The darkness of the sensory language surrounding the Shivering Sand in Period 1 Chapter 4 is a literal version of the gloomy mass of contradictory facts, dark truths, and hidden evidence in The Moonstone. Rosanna uses hyperbolic language and provocative alliteration to describe the Sand. Her intense descriptions of it also foreshadows her own death within its depths. When Rosanna and Betteredge stand looking over the Sand together in Chapter 4, Betteredge says:
I looked where she pointed. The tide was on the turn, and the horrid sand began to shiver. The broad brown face of it heaved slowly, and then dimpled and quivered all over. ‘Do you know what it looks like to me?’ says Rosanna, catching me by the shoulder again. ‘It looks as if it had hundreds of suffocating people under it – all struggling to get to the surface, and all sinking lower and lower in the dreadful deeps! Throw a stone in, Mr Betteredge! Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!’
In this passage, Rosanna uses the diction of suffering and suffocation to give the reader a bold visual image of her fear of the Sand. She imagines it to be full of "hundreds of suffocating people" below the surface, and although this is hyperbolic, the quicksand itself does eventually prove to contain "suffering." It hides evidence from the people investigating the theft of the Moonstone, and it is associated with secrets, pain, and strife by every narrator.
When people describe the Sand, as Rosanna does here, it is linked to the visual language of obscurity and loss: it has "dreadful deeps" like grief and is "horrible" to look at as it shivers like a person in terror. The language of pointless struggle in Rosanna's descriptions also provokes a sense of hopelessness and despair for the reader, as she describes people "sinking lower and lower" into the muck. The alliteration of "Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!" also provides the reader with auditory imagery: the sucking "s" sounds in this phrase echo the plop and sink of a stone into the quicksand. All of this obsessive, gloomy talk foreshadows the later point at which Rosanna drowns herself in the Shivering Sand. She follows the arc of the stone that is "thrown in" and is also "sucked" down, never to be seen again.
A last link between Rosanna and the dark sensory language surrounding the Shivering Sand is made by Franklin Blake at the end of this chapter. As he "closes" his discussion of her suicide note, he describes the next stage of his story as his "toilsome journey from the darkness to the light." In Chapter 8 of his Third Narrative, he resolves to "force his way through all obstacles, from the darkness to the light" with the help of Sergeant Cuff's detective work.
When Betteredge describes first seeing the Moonstone diamond in Period 1, Chapter 9, Collins immediately presents the reader with powerful visual imagery of paralysis, depth, color, and intensity:
Lord bless us! it was a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover’s egg! [...] When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it. [...] It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves. We set it in the sun, and then shut the light out of the room, and it shone awfully out of the depths of its own brightness, with a moony gleam, in the dark.
Betteredge is so stunned by even the "flash" of the diamond that Rachel gives him that he has to "bless" himself to express his surprise. All of the sensory language of sight that Collins uses here makes the diamond seem uncannily enormous and engaging. It's just a stone in the hand of a young girl at this point, but it's also an object that contains "a yellow deep" that the manservant finds difficult to describe. The imagery of its relative smallness—"you could hold it between finger and thumb"—is contrasted with descriptions of its enormous and supernatural profundity. It is "as unfathomable as the heavens themselves": so "unfathomable" indeed that Betteredge uses the word twice in the same phrase.
Collins also, even at this very early point of its presence in the story, gives a supernatural veil to the Moonstone. When Betteredge describes it later in the passage he says it does not merely reflect light, but actually, impossibly, "contains" it. The jewel is so valuable and so eerily beautiful that it shines by itself like a light is on within it. Its "moony glow" is still visible, coming from the "depths of its own brightness" as it scintillates "awfully" alone in the dark. This imagery supports the narrative that the Moonstone is cursed. It isn't just a stone, even after it has been removed from the Moon God's Temple. It is an object with its own, frightening power.
