Chapter 3 - Listening to the Radiant Voices of Others

Summary

Diamonds and jewels – their brilliant refractions providing prototypes for intellectual elasticity and insight into connections between things and gender, colonialism, marriage for hire, and ecosystems – spring forth in Belinda and Les bijoux indiscrets to teach characters to become better interpreters. This chapter argues that in these novels gems become “mouths” that kinesthetically narrate and enact material histories: the labor and commerce that produced them, the deleterious enmeshment of women and objects, and women’s right to be human – that is, honest, rational, fragmented, stained, and radiant. Belinda’s allusion to the historic 48-carat Pigot links domestic larceny in matchmaking to colonial theft in India and Ireland. Markets collide as Belinda demonstrates how the lexicon of purity and perfection dominates the commercialization of courtship and of advisory treatises instructing the public how to buy authentic diamonds. In conclusion, the chapter analyzes how a diamond leads to Lady Delacour’s restoration by teaching her how to belong with the human–nonhuman network.

Préambule

Chapter 2 provided a new reading of Corinne as I identified ways the novel highlights how imperative it is for individuals to connect to the material world; such belonging with initiates possibilities for creating and maintaining more viable social circuits, of which freedom from gender constraints and cosmopolitanism’s greater openness provide examples. Staël’s novel, describing Romeo and Juliet, could in fact be illuminating its own fundamental conviction: Neither the play nor Corinne is “just one shade, just one sound”; its “colours” do “not make [its] style cold and artificial; it is the ray of light, divided up, reflected, and varied, that produces these colours, and one can always feel the light and fire from which they stem” (C, p. 123). As this chapter shows, such a prismatic effect captures how diamonds spring forth in Belinda to teach readers to become better interpreters, their radiance providing a prototype for developing intellectual elasticity and their facets refracting insight into the relationships things have with gender, politics, and ecosystems.¹ Having thus far discussed public objects – the Venus de’ Medici and Corinne’s Italian monuments – I now move to private things – diamonds such as the Pigot as well as those glittering stones that individuals more generally longed for. These diamonds, communicating kinetically, are “mouths” speaking discreet and indiscreet truths. For this reason, I begin with Diderot’s Les bijoux indiscrets (1748), a novel that dazzles as a particularly famous account of “jewel-mouths”² and one that opens a dialogue about listening to matter. Shuttling between French and British explorations of the nonhuman, I examine intersections between these two novels, both of which express a desire for belonging with, and I then turn to a translation of Belinda, which resists connections among humans and among their relations with things.³

In Les bijoux, Mangogul acquires a ring that, when directed toward women, makes their “jewels” – that is, their genitals – tell the truth about their erotic lives. As a philosophical work, it elevates the body and heals the ruptures between and among soul, physicality, and things, as when Mangogul asks: “Who knows what a jewel” – simultaneously a woman’s body and an ornament – “may have in its soul?” (IJ, p. 14). For Mangogul, one thing (a silver ring set with a stone) makes other things (“jewels”) mouth truths so that women cannot deceive men about their sexual indiscretions, though the text reveals the axiom that jewels speak because fearful women have been forbidden to be honest.⁴ These indiscreet voices precipitate something radical: candid relationships between lovers. For Odile Richard-Pauchet, “Mangogul is a modern Ulysses,”⁵ an idea that, combined with the novel’s conceit that a thing can talk, strengthens my thesis that discovering and interacting with things galvanizes an experimental journey into new zones of belonging with.⁶ In listening to matter and thus rendering it volatile, Les bijoux dizzies us with interlacings among human–nonhuman and thing–thing encounters.

For example, in one vignette, Diderot links bodies and things by amalgamating the genital-jewel with a real gem. Manille, an obsessive gambler, has lost “10,000 ducats” to Turcarès, a financier; to continue playing, she needs something valuable as her stake. She thinks first of her literal gemstones but dares not proffer them since her husband has recently “recovered” them (IJ, p. 39). Instead, she bids all she has left: her genital-jewel. What initially seems to be a series of oppositions – her husband takes, pawns, and redeems her pierreries rather than her bodily bijou, while she gambles her jewel away rather than her jewelry – instead becomes an aggregate of relations in which human and thing fold into each other. They do not collapse into one, however, as becomes clear when the Jewel (I now capitalize this, since she identifies herself as an individual) divulges her own feelings as well as the torments she and Manille share. The Jewel reveals that Manille’s lover Turcarès, vain about “possessing a titled jewel” – the phrase itself spills over from the human genitals to the nonhuman label – “offered to finance Madame’s gaming, on the condition that I serve his pleasures. Soon it was a deal. But since [Manille] played high and the financier’s resources were not endless, we soon came to the bottom of his coffers …, and God knows how many times I shall be wagered” (IJ, pp. 39, 40). Bodies, jewels, gemstones, and money all implicate each other in this poignant gathering as the Jewel differentiates herself as an “I” with intelligent hopes and emotional desires, and even – though perhaps just an idiom – a call to God.

