{"id":342,"date":"2017-04-07T20:55:07","date_gmt":"2017-04-07T20:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/?p=342"},"modified":"2020-08-31T20:37:57","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T20:37:57","slug":"dont-trust-betteredge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2017\/04\/07\/dont-trust-betteredge\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t Trust Betteredge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I cannot help but struggle with the narration of this novel. After reading Jane Eyre and the various post-colonialist critiques, I struggle with accepting and moreover trusting Betteredge\u2019s narration of the story. As Betteredge is the head male servant to the Verinders, his judgmental commentary of the Indian men sent to retrieve the moonstone is anything but just. As he is a white lower class male, his narration of the Indian men who must disguise themselves in lower class attire in their attempt to re-obtain the moonstone. All of this is backwards and flipped on its head, as Betteredge can only move upwards, and really has no authority to be speaking or commenting on the Indian men. Moreover, Betteredge\u2019s bias towards the <em>white<\/em> people he is surrounded by makes him an unreliable narrator. For him to claim the moonstone as the property of the white upper class, when it is a stolen piece of property from the Indian upper class screams of bias. With arguments like that of O\u2019Conner and Spivak, accepting the narration of Betteredge would be accepting the underlying racism. Whereas with <em>Jane Eyre<\/em> the criticism focuses on the language surrounding Bertha Mason, the imperialist leanings in <em>The Moonstone<\/em> are not solely in the language, but the overall attitude regarding the Indian culture that these characters choose to remain ignorant about. Thus, the loss of the moonstone remains almost like a work of karma, yet as it was again stolen perhaps it is more an indication of the greed and entitlement of white colonists that Collins is commenting on. Whether it is Colllins\u2019 ignorance which is the driving force behind Betteredge\u2019s bias, or instead a way of Collins to critique the outlook of 19<sup>th<\/sup> Century imperialist thinking remains to be seen. Neverthless, Betteredge\u2019s narration is biased, and accepting his word is accepting the racist undertones.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I cannot help but struggle with the narration of this novel. After reading Jane Eyre and the various post-colonialist critiques, I struggle with accepting and moreover trusting Betteredge\u2019s narration of the story. As Betteredge is the head male servant to the Verinders, his judgmental commentary of the Indian men sent to retrieve the moonstone is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/2017\/04\/07\/dont-trust-betteredge\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Don&#8217;t Trust Betteredge<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2837,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[138876,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2017","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","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\/2837"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/19thcennovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}