Collins employs hyperbolically exaggerated language in Miss Clack's diction. In doing so, he is satirizing the self-important speech of prosetylizers in his period. In Chapter 1 of Narrative 1, Miss Clack "humbly" explains that she's only helping with the Moonstone case because she's being paid:
Pecuniary remuneration is offered to me—with the want of feeling peculiar to the rich. I am to re-open wounds that Time has barely closed; I am to recall the most intensely painful remembrances—and this done, I am to feel myself compensated by a new laceration, in the shape of Blake's cheque. My nature is weak. It cost me a hard struggle, before Christian humility conquered sinful pride, and self-denial accepted the cheque.
In this passage, Collins lampoons Miss Clack's apparently Christian attitude. Her protesting language only underlines the hypocrisy of her actions. In order to feel all right about taking money for doing a good deed, she needs to justify her "struggle" to accept "pecuniary remuneration." She does this by reframing it as "Christian humility" to herself and to Franklin Blake, the intended reader of her "Narratives." Clack protests a great deal but eventually takes the cheque from Blake, as she clearly doesn't really intend to turn it down.
This is really self-interest reworded as a "hard struggle" for "self-denial." Miss Clack is un-self-aware enough to apparently believe that her exaggerated, hyperbolic self-criticism and "reflection" covers up the self-regarding reality of her choice in this passage. Collins implies that with enough bluster and self-deception, even the most banally selfish or money-motivated choices can be framed as Christian behavior.
Clack's hyperbolic hypocrisy doesn't just extend to excusing herself. She is horrible about other characters—particularly Rachel Verinder— in a very overt way. However, because she can't see herself clearly, her discussions of them are also delivered as moralistic tracts meant to persuade the reader of her wisdom and her moral righteousness. Similarly, when she admires someone, they are also described in naively hyperbolic language. In the same chapter, she begins to call Godfrey Ablewhite the "Christian Hero," going on to describe his mugging by the Three Indians in the terms of a Christian parable:
When the Christian hero of a hundred charitable victories plunges into a pitfall that has been dug for him by mistake, oh, what a warning it is to the rest of us to be unceasingly on our guard! How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce on us unawares! I could write pages of affectionate warning on this one theme, but (alas!) I am not permitted to improve – I am condemned to narrate.
Clack's description of this "pitfall" is nothing short of ridiculous, especially as she uses the example of Godfrey being attacked and searched as a cautionary tale. She aligns moral vigilance and being "unceasingly on our guard" with avoiding being "pounced" on by "Oriental noblemen," a ridiculous comparison in any context. She then goes on to immediately deny she's speaking moralistically, as given the terms of her contract with Blake, she isn't "permitted" to "improve" others and can only "narrate." Collins's satire is painfully sharp here. Clack can't seem to tell that this plain and scientific "narration" she believes she is "condemned" to writing for Blake has already become a pompous and moralizing screed.
Collins satirizes the hypocrisy of Christian fundamentalists repeatedly in this book, using Miss Clack as a mouthpiece for their pious self-interest. This character speaks in the hyperbolic and overblown tones of a fundamentalist religious tract to her reader in the first Chapter of Narrative One:
Thoughtless and superficial people may say, Here is surely a very trumpery little incident related in an absurdly circumstantial manner. Oh, my young friends and fellow-sinners! [...] Oh, be morally tidy. Let your faith be as your stockings, and your stockings as your faith. Both ever spotless, and both ready to put on at a moment’s notice!
I beg a thousand pardons. I have fallen into my Sunday-School style.
The "Sunday-School style" of this speech reads as being unbearably patronizing and high-handed, especially because Clack begs an insincere "thousand pardons" and then doesn't stop preaching. All of Clack's language is exaggerated and overblown, as she exhorts people to be "morally tidy" in their behaviors. In this passage, Collins pairs weighty Christian ideas like moral purity with seemingly trivial ones, like "tidiness." The self-evident silliness of these duos reflects Collins's low estimation of people who held these opinions.