Because the Jewel has her own desires and woe, I diverge from Thomas Kavanagh’s suggestion that “[t]he words of the hidden speaker float from under a dress and reach the ears of their scandalized audience as messages purified of all traces of that natural body they are meant to represent.”⁷ I argue instead that the Jewel articulates how she acutely feels her physical labor. Her lament (“God knows how many times I shall be wagered”) opens up a rich concert of possibilities. Thus, while Anthony Wall proposes that what we see in Les bijoux indiscrets “are the products of … rape” that erupt from the “desire” of “a capricious and bored sultan,” one who “invades … the woman’s body through coercion, making bodies speak what no one, except perhaps Mangogul, really wants to hear”⁸ – conversely, I claim that in including manifold voices, Diderot reveals precisely what does need to be heard: that women whose physicality has been silenced must render their virtue separate from their bodies and hearts. Here, then, Diderot strives to overcome such dualism and to acknowledge that matter – one’s body – could help make truthfulness between humans possible.⁹ While we see inhumanity practiced in this novel (does Mangogul have the right to listen to a woman’s jewel without her permission?), the reconciliation between human and nonhuman does arise when the former listens to the latter and works in conjunction to explore the binaries that lead to such misery in marriage. As Anne Deneys-Tunney illuminates, Les bijoux “is in fact an investigation of sex that stages a radical critique of metaphysics, or more specifically, a radical critique of the dualism of soul and body.”¹⁰ We see this when, Mirzoza, the king’s “favorite,” contends that “the affectionate woman[’s] … soul is usually in her heart, but sometimes also in her jewel” (IJ, p. 126).¹¹ In other words, the soul inhabits a body both sexual and spiritual, and both virtuous and affectionate.

In breaking down binaries between human and nonhuman, Les bijoux, as Corinne does, foretells the possibility of a theory of things that involves belonging with: We hear Mangogul’s happy thought “that jewels deign to speak our language and contribute to the conversation. Society can only benefit tremendously from this duplication of faculties. Possibly we men, in turn, shall one day speak from somewhere other than the mouth” (IJ, p. 24). I suggest here that Les bijoux anticipates Vicki Kirby’s question that “if nature is literate, then the question ‘What is Language’ – or more scandalously – ‘Who Reads?’ – fractures the Cartesian Subject to its very foundation.”¹² Diderot thus argues for connections among the body, soul, and intellect and for links between the nonhuman and the human, in his case, the ring and a woman’s biological “jewel.” Analogously, some theories of things today try to fulfil Mangogul’s prophecy, one wherein humans will speak from more than just one single, ubiquitously noisy Anthropocene “bouche.” The Sultan’s philosophers wonder why, “[i]f it is by the grace of Brahma … to double [women’s] organs of speech, … they were unaware or neglectful of so precious a natural gift for so long a time”; continuing to ponder, they ask “[w]hat mechanism causes one mouth perforce to shut while the other speaks?” (IJ, p. 31). Indeed, why have humans, who also have been given another mouth – a nonhuman one – to listen to, been “unaware or neglectful” of this exquisite endowment? What “mechanism” makes humans stop listening?

