The Moonstone: The Discovery of the Truth 1: 1 Summary & Analysis

Clack, like Betteredge, opens with a personal digression that reveals much about her character, although in her case it is truly irrelevant to the story and merely a kind of comic relief. Indeed, the tone of her account makes her religious fanaticism clear from the start and sets her up as an unreliable narrator—in contrast to the deliberately humble and sober Betteredge. Nevertheless, both are firmly pinned to particular values: Betteredge sees Robinson Crusoe and loyalty to his employer as paramount, the same way Clack sees (her interpretation of) the Bible.

Clack’s allusion to her new home in France and Franklin Blake’s scathing footnote suggest that, unlike Betteredge, she is far from beloved by the family; rather, Franklin simply needs her narrative for his records, and while she claims to be providing it out of a sense of service, it is clear that her real motivation is money (but also that she does not want to admit it). Clack’s declaration that she prefers “truth” above “persons” contrasts directly with Betteredge’s expression of delight that he puts loyalty to Julia above mere reason. It is also clear that Clack puts little actual weight in the “truth”—at least, “truth” conceived as scientifically verifiable fact, the kind relevant to the Diamond’s theft and necessary for the witness statements Franklin Blake is compiling. Indeed, her frequent conflation of “truth” with religious dogma ultimately obscures rather than reveals the facts of the case.

Although Clack presents stumbling upon Julia’s house as a casual coincidence and offering her help as an act of service, Penelope’s note to her father Betteredge at the end of the last chapter suggests that Clack is ordinarily keen to impose herself on the family uninvited. And Clack’s attitude toward Penelope and Betteredge—who also considers himself a good Christian—again forces the reader to confront the question of how much of Betteredge’s narrative to take at face value (not to mention the perhaps easier associated question: how much of Clack’s). Clack’s pamphlet is a classic symbol of Victorian evangelical Christian morality, a largely conservative, reactionary trend that aimed to stop the changes in social and especially gender mores brought about by industrialization.

Clack’s charity, also a caricature of the fundamentally useless religious social interventionism that often passed as reform, essentially uses the pants to denounce fathers for their poverty, which is labeled immoral without any consideration of how or why families end up poor (not to mention any attempts at genuinely changing the next generation’s socioeconomic situation). Clack’s mention of Godfrey should recall her brief presence at Rachel’s birthday dinner (when they spoke to no one else, and the reader can now likely see this might have had something to do with Clack’s propensity for endless, empty talk).

While Clack realizes that her “Sunday-school style” can be off-putting, it is so contradictory, exaggerated, and comedic, especially to Collins’s working- and middle-class newspaper audience, that it made her narrative the most popular section of the novel. Her name for Godfrey, “the Christian Hero,” recalls Betteredge’s comparable reverence for the man, although both contrast with his surliness on Rachel’s birthday, which is the reader’s only glimpse of him so far. Clack narrates the Indians’ robbery of Godfrey with a characteristic outrage tied to her descriptions of stereotypes about Asia and the men’s racial characteristics. Although, by distracting Godfrey with the “ancient Oriental manuscript,” the Indians seem to understand and use to their advantage the power of such prejudices and stereotypes.

Clack ties her regressive picture of gender roles (“proper […] female discussion”) to her xenophobic disdain for the Indians, and of course recounts Godfrey being saved by the selfless English property owner. Again, the Indians play on this same stereotype to rent the apartment in the first place (by presenting themselves as aristocracy and enlisting an English gentleman). Unable to imagine that the Indians could have had a reason to search Godfrey—presumably, for the Diamond—Clack declares they must have been “incomprehensibl[y]” irrational to do so.

Unlike with Godfrey, the Indians certainly had a reasonable basis for assuming Mr. Luker had something to do with the Diamond. This is the same story about which Cuff mailed a newspaper item to Betteredge, which means that Clack’s narrative has reached the point at which Betteredge’s ends. But given Clack’s reverence for Godfrey, the reader must decide how faithfully to believe her insistence that he was only at the bank by coincidence. Luckily, his meeting with the police confirms for Clack that Godfrey remains truly invested in her charity.

Much like Betteredge does (although more forcefully), Clack considers Rachel the wrong kind of woman because of her independent-mindedness and refusal to accommodate the gendered expectations of polite society—even though Clack does not take into consideration the profound trauma Rachel has just suffered and also certainly lacks “restraint” when she openly accuses Rachel of hiding something. Clack’s disdain for doctors evokes the emerging tension between science and religion in Victorian England—a conflict in which Collins seems to side firmly with science.