In The Changeling, a play filled with status-obsessed characters and precarious class hierarchies, diamonds symbolize the way that various people turn each other into commodities. When the servant DeFlores kills the wealthy Alonzo de Piracquo, he severs his victim’s finger, so desperate to get Alonzo’s diamond ring that the horror of dismembering another human being does not even cross his mind. And though Beatrice pretends that DeFlores’s diamond theft disgusts her, her thinking is equally transactional: rather than acknowledging DeFlores as her partner in crime, she merely tries to pay him off (using her own “jewels”) and send him away.
Moreover, while DeFlores’s casual attitude toward the severed finger is explicitly gruesome, the play also uses diamonds to represent less drastic forms of objectification. Alsemero, desperate to marry Beatrice despite the oddities he notices in her personality, insists that this “true deserver” of his love “like a diamond sparkles”; by describing Beatrice in this way, Alsemero turns Beatrice from a person he wants to get to know into a prize he hopes to possess.
Diamonds Quotes in The Changeling
BEATRICE: Methinks I love now with the eyes of judgment
And see the way to merit, clearly see it.
A true deserver like a diamond sparkles,
In darkness you may see him, that’s in absence,
Which is the greatest darkness falls on love;
Ye he is best discern’d then
With intellectual eyesight.
Diamonds Symbol Timeline in The Changeling