The use of chiasmus in this passage also adds to its hyperbolic quality. Chiasmus is a a rhetorical figure often used in religious texts, where words are repeated in reverse order, as when Clack says "let your faith be as your stockings, and your stockings as your faith." With this phrase, Collins employs another ridiculous juxtaposition of a big, important thing with a small, silly thing, in language that sounds almost Biblical. This chiasmus is central to the satirical work of this passage, as it shows the hypocrisy of the self-important and persnickety Miss Clack's views. Collins was publicly critical of what he viewed as the hypocritical and pompous behavior of people who preached evangelical Christianity in mid-19th century England. If people like Miss Clack can put on or take off their "faith" as easily as their stockings, Collins implies, their moral "tidiness" is probably not as "spotless" as they believe.
Miss Clack describes her ecstasy at Godfrey Ablewhite's presence and his "Christian" action of burning Rachel Verinder's "confession" with a simile in Chapter 2 of her First Narrative:
I was too deeply affected by his noble conduct to speak. I closed my eyes; I put his hand, in a kind of spiritual self-forgetfulness, to my lips [...] Oh, the ecstasy, the pure, unearthly ecstasy of that moment! I sat – I hardly know on what – quite lost in my own exalted feelings. When I opened my eyes again, it was like descending from heaven to earth. There was nobody but my aunt in the room. He had gone.
Just before this, Rachel has declared that she cannot bear to have Godfrey blamed for the theft of the Moonstone, and she writes a document declaring his innocence. Godfrey destroys it instead of using it; unbeknownst to Clack, however, he has selfish motives for doing so. Miss Clack has no idea that Godfrey's destruction of Rachel's signed declaration of his innocence is anything but another piece of evidence that Godfrey is a "Christian Hero," as she dubs him earlier in the novel. She is transported into hyperbolic throes of ecstasy by this "good deed."
Her reaction to it is so intense that she almost passes out from this "unearthly ecstasy." Collins injects a little comedy into the scene here, as when Clack opens her eyes Godfrey has already left. She's brought abruptly down from "heaven" and finds herself embarrassingly returned to Earth, where there is "no-one but [her] aunt in the room." This is another instance of Clack's self-aggrandizing and unselfconscious religious silliness, but is also a key moment in the characterization of Ablewhite in The Moonstone. Miss Clack is transported out of her body by her impressions of his "heavenly" behavior. Godfrey, however, is not; he just rudely leaves her to her reveries and gets on with his own machinations.
Miss Clack uses a hyperbolic biblical allusion in Narrative 1, Chapter 2. This allusion functions as a metaphor to describe some visitors arriving to accompany Rachel Verinder to a flower show. In this section Clack tells the reader that:
[...] a thundering knock at the street door startled us all. I looked through the Window, and saw the World, the Flesh, and the Devil waiting before the house – as typified in a carriage and horses, a powdered footman, and three of the most audaciously dressed women I ever beheld in my life
Drusilla Clack thinks Rachel is arrogant, badly behaved, and un-Christian, and is always trying to improve her behavior by forcing fundamentalist religious pamphlets on her. It's unsurprising, given this, that Clack believes Rachel's friends are "the most audaciously dressed women" she's ever seen. The situation she is describing—people arriving to pick up a friend in a carriage—is actually quite normal, but through Clack's hyperbolic voice, it becomes an occasion of bombastic significance.
Clack refers to the girls in the carriage as "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil waiting before the house." This trio of things is an allusion by the author to the writing of Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Italian theologian. Aquinas described the three things Clack references here as the "implacable enemies of the soul." Aquinas is a canonical Christian figure, and this reference would have been a familiar one to Collins's largely Christian British audience.
Of course, the idea that some flashily-dressed girls in a carriage could be the embodiments of the "enemies of the soul" is obviously farcically overblown. Nevertheless, Miss Clack sees opportunities for sermonizing everywhere, especially when they involve criticizing Rachel. This is another instance in The Moonstone where the insatiable Miss Clack makes a ludicrously exaggerated and negative religious reference to align something quite ordinary, even pleasant, with something very bad indeed.
