Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture by Jean Arnold (review)

In Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel, Jean Arnold argues that if we want to understand relationships between characters in fiction, how individuals relate to themselves and society, and the complexities of Victorian culture in general, we should first examine how characters treat objects. Jewelry and gemstones are particularly revealing in this regard because they are designed to radiate sociocultural meaning. They serve both character and reader as “prisms of culture,” housing and advertising information that variably refracts, reflects, is costly and priceless. Arnold calls this the “prism effect”—just as a translucent gem would receive monochromatic light and give off a spectrum of color, so too do jewels function in literature to reveal “a spectrum of affect, a gamut of emotions that both produce and reveal individual identity” (20). Jewels show both the interior and exterior of the subject and, as simultaneous markers of personal memory and wider socioeconomic status, reveal the interplay between public and private spheres. They also frequently blur the line between subject and object as characters come to think of them as agents of social change and the people who wear them as ornaments. By studying these overlaps, arnold argues, ultimately we can understand the ways Victorian reading audiences “relate[d] to the living beings they objectif[ied]” (32).

To explore the promise of tracking gems in Victorian literature, arnold deals with four novels in four chapters, respectively: William Makepeace Thackeray’s The History of Samuel Titmarsh and The Great Hoggarty Diamond (1841), Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873). Though three of these titles showcase the importance of jewels and thus seem obvious choices, the Middlemarch chapter as well as the short analyses of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48) and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) in the introduction are the most provocative and compelling of the monograph. Arnold states that it is her goal to historicize each novel, not only in terms of the time period in which it was written but also the time period about which it was written. In that spirit, her interpretation of The Hoggarty Diamond focuses on the themes of mobility and commodity fetishization while referring to the unstable economy of the 1820s. Samuel fetishizes the diamond he has inherited and, as if in turn, it propels him up the social ladder. It is only when he, like Britain’s wayward bubble scheme investors, sees the irrationality of the fetish that he can regain control of his life. arnold mentions but does not delve into the Irishness of The Hoggarty Diamond; in her analysis of The Moonstone, imperial themes are, perhaps predictably, front and center. She argues that the novel is Collins’s alternative history of Britain’s relationship with India—a narrative of theft and colonial violence that cannot be rectified by subsequent gift-giving rituals and that end up tainting the metropolitan domestic sphere as much as the colonial one. The crucial historical context for The Moonstone is the East India Company’s annexation of the Punjab in 1849, Queen Victoria’s appropriation of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond in 1851, and the gemstone’s highly celebrated recutting or “transculturation” (80). Dorothea’s emeralds, cameo, miniature, and classical sculpture are the objects under scrutiny in the Middlemarch chapter. Arnold offers a fascinating analysis of the relationship between aesthetics and political economy, showing the ways in which Dorothea’s understandings of herself as an authentic individual and as a female consumer develop in uneasy tension with each other. In the final chapter, Arnold argues that the relationship between Lizzie and the flashy diamond necklace in The Eustace Diamonds is not only emblematic of the instability and superficiality against which the novel warns but is also particularly instructive for Victorian audiences embroiled in legal debates over credit and the Married Women’s Property Act.

Arnold’s metaphor of the...