Here Lies the Muscular Christian Hero
Death of the Male Christian Hero and the Erasure Imperfect Women in The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins wrote a counter-culture detective story, first published in serial installments, when he penned The Moonstone in 1868. The timing of The Moonstone’s publication coincided with three phenomena in popular entertainment, two of which were related to the abundant availability of cheap newspapers (Gilmore 297-309). The first of these was the increasing popularity of puzzles of all varieties. The second was the emergence of “a new variety of sensation novel [that centers on] the gradual unraveling of some carefully prepared enigma” (qtd. in Gilmore 297). When he published The Moonstone, Collins had already been working on enigma stories for some time—he published The Woman in White in 1861. Critics panned the puzzle phenomenon and Collins’s writing at the time, commenting “we are no special admirers of the department of art to which [Collins] has devoted himself, any more than we are of double acrostics or anagrams, or any of the many kinds of puzzles on which it pleases some minds to exercise their ingenuity” (qtd. in Gilmore 297). The public however, disagreed with critics and the popularity of the puzzle genre and enigma novels increased over the next decade (Gilmore 297-309). Wilkie Collins took advantage of the popularity of both the puzzles and his writing to deliberately assault the third phenomenon in popular entertainment, the popularity of the muscular Christian hero—a hyper-masculine, handsome, Christian hero character.
The muscular Christian hero was a rapidly expanding character type at the time Collins wrote The Moonstone and one he wanted to counter. In her analysis of Collins’s work, Lara Karpenko recounts the “rapid diffusion of muscular Christianity” at the time and describes the popular depiction of the hero figures at the time as “muscular Christian men [that] represented a specific model of excessively athletic, emotionally stoic, and piously spiritual masculinity” (134). Collins sought to contradict the definition of the muscular Christian hero and to redefine masculinity with “a slew of unathletic men” that work to solve the mystery of the missing Moonstone (Karpenko 134). Collins revealed his intent to create shock by contradicting the popular model in his novel in correspondence both with Charles Dickens and with his own mother; he relished the idea that Dickens was as taken aback by the identity of the heroic figure as the villain as much as a typical Victorian reader would be (Karpenko 139). The success of the novel, lauded as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels,” by T.S. Eliot, confirms both that Collins succeeded in his efforts and that the audience was willing to accept the disruption of their expectations (qtd. in Farmer 10-11).
The Moonstone, at its core, is a simple tale of theft. The theft, however, defies norms because “the plot hinges on a single undetected crime committed on the grounds of a remote country-estate, undercutting the Victorian perception of crime as a distinctly urban phenomenon” (Farmer 15). Further, the theft is buried in a complex web that involves an allegedly cursed religious artifact from India, the diamond, that Colonel John Herncastle stole from a temple during a military campaign and subsequently brought to England. The diamond’s curse causes significant hardship and disenfranchisement to Herncastle in his life, but he doesn’t relinquish it until he bequeaths it to his niece, Rachel Verinder, as a birthday gift as what might be—it is never clearly articulated—a revenge gift; his sister, Lady Julia Verinder, snubbed his effort at reconciliation years before (Collins 85-87). The story is narrated by multiple voices and presented as first-hand accounts of their experiences and their understanding of events as they unfolded. The methodology to use witness testimonials narrated by various voices is the authors way to suck the reader in and to allow them to be part of the story as investigators themselves. Melissa Free posits that Collins, “in his effort to solicit the reader as an active interpreter, [he structures] the text as both archive and legal document, he also generates mystery, casting the reader as chief detective” (Free 342). In their role of chief detective, readers could be entertained by the narrative while also flexing their puzzle-solving muscles.
