betteredge's position within the extended "family" of the gentry and the contemporary dissolution of these feudal structures for more neutral, contractual, capitalist ones. 15. Miss Clack's instinctive response, throwing another tract through the window of the cab as the cabbie heads off angrily, would also have alerted Victorian readers to the mix here of spiritual and monetary pursuits, since tossing bills into cab windows was a popular mid to late- century mode of advertising (Carrier 81). 16. The parallel between Rachel and the gem is marked in nearly every essay on the novel from the late 1950s onward. Cohen's analysis (159-190) of the metaphorics of female sexuality and jewelry is one of the finest. His argument--that Victorian fiction is marked by a dialectic in which sexual secrets generously produce narratives, even as they are characterized as unspeakable--can be usefully applied to The Moonstone. 17. Though she attributes it only to the rule of coincidence in sensation novels, Winifred Hughes notes the recurrence of the "waste" phenomenon: "The profusion of secrets, as well as sheer ignorance, brings on all sorts of complications.So much of the trouble in melodrama is entirely illusory, so much of the emotion wasted, and all because someone has neglected to write a letter or provide an explanation, or because the newspapers have printed an erroneous report" (22). 18. See Heller for a reading that notes the predominance of "images of the unread" in Collins (161). Interpreting these images as representing contained female subversiveness and the repressed gothicism of sensation writing, Heller elides rather than marks the distinction between writing and body that is so vital to my argument here. 19. As Taylor notes, Ezra Jennings is easily read as the "negative reflection" of Franklin, as Rosanna is of Rachel (199). 20. On the interdependence of Victorian writers--particularly those who published in serial form--and their audiences, see Tillotson, 33-36. Lonoff offers a discussion of Collins and his audiences. 21. The "you" that precedes the gentle reader is also fictive: "the second personis a grammatical category in literature, not a receptive destination" (Stewart 19). 22. I am indebted to Peter Stallybrass for conversation on the distinctions between scrolls and codices. 23. Even the novel's use of the term "Moonstone" serves to point out the doubleness of language: the gem is not actually a typical moonstone, we learn, but a diamond. WORKS CITED Bataille, Georges. "The Notion of Expenditure." Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Carrier, James G, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Cohen, William A. Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991. Collins, Wilkie. Armadale. 1866. Ed. John Sutherland. New York: Penguin, 1995. -- Letters of Wilkie Collins. Ed. William Baker and William M. Clarke. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin's P, 1999. -- "A Sermon for Sepoys." Household Words 27 (Feb. 1858): 244-47. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. 1719. Ed. John Richetti. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Dolin, Tim. Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1997. Douglas, Mary. "Foreword: No free gifts." Mauss vii-xviii. Farmer, Steve, ed. Moonstone. Wilkie Collins. Ontario: Broadview P, 1999. Fisher, Philip. Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1998. Girard, Ren. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977. Heller, Tamar. Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Herbert, Christopher. "Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money." Victorian Studies 44 (2002): 185-213. Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Lonoff, Sue. Wilkie Collins and His Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric' of Authorship. New York: AMS P, 1982. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Milbank, John. "The Midwinter Sacrifice: A Sequel to 'Can Morality Be Christian?'" Angelaki 6.2 (2001): 49-65. Mill, John Stuart. "The Utility of Religion." 1874. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Ed. John M. Robson. 31 vols. Toronto and London: U of Toronto P, 1965-91. Miller, D.A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Nayder, Lillian. Wilkie Collins. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. Newman, John Henry. "Sins of Ignorance and Weakness." John Henry Newman: Selected Sermons. Ed. Ian Ker. New York: Paulist P, 1994. Parker, John L. "God Among Thieves: Marx's Christological Theory of Value and the Literature of the English Reformation." Diss. U of Pennsylvania, 1999. Peters, Catherine. The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. London: Secker and Warburg, 1991. Post, Stephen G. A Theory of Agape: On the Meaning of Christian Love. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1990. Ruskin, John. Unto This Last. 1862. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1967. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Strathern, Marilyn, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems" with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and NineteenthCentury Psychology. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954. Webb, Stephen H. The Gifting God: A Trinitarian Ethics of Excess. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Weiner, Annette. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. ~~~~~~~~ By Ilana Blumberg, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Copyright of Studies in the Novel is the property of University of North Texas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. Back