{"id":1004,"date":"2022-11-15T20:25:06","date_gmt":"2022-11-15T20:25:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/?p=1004"},"modified":"2022-11-15T20:26:47","modified_gmt":"2022-11-15T20:26:47","slug":"fan-behavior-why-india-appears-so-often-in-victorian-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2022\/11\/15\/fan-behavior-why-india-appears-so-often-in-victorian-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Fan Behavior: Why India Appears so Often in Victorian Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something I found intriguing while reading <\/span>The Moonstone<\/span><\/i> is how similar it was to other detective works.\u00a0 Especially Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band,” a classic Sherlock Holmes story.\u00a0 One main similarity I noticed was that both somehow involved India.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Speckled Band,\u201d the stepfather of the story has a \u201cviolence of temper\u201d that is apparently \u201chereditary,\u201d although his stepdaughter believes it has \u201cbeen intensified by by his long residence in the tropics,\u201d those tropics being India (Doyle, 2).\u00a0 He also has \u201ca passion\u2026for Indian animals,\u201d (Doyle 3).\u00a0 In <\/span>The Moonstone<\/span><\/i>, the prologue introduces the moonstone itself by stating \u201cone of the wildest of these stories related to a Yellow Diamond\u2013a famous gem in the native annals of India,\u201d which establishes the involvement of India right off the bat (Collins, 11).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is interesting that a foreign country is so present in British literature, even for one under British rule.\u00a0 In addition, both mentions of India have some negative connotation.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Speckled Band,\u201d India has worsened the temper of the stepfather, and the end of the story reveals it is one of his Indian animals (a snake) that has acted as the murder weapon.\u00a0 In <\/span>The Moonstone<\/span><\/i>, the stone said to cause bad luck originates from India and is the cause of most of the suffering in the novel.\u00a0 Victorians clearly have a hostile and racist outlook on foreign countries, especially India, as seen by the portrayals of the country and what comes from it that become detrimental to the supposed stability and prosperity in Britain.\u00a0 At the same time, Victorians are fascinated by different cultures, and as their technology advances, so does their knowledge of nations outside of Britain, as well as their curiosity.\u00a0 So for all the racism and negative attention directed towards India in the detective story, Victorian authors and audiences cannot help but be entertained by their central inclusion in the plot.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something I found intriguing while reading The Moonstone is how similar it was to other detective works.\u00a0 Especially Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band,” a classic Sherlock Holmes story.\u00a0 One main similarity I noticed was that both somehow involved India.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Speckled Band,\u201d the stepfather of the story has a \u201cviolence of temper\u201d that … Continue reading Fan Behavior: Why India Appears so Often in Victorian Literature<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2022"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1004\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}