The characters that the novel revolves around are plentiful. The narrating voices are predominantly male, with only Ms. Clack, the hyper-religious niece to Lady Verinder, has opportunity to add her voice to the narrative. The essential male characters are Godfrey Ablewhite, Franklin Blake, Sergeant Cuff (the detective), Ezra Jennings (a doctor and opium addict), and Gabriel Betteredge, Lady Verinder’s house steward. The female characters include Rachel Verinder, her Mother Lady Julie Verinder, Ms. Drucilla Clack, and two women of the lower social orders: Rosanna Spears, a former convict that now serves as Lady Verinder’s housekeeper and Lucy Yolland, Rosanna’s friend and daughter to a fisherman that lives near the Verinder estate. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that while Collins deliberately inverts the images of the heroes and villains to challenge the dominance of the muscular Christian hero; however, other Victorian norms like the various forms of gender inequality and class division are quite in line with the standards of the day; in his effort to kill the muscular Christian hero, Collins erases female characters of lower social standing with physical abnormalities, killing one to complete the erasure.
In The Moonstone, the handsome, outwardly pious Godfrey Ablewhite is the veritable posterchild of the muscular Christian hero figure. However, he turns out not only to be a fraud, but to be the culprit behind the mysterious disappearance of the large, priceless diamond for which the novel is titled. Gabriel Betteredge, House Steward in the Service of Lady Verinder, and “picture of British domesticity” and faithful to his mistress, Lady Verinder to a fault, having served her for fifty years, and it is through his eyes that the readers get his first glimpses of most of the characters in the novel. (Lewis 168). He describes Godfrey, thus:
He stood over six feet high; he had a beautiful red and white colour; a smooth round face, shaved as bare as your hand; and a head of lovely long flaxen hair, falling negligently over the poll of his neck. … a barrister by profession; a ladies’ man by temperament; and a good Samaritan by choice. (Collins 110-11)
Betteredge’s description typifies the muscular Christian hero. He is tall, athletic, and attractive. He is also depicted as generally unconcerned with his physical appearance, as though it was inconsequential—a characteristic of the muscular Christian hero model—which is captured through the mention of his hair “falling negligently” as if vanity was not an issue. Betteredge continues:
Female benevolence and female destitution could do nothing without him. Maternal societies for confining poor women; Magdalen societies for rescuing poor women; strong-minded societies for putting poor women into poor men’s places … Wherever there was a table with a committee of ladies sitting round it in council, there was Mr. Godfrey at the bottom of the board, keeping the temper of the committee and leading the dear creatures along the thorny ways of business, had in hand. I do suppose this was the most accomplished philanthropist … that England ever produced. (Collins 111)
This comprehensive description of Godfrey Ablewhite sets the reader up to recognize him as the clear hero figure. He is handsome, pious, and philanthropic to almost super-heroic proportions, A Victorian Superman. It is therefore even more shocking when Sergeant Cuff, after discovery of Ablewhite’s body in the boarding house, sheds light on Godfrey’s secret identity:
Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite’s life had two sides to it … gentleman … speaker at charitable meetings … endowed with administrative abilities, which he placed at the disposal of various Benevolent societies, mostly of the female sort. This side kept hidden … the totally different character of man of pleasure with a villa … not taken in his own name, and with a lady in the villa, who was not taken in his own name, either. (Collins 525)
Sergeant Cuff goes on to describe Ablewhite’s theft of his ward’s inheritance through forgery and lays bare his completely duplicitous life. His outward persona, the Victorian Superman was, in fact, a sham. If Collins intended to slay the model representation of the muscular Christian hero, he certainly did it with the elevation of Ablewhite to such heights only to eviscerate the reader’s expectations of the character so completely. If Ablewhite had a headstone, it could read “here lies the muscular Christian hero,” so completely did Collins dismantle the model hero and the readers perceptions and expectations of popular fiction at the time.
Collins depicted the male characters that do the heavy lifting of solving the mystery quite differently. Sergeant Cuff, again described by Betteredge, is:
a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not an ounce of flesh on his pones in any part of him … all in black, with a white cravat … His face was sharp as a hatchet, and the skin of it was yellow and dry and withered as an autumn leaf. His eyes, of a steely grey. His walk was soft; his voice melancholy; his long lanky fingers were hooked like claws (Collins 155).
