The Shadow In The Moonstone

William Wilkie Collins is one of the most famous writers in the Victorian age. He's most remembered by The Moonstone, a work of his literary zenith, which was then a world-famous novel and is now regarded as one of the classics of the detective fiction genre.The format of the story is similar to the one Collins had used in The Woman in White. He presented the events sequentially from the vantagepoint of different individuals who witnessed different events and formed their own opinions and interpretations of the occurrences, and during this process, some hidden truths about the narrators themselves were exposed, intentionally or unintentionally. What's more, with this narrative technique, Collins was able, in an invisible way, to express his own attitudes to or thoughts about the materials he was presenting without interrupting the continuity of the narration.Collins inclined to select from real crimes for his literary creation. As a matter of fact, The Moonstone was inspired by the Road murder case in 1860, which received national attention and remains unsolved until now. Obviously the idea of stealing the moonstone came from the shocking and tragic India mutiny in 1857. Besides, he also employed some well-received contemporary psychological or scientific theories for knotting and unlocking his mysteries.The content of the story focuses on unraveling of the mystery of the missing moonstone. The always wild and unruly Colonel Herncastle viciously robbed the guardian Brahmin of the moonstone during British soldiers'ransacking of Seringapatam and stealthily brought it back to England. With a notorious reputation, he was generally rejected by his relatives, while the India Brahmin were lurking around waiting for the right time to take his life and restore the holy moonstone to the statue of the moon goddess. Guileful as he was, he started a secret and isolated life and deposited the diamond in the safekeeping of the bank with such an instruction: in a case of abnormal death, the moonstone should be cut into several pieces and sold immediately, and in this way, its holy identity would be lost for ever; in a case of normal death, the diamond should be bequeathed to his niece Rachel as a gift for her 18th birthday. But it's worth noting that Rachel's mother and his sister Lady Verinder had coldly rejected him at his former visit at Rachel's last birthday party. After his death, his nephew Franklin brought the moonstone to the Verinder house as an executer of his uncle's will and gave Rachel this precious diamond at her 18th birthday party, but the moonstone went missing that very night. Great detective Sergeant Cuff was called in to solve the case. Then the deformed maid Rosanna who's also an ex-thief, Franklin whom Rachel's heart secretly stayed with, the three Indians lurking around the house and even Rachel herself, was or were suspected successively. Yet the case met with a dead-end: Rachel became silent and hysterically swore never to see Franklin again, Rosanna killed herself in the shivering sand, the Indians went missing and Franklin, both confused and heartbroken, went abroad to travel around, Cuff quitted his job as a retirement. One year later, when Franklin came home to inherit his father's rank and property, some missing links of the case gradually came up. With Mr. Jennings'psychological experiment, the dead knot of the case was finally unraveled: the night the moonstone went missing, Franklin happened to be drugged by laudanum; under the pressure of a heavy anxiety for Rachel's safety, he sleepwalked to Rachel's room to take the moonstone away with an intent to protect her, which was mistaken by Rachel who had witnessed Franklin's"crime". With this new clue, Cuff began a new direction of deduction and detection which was assisted by a smart little boy Gooseberry; they caught the real thief of the moonstone in a hotel room who's already killed in suffocation: the distinguished Godfrey Ablewhite. As for the moonstone, after centuries'trials and tribulations, it finally restored its place to the Indian moon goddess.As the detective fiction genre has an association with"low"fiction, for a long time, it has been critically marginalized especially in its research at home. Yet during the last 30 years, Collins and his works have been reassessed abroad, which has inspired the writer of this thesis, who thinks that detective fiction does not equal to low genre and Collins and his works are worth further digging and researching. Based on the former studies, this thesis intends to reassess The Moonstone in terms of one of the most compelling ideas of the Jungian theory, the concept of the shadow. The shadow, as the negative side of personality, is repressed and rejected by the ego. The habitual neglect of the realm of the shadow will lead to the misjudgment and misunderstanding of others, or even oneself. The writer of this thesis thinks that it is exactly the shadow which hides in people's hearts that creates the strangeness and disharmony between human relationships, which consequently leads to suspense, mystery and uncertainty as reflected in the novel: on the one hand, the novel becomes more attracting, and on the other, the reader could arrive at a deeper understanding of the Victorian time and its people in the end.The main body of the thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter one includes a brief introduction to Jung's analytical psychology and a detailed explanation of the shadow archetype. Chapter two focuses on detailed psycho-analysis about the shadow inside the characters living in a Victorian family, in terms of the Jungian theory, especially the shadow theory. And it is divided into two parts: the female characters such as Rachel Verinder, Rosanna Spearman and Miss Clack and the male characters such as Franklin Blake, Godfrey Ablewhite, Ezra Jennings and Sergeant Cuff. And it's discovered that it's the conflicting state of the characters'ego and shadow that leads to the complication of the mystery and acts as a curse or salvation to their souls, and moreover, that the detection of truth is actually a reassessment of others and a rediscovery of oneself. Chapter three focuses on the analysis of the two aspects of the shadow hidden inside the novel which are discovered through the detection of the moonstone: first, the unknown desires hidden in a materialized society; second, the repressed unknowns in an imperialist country, such as the patient and dedicated Indians lurking around, that have a persistent passion for their recognition. The thesis then ends with a conclusion: The Moonstone is not only a perfect detective fiction with brilliant plotting and exquisite characterization, but also conveys Collins's understanding of criminality: the real danger or crime does not come from without but most probably from within.