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
Preparing for dinner, Betteredge chastises the kitchen-maid Nancy for her “sulky face.” Nancy complains about her tardy colleague Rosanna, whom Betteredge goes to retrieve. Lady Julia has employed Rosanna Spearman—who used to be a petty thief in London—after meeting her in a reformatory. Rosanna proved a competent worker, but did not grow close to any of the other servants, who grew angry with her for her lack of interest in their gossip. This particular day, Rosanna had gone for fresh air to the ugly expanse of quicksand by the sea, the Shivering Sand, which is inexplicably her favorite route to walk in the area, even though all the other walks are nicer.
Rosanna, like the young boy with the Indians, also exemplifies the plight of the new British poor; but her transformation from thief to servant points to the Victorian hope for moral reform and belief that poor criminals can be taught respectability and subservience to the rich. Nevertheless, Rosanna’s alienation from the other servants suggests that this narrative may be missing something, and that she (perhaps unlike the others) does not see being a rich family’s maid as fulfilling or dignified work.
Themes
When Betteredge encounters Rosanna at the Shivering Sand, she is crying about her “past life” and declines dinner. She explains that she always returns to the sands because she “think[s] that [her] grave is waiting for [her] here.” She feels entranced by the place and thinks about it nonstop. Rosanna fears her new life is “too quiet and too good” for someone like her; she resents and feels lonely around the other honest, boring servants. She loves the quicksand, which looks like people are “suffocating” underneath. Betteredge nearly chastises her, but they hear a cry from behind and turn to see a handsome gentleman approaching—the man announces that he owes Betteredge money and sits down beside him. It is Mr. Franklin Blake. They both look at the blushing Rosanna, who suddenly walks off, to the men’s confusion. Betteredge promises that the chapters to come will explain her motives.
Rosanna’s morbid fascination with the tumultuous sands confirms her sense of “1uffocate[ion]” as a servant and forces the reader to confront the possibility that the moral “reform” she underwent might not be the best solution to inequality. She at once believes she is morally unworthy of a normal life and hates the life she has taught to see as “normal”; if Betteredge is the well-oiled cog in the British class machine, Rosanna shows the injustice built into the labor system. Her reaction to Franklin’s arrival foreshadows her later fixation on him, and Betteredge’s final assurance that future events will explain this reaction again shows how the novel uses a unique, reverse kind of dramatic irony well-suited for a detective story: the characters narrating The Moonstone already know the whole story, but the reader does not.
Themes
Literary Devices