The other character that is essential to solving the mystery of the missing Moonstone—arguably, the most essential character to its unraveling, is Ezra Jennings and Franklin Blake describes his first view of him this way:
His complexion was of a gypsy darkness; his fleshless cheeks had fallen into deep hollows, over which the bone projected like a pent-house. His nose presented the fine shape and modelling so often found among the ancient people of the East, so seldom visible among the newer races of the West. His forehead rose high and straight from the brow. His marks and wrinkles were innumerable. From this strange face, eyes, stranger still, of the softest brown—eyes dreamy and mournful, and deeply sunk in their orbits—looked out at you … [and his hair] had lost its colour in the most startlingly and capricious manner. (Collins 390)
The combined descriptions of Sergeant Cuff and Ezra Jennings deliberately undermine the muscular Christian hero, and they arguably go a step further by casting the most essential minds in the story as the most unattractive characters. While Cuff does have some prestige as a detective for Scotland Yard with a sterling reputation, his appearance is deliberately in contrast to Betteredge’s, and the readers’, expectations. Cuff, unlike the other police officer, the striking figure of the incompetent Superintendent Seagrave, is old, decrepit, and almost beastlike, with claws and an almost supernatural ability to see through you— “[Cuff’s eyes] looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself” (Collins 155). Ezra Jennings, likewise, is depicted as decidedly unappealing in physical form, sickly and gaunt. The difference in his appearance because of his ethnic differences serves to further remove him from the ideal of the Victorian muscular Christian hero.
It is therefore even more important to recognize that these unappealing men, so different from the archetypical hero, repeatedly demonstrate the wit and intellect to solve the various puzzles that lead to the culprit that stole the diamond, Godfrey Ablewhite. Sergeant Cuff unravels the mystery step-by-step, and although he makes a mistake or two, he ultimately solves the puzzle and proves it in a sealed letter to Betteredge before the discovery of Godfrey’s body. Jennings, despite being an addict with a mysterious past—the details of which the reader never learns—has the intellect to decipher Doctor Candy’s incoherent babbling and identify that Franklin Blake had been drugged and the effects of that event led to the disappearance in the first place. Further, he conducts an experiment to prove his hypothesis. The outcome of Jennings’s experiment is the key that absolves Blake of responsibility by proving that the opium was responsible for his actions and that those actions were motivated by a desire to protect Rachel from the diamond’s curse. Thus, the combined efforts of the two most unattractive male characters, the most important parts of the mystery are exposed and the innocence and social standing of both Rachel Verinder and Franklin Blake are preserved. Through both characters, combined with the disgrace of his Victorian Superman, Collins upends convention and skewers the muscular Christian hero paradigm.
Franklin Blake, arguable the novel’s protagonist, serves as a facilitator for the conflict between the beautiful (but caricatured) and the ugly, yet effective, characters. Franklin is described as handsome; Rosanna Spears blushes at the sight of him and the reader can perceive that her initial reaction might be something akin to love at first sight (Collins 80). However, Blake is never really the center of the action. Instead, he facilitates the action. Betteredge describes him as someone of “of average reputation and capacities” when comparing him to Ablewhite and in doing so removes him from the competition for the muscular Christian hero role (Collins 111). Blake is described as worldly, but Collins never attributes him with any actions that are derived from his great travel experiences. He is handsome enough to be attractive to Rachel Verinder and to Rosanna Spears, but not enough to overshadow the looks and presence of Godfrey Ablewhite. He serves to organize narratives and to move the story along, and, if anything, becomes the fulcrum around which the other characters move. Franklin Blake piques our interest less for who he is or what he represents than for what happens to him and around him. If anything, Collins should be commended for creating a character that is just interesting enough to keep reading while not stealing the show from the characters that matter.
However, when it comes to the female characters in the text, Collins makes little or no effort to stray from convention. Lady Verinder is the picture of a noble, proud widow and head of her household. Rachel, her daughter, despite appearing complicit of the theft of the diamond is never openly challenged on the matter (by anyone other than her mother) and maintains her dignity and her status. Even the Ablewhite sisters, with “superabundant flesh and blood [and] bursting from head to foot with health and spirits [to the point] the legs of their horses trembled with carrying them” suffer no indignities other than being described as grossly obese (Collins 117). The servants and poor are offered no such mercies. Rosanna Spears and Limping Lucy Yolland are characterized from the beginning as without value.
