Although it is the stolen treasure at the center of the novel, the Moonstone is notable less because everyone agrees why it must be retrieved than because various characters attach various kinds of value to it, ranging from the religious and aesthetic to the social and financial. For Colonel Herncastle, the Diamond is originally a spoil of war, valuable presumably because of its monetary worth, but when he gifts it to his niece Rachel, it becomes transformed into a means of opening back up Herncastle’s relation with the family he has been cut off from. Even when gifted, however, the stone’s value is ambiguous: nobody can tell if he is genuinely trying to make amends with his family or seeking vengeance by passing on the stone’s curse. Indeed, Franklin Blake’s obsession with the curse ironically leads him to take the stone in his opium-influenced stupor; he steals the Diamond precisely because he worries someone else will, and to him the Diamond signifies danger and vulnerability. Rachel proudly pins the stone to her dress, showing it off as a symbol of her beauty on her 18th birthday, as she turns from a girl to a marriageable woman. Godfrey Ablewhite, one of the men she is likely to marry, tellingly calls the Diamond “mere carbon” just before stealing it: he sees the stone as a mere source of money—a misunderstanding that eventually costs him his life, when the three Indians who see it as a priceless religious artifact kill him to take it back. And during the entire investigation, the stone stands for loyalty and trust, as the drama surrounding its theft unravels the Verinder family—indeed, it is telling that the novel’s happy ending is about banishing the stone’s curse and reestablishing trust among the innocent members of the family (especially Rachel and Franklin), but not recovering the Moonstone.
In fact, the Moonstone is, in one sense, recovered to its rightful place at the end of the novel: it returns to India, from which Herncastle plundered it. Although the novel’s investigation focuses on the Moonstone’s disappearance from Rachel’s room in the Verinder estate, in fact “the Diamond” (as the novel’s British characters, mostly ignorant of its religious significance, call it) is actually stolen a number of times, including three times during the Prologue alone. When its original home, the temple at Somnauth, is raided, the Moonstone’s guardians take it to Benares and build another temple for it; some centuries later, it is stolen from Benares and taken to Seringapatnam, from which “the wicked Colonel” John Herncastle steals it in 1799. In Britain, it is stolen three more times: from Rachel’s bedroom by the opium-dreaming Franklin Blake, from Franklin by the scheming Godfrey Ablewhite, and finally from Godfrey by the three Indian Brahmins, the stone’s true guardians, who finally return it to Somnauth some 800 years after its original theft. This series of thefts complicates the question of the Diamond’s ownership: Rachel has no more claim to the Diamond than the Sultan of Seringapatnam, and Godfrey Ablewhite no more than its original thief, his uncle Colonel Herncastle. The Diamond’s brilliance lies in its capacity to transform: to mean different things to different people at the same time, as well as to transform the relations of the people who come into contact with it—something perhaps most saliently expressed at the very end of the novel, when the three Brahmins who have spent their lives hunting down the Moonstone are required to turn in opposite directions, never see one another again, and spend the rest of their lives in pilgrimage.
The Moonstone Quotes in The Moonstone
The Moonstone will have its vengeance yet on you and yours!
Lord bless us! it roar a Diamond! As large, or nearly, as a plover's egg! The light that streamed from it was like the light of the harvest moon. When you looked down into the stone, you looked into a yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. 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. No wonder Miss Rachel was fascinated: no wonder her cousins screamed. The Diamond laid such a hold on me that I burst out with as large an 'O' as the Bouncers themselves.
“Do you mean to tell me, in plain English,” I said, “that Miss Rachel has stolen her own Diamond?”
“Yes,” says the Sergeant; “that is what I mean to tell you, in so many words. Miss Verinder has been in secret possession of the Moonstone from first to last; and she has taken Rosanna Spearman into her confidence, because she has calculated on our suspecting Rosanna Spearman of the theft. There is the whole case in a nutshell. Collar me again, Mr. Betteredge. If it's any vent to your feelings, collar me again.”
“Her ladyship has smoothed matters over for the present very cleverly,” said the Sergeant. “But this family scandal is of the sort that bursts up again when you least expect it. We shall have more detective-business on our hands, sir, before the Moonstone is many months older.”
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!
“In the name of the Regent of the Night, whose seat is on the Antelope, whose arms embrace the four corners of the earth.
Brothers, turn your faces to the south, and come to me in the street of many noises, which leads down to the muddy river.
The reason is this.
My own eyes have seen it.”
“If you had spoken when you ought to have spoken,” I began: “if you had done me the common justice to explain yourself—”
She broke in on me with a cry of fury. The few words I had said seemed to have lashed her on the instant in to a frenzy of rage.
“Explain myself!” she repeated. “Oh! is there another man like this in the world? I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my own character is at stake; and he—of all human beings, he—turns on me now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself ! After believing in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of him by day, and dreaming of him by night—he wonders I didn't charge him with his disgrace the first time we met: ‘My heart's darling, you are a Thief! My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!’ That is what I ought to have said. You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have lost fifty Diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it lying now!”
“I wish I had never taken it out of the bank,” he said to himself. “It was safe in the bank.”
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne—seated on his typical antelope, with his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth—there, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began. How it has found its way back to its wild native land—by what accident, or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem, may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone? Who can tell!
The Moonstone Symbol Timeline in The Moonstone
