Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Moonstone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Detective Methods and Genre Standards
Intention, Identity, and Personality
Science and Religion
Gender and Victorian Morality
Class, Wealth, and Nobility
British Imperialism
Summary
Analysis
Rachel meets Franklin Blake, who is taciturn and seemingly entranced. She approaches him and Franklin forgets the conflict between them, remembering only “the woman I loved” and then kissing her all over the face. In response, Rachel lets out “a cry of horror” and pushes him away with “merciless anger in her eyes” before calling him a “mean, miserable, heartless coward!” Franklin reprimands her, and she facetiously apologizes for assuming that he would recognize the cowardice in his actions. He asks what actions she is talking about, and she asks if she really needs to explain, after protecting his secret. Distraught, she buries her head in her hands.
Rachel’s free creative expression (playing the piano) completely shuts down when she sees Franklin, who fails to consider her perspective and simply treats her as though it doesn’t matter that she has distanced herself from him for a year. Clearly, she blames him for some particular act that he is unable to identify; again, like with Rosanna, Franklin cannot relate or reply to Rachel because he has no idea what she is thinking, and they simply speak past one another because of their asymmetric information.
Themes
Literary Devices
After a long pause, Franklin asks if Rachel will hear his appeal and he tells her everything he has discussed in his narrative thus far. At the end, he asks if Rosanna showed Rachel his nightgown, and she asks if he is “mad” and has only come to try and relieve his guilt through a “pretence of innocence.” She declares that she “saw you take the Diamond with my own eyes!”
Rachel reveals the worst and most baffling news possible: Franklin did, indeed, steal the Diamond. How, why, and why he does not remember (or whether he is lying here) are all questions yet to be answered. Franklin seems to have become foreign to himself.
Themes
Franklin is shocked and “overwhelmed by the discovery of his own guilt.” Rachel explains that she tried to “spare” him and asks “why did you come here to humiliate yourself?” Franklin at once understands her reaction to him and tells her, “Rachel, you once loved me.” He holds her hand, but she tells him to “let go of it,” and he wonders whether there might still be some piece of evidence that could “be made the means of vindicating [his] innocence in the end.”
Like Rosanna’s, Rachel’s behavior has seemed erratic and secretive throughout the entire novel so far (which is why Sergeant Cuff thought she might have stolen her own Diamond). However, after learning what she experienced, the reader must now re-interpret all her breakdowns and periods of isolation—as well as her decision never to reveal what she saw Franklin do.
Themes
Franklin asks if Rachel can recall everything she saw the night of the theft for him, and she reluctantly agrees. She could not sleep that night, and so she dressed to go out and get a book—and then Franklin came to her door, wearing his nightgown and holding a candle, with bright eyes that looked around the room as though he “were afraid of being found out.” Rachel “was petrified” and felt she could not move; she is certain that Franklin “never saw [her].” She saw him put down his candle, open her cabinet, take the Diamond and hold “still, for what seemed like a long time,” before leaving her room (leaving the door open, just as he left the drawer with the Diamond open) and disappearing. Nothing else strange happened that night, Rachel finishes, and she asks if Franklin is satisfied with her report.
The way Franklin enters Rachel’s room, silently and with an otherworldly glare, alongside Rachel’s reaction to his actions, carry strong overtones of sexual assault, which is metaphorically linked to the Diamond’s theft. It becomes clear why Rachel would lose all trust in Franklin and watch her own identity begin to fall apart: the man she most trusted and loved betrayed her through an unprecedented, deceitful, and egotistical crime, silently in the middle of night, by stealing the gift that symbolized her beauty, innocence, and coming of age on her 18th birthday.
Themes
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In a move he later considers rash and ignorant, Franklin criticizes Rachel for not telling him earlier, and she explodes “with a cry of fury,” declaring that Franklin is a “villain” for now telling her she was wrong to hide his secret and not immediately accuse him of being a thief. “In mercy to her,” Franklin turns and walks out without a word—but Rachel follows him and declares that she “owe[s him] a justification of [her] conduct.”
Again, Franklin worsens the situation by reacting before thinking through Rachel’s perspective and experience, which is perhaps ironic given his great propensity for planning and philosophical speculation. In as much of a hurry, he abandons the situation he sought to resolve at its worst moment.
Themes
Rachel explains that she kept quiet to protect Franklin and even wrote him a letter—which she knows he never got—explaining that she knew he needed money to pay his debts and offering him that money, if only he would secretly return the Diamond. But then she took the letter and “tore it up” upon realizing that Franklin himself was enlisting the police’s help and starting to lead the investigation, including interviewing Rachel herself about the theft. She then approached him and gave him an opportunity to admit the crime on the terrace—something he misinterpreted and responded to with a “false face of innocence.”
In fact, the precise silence that Franklin interpreted as an affront was Rachel’s attempt to protect him; like Rosanna, Rachel strained to save Franklin from himself—indeed, from something he did not even realize he had done. Needless to say, by leading the push to call the police on something Rachel already knew he had done, Franklin sent horrendously mixed signals that confounded Rachel. The most logical explanation was that he was continuing to deceive her.
Themes
Rachel declares that she saved Franklin’s reputation by never admitting what she saw, and insists that she believes he is capable of any lie (including lying to her now) given that she saw him steal the Diamond. She believes he has pledged the Diamond in London and that his entire story about finding Rosanna’s letter and the nightgown is a lie. But she does not understand why he has returned to her—and laments that she “can’t tear [him] out of [her] heart, […] even now!” Franklin insists that “You shall know that you have wronged me, yet […] Or you shall never see me again,” and leaves. On his way out, Rachel shouts that she forgives him and asks him to forgive her, too. But Franklin does not respond.
Understandably, Rachel finds it impossible to believe anything at all that Franklin says—and this inevitably raises the question of whether the reader should, either. Like all of Collins’s characters, she remains tortured by opposite feelings: this suspicion and her residual love for Franklin. Both of their personalities begin to destabilize, and the implausible truth throws more and more of the novel’s testimony so far into doubt. And Rachel’s last words to Franklin show that she—like Rosanna—still believes in love above all else.
Themes