If Franklin Blake is a necessary placeholder that the other male characters orbit, then most of the female characters are his equivalent—with two exceptions: Limping Lucy Yolland and Rosanna Spears. Lady Verinder is the picture of high society and her behavior throughout the novel paints her in a positive, yet flat, light. Rachel, although she is central to the story as the new owner of the diamond and is at one point accused being involved in the diamond’s disappearance, her character fills the role of wealthy young woman with little deviation. The only place where she deviates from expectations, which serves the mystery narrative, is in her unwillingness to reveal what she knows—and the apparent acceptance of all involved that she knows more than she is letting on, which might be the result of her privileged social status. She does appear to struggle with her burden, but “is ultimately acquitted…as we learn her strange behavior resulted from her having witnessed [Blake] remove the diamond from her room …tortured by her belief in his criminality, she kept her silence at the price of inviting suspicion. (Briefel 140). Rachel’s evidence was a first-hand, eye-witness account which she kept her silence about and is ultimately forgiven for. Contrast her sacrifice with that of Rosanna Spears, who commits suicide after being ignored and treated essentially as invisible after taking much greater pains to protect Franklin Blake.
It is important to note the difference in class between the female characters that are excused for their failings or behavior and those that are condemned. Rosanna and Lucy—which are despite their comparatively brief appearances far more interesting than the higher status women—are a house servant and a poor fisherman’s daughter, respectively. Collins casting them in lower class roles preserves the aesthetic importance of the Victorian class hierarchy. Ugly people are usually in some form of service while the upper class features very few, if any, people that are unattractive—if they have such a failing it is glossed over or excused. The aesthetic importance It’s notable that the ugly people are all in some form of service. The appearance of servants reflects on the household and they carry the burden of representing the household, but it remains necessary to distinguish servants from the served:
For the servant, health is about neatness, cleanliness, and respectability—without the danger of too much beauty … the servant’s body is very much tied to the domestic space. This body ideally should blend into the household and take no visible credit for its happy, orderly state. (Chamberlain 293-96)
Collins does not deviate from this model and does not offer any reason for the reader to see it differently in the way he upsets to paradigms for the male characters. Despite this, “Rosanna Spearman and Limping Lucy…upset the social order of the novel” to some extent (Tarr 647). Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that characters like Limping Lucy and Rosanna Spears are in Victorian novels and feature physical deformities and disabilities specifically to “generate shock, curiosity, and a sense of the uncanny” (qtd. in Tarr 647). The important difference to note between the unattractive male characters and the deformed female characters in the novel, then, is that the female characters are inserted as curiosities and novelties while the male characters are there to prove the author’s point; they’re his weapons and they get depth as their reward—Jennings gets a compelling and mysterious backstory and an elegy of sorts that makes him a very sympathetic character; Cuff gets a country house and a quirky love of roses; Betteredge gets Robinson Crusoe and a large part of the narrative. The class hierarchy and the gender imbalance impact Rosanna and Lucy to the greatest extent because they are not only left flat in any way that does not impact the story, but they also vanish after they’ve served their purpose and as the story moves along are not considered further; there is no elegy for Rosanna Spears.
Betteredge describes Rosanna as “wretched” from the beginning (Collins 77). She is introduced to the reader as crying near the Shivering Sands and retreated there after having fainted, something she apparently does frequently, earlier in the day (Collins 75-79). She is physically plain and unremarkable except for a deformity in her left shoulder that is often part of her description when she comes up in the narrative. The deformity and lack of beauty combined with her status as a servant renders her invisible. It also serves to make her an appealing target for being the culprit as her strange behavior and checkered past conspire against her and set up Victorian readers to expect her to be part of the theft by exploiting their biases. The reader’s interest in Rosanna is piqued form the early descriptions while she is at the Shivering Sands with Betteredge and when he reveals that she had been imprisoned for theft before Lady Verinder accepted her into her house as a servant—affirming the noble nature of the Lady while also reinforcing Rosanna as a character that has a history befitting her station as a servant and generally a person of the lower class. This information, the description of her interactions with the house staff, and her peculiar behavior sets Rosanna up in a way that fits the narrative of the text and of the milieu—Collins is betting on the assumptions his reader might make based on the popular depictions of people at the time. Rosanna’s actions are not clarified until after her death when Lucy delivers her letter to Blake, who at the time confirms that he was oblivious to her feelings and attempts to reach him. What is absent when it comes to Rosanna, is any real development of the character beyond the points that serve the plotline and create some additional mystery that would make her character more human and allow her to be something more than the female thief with the deformed shoulder. It would also demand something more than a passing comment on her suicide.
Limping Lucy, a fisherman’s daughter afflicted with a deformed foot, suffers no better fate. Every reference to her mentions either the foot or the crutch she uses to get around. Franklin Blake is so distracted by the crutch that his “attention was absorbed in following the girl’s crutch. Thump-thump…” (Collins 370). Lucy does get a moment where she challenges Blake and scolds him for his treatment of Rosanna Spears, whose letter he has not read at that point, but the moment is brief, and Lucy disappears. Lucy’s club foot is there to allow for a friendship and a kind of kinship between her character and Rosanna. Collins creates a scenario where the only person that would befriend someone with a physical deformity would be another person with a physical deformity. This is supported by the lack of companionship Rosanna finds in the other servants at the house. For Rosanna and Lucy to discover any form of companionship, they had to find one another, and they could only connect because they were both physically deformed.
The letter Rosanna writes to Franklin Blake, delivered to him by Lucy, is the one place where Rosanna Spears has a voice and describes the various events as she understood them and the actions she took to protect Franklin Blake from suspicion. It is also symbolic of the friendship that Rosanna and Lucy share—together, despite their low station and physical defects—they can confront Blake who is of higher station and fully able-bodied. It is, however, too late. Rosanna Spears is already dead, having committed suicide by diving into the Shivering Sand and drowning herself. It is remarkable that the letter scolds Franklin for his complete unawareness of her as a human being. She describes her invisibility to those around her, and that she has had to remove herself so completely that she has not just died, she has disappeared. There is no body to recover; her erasure is complete. Collins’s portrayal of Rosanna Spears echoes Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s comments that “the history of disabled people in the Western world is in part the history of being on display, of being visually conspicuous while being politically and socially erased” (qtd. in Mossman 487). Although Collins could be interpreted to have given larger voices to disable characters in the lower social classes, he effectively silences them in the end and destroys the idea that they may have had any agency at all.
The Moonstone is an immersive detective story with appealing characters and a pace that pulls the reader into the story and does not let go until the story is finished. Collins created a gripping narrative by luring readers in with the presentation of the novel as eye-witness accounts that allowed the reader to become part of the investigation. As he revealed clues through the voices of the novel’s characters, he exploited the popular tropes of the genre and the Victorian expectations and biases as he presented characters and their actions. His effort to excite the reader with the story and yet lull them into complacency was well orchestrated and effective. By the time the mystery begins to unfold, a reader would have been so invested in the characters and story that they would certainly hang on until the outcome was revealed. When Godfrey Ablewhite is unmasked as the culprit, Collins’s trap is complete. The muscular Christian hero is not only guilty, but he is quite dead. The female characters, however, all fit into tidy Victorian norms. They perform their class and gender roles without real defiance, and when Lucy and Rosanna briefly strike at Blake from their lower-class station, it does not last long; it is ineffectual for anything but to move the plot along by revealing a few more clues. Therefore, Collins’s very successful and entertaining detective novel is responsible for shattering the myth of the muscular Christian hero, while supporting, and reinforcing, the gender inequality and class divisions of the Victorian era.
Works Cited
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