These philosophers’ comments and questions constitute subjects I address in this chapter on Belinda and diamonds: How might we more happily belong with our world by recognizing multiple “mouths” – women’s, the body’s, and the nonhuman’s – and by listening to these? This “indiscreet” – because radically revealing – triple-talk potentiates connections. While Melanie Holcomb points out that “[a]dorning oneself competes with language and the creation of tools as markers of humanity,”¹³ literature confirms how diamonds, rather than competing with language, have a voice that reveals information about the nonhuman and about women’s place in culture, a voice that specifically broadcasts colonial and domestic interlacings.¹⁴ Diamonds cut, polished, and worn on the body become, as it were, “indiscreet,” communicating with those who wear and those who view them. Many studies have demonstrated how jewelry expands and intensifies the human body, becoming, as it were, another mouth that speaks. Certainly, during the long eighteenth century, women’s relationship to jewelry was characterized in multifaceted and overlapping ways. This bears out Marcia Pointon’s understanding that jewels offer a “historically valuable body of evidence in cultural history.”¹⁵ In this chapter, I examine the ethical implications that arise when the diamond and marriage markets enter into concentrated relationships with candor, authenticity, status, property rights, and gender fashions.

In my focus on Belinda, it is worth noting that scholars have not scrutinized the links I find in the novel among diamonds, women, and colonialism.¹⁶ Further, while many critics have parsed these interconnections in Victorian literature, no one mentions Belinda as an important precursor of this conversation. Dwelling on the gems lodged between and exceeding the book’s covers, Belinda germinates open-minded relationships that arise from the diamond’s paradoxical qualities – adamantine yet capable of shattering light; foreign yet domestic; natural yet artfully transformed; supposedly inanimate yet conducting heat. Most specifically, this gem dynamically inspires varying interpretative possibilities, since incandescence and prismatic variegation characterize the diamond as well as offering a model for the openness epitomizing belonging with. Because these highly refractive stones illuminate and transform surfaces, they afford an apt correlative for creative thinking itself.¹⁷ In other words, like the Venus de’ Medici and Italy’s monuments, this lightsome mineral moves because it transforms itself and the things around it. I will be listening in this chapter to polyphonic interactions that offer mobile, imaginative ways of being and understanding as I explore the following: “indiscreet” connections and collisions in which gender performance in courtship defies established rules; mercantile corruption, affecting both diamonds and brides, generated from within England, rather than from that stemming from abroad; and diamond ownership that is not merely considered immoral.¹⁸ Taken together, things in Belinda – diamonds and treatises written about them – tangle up the human and the nonhuman, integrating material and intellectual knowledge.

3.1 The Currency of Diamond-Brides

Though not going as far as John Ruskin did in linking girls to crystals that, like “a lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, [are] arranged by atomic forces,”¹⁹ Romantic-era writers still found inextricable connections between women and diamonds. It was common to use the stone to indicate artlessness and translucence. In a move resembling that in Les bijoux, wherein a “jewel” reveals whether women are limpid and “pure,” these same qualities became a goal doubly for purchasers of human and nonhuman dazzlers. Second, a morality evidently present in both women and diamonds suggests another reason for rendering them commensurate. Charles William King (1867) articulated long-held claims that both the ancients and the moderns have “ever declared that virtues do subsist in stones”: the Pythagoreans, he continues, believed “that virtues subsist in all things, and proceed from a soul”; further, exchanging energy with humans when they are in proximity, stones can “impress their peculiar virtues upon the substance of the man.”²⁰ Third, diamonds’ enduring materiality suggests permanence, their origins in the earth’s secret recesses promising intriguing mystery, and their prismatic beauty intimating light and depth, all qualities felicitous for companionship with the human. On the other hand, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century educational treatises teaching potential buyers about these stones address the pervasive fear that a diamond might not be a diamond, but a counterfeit – simply “paste” (George Frédéric Stras’s eighteenth-century invention)²¹ – or that sellers trick the public by cutting gems badly and inflating their prices. If one substitutes bride for diamond, as was consistently done, this becomes a description well befitting wives-to-be and the marriage market in which they momentarily glitter. This last connection is paramount in Belinda, which explores fraudulent practices in both the diamond and marriage markets. I show here how the novel capitalizes on the contiguity between these kinds of merchandise to expose how both stones and young women are similarly assessed and appraised, since cultural touchstones often equated the (good) female with transparency and thus innocence. In doing so, the novel amplifies how the diamond trade vernacular has infiltrated that of the marriage bazaar (and vice versa), wherein both stones and bodies, talisman-like, supposedly divulge a woman’s “virtue” while simultaneously disclosing which diamond-brides constitute a “safe” – that is, profitable – unit of currency.²²

Diamonds’ growing popularity in eighteenth-century British novels and poems rendered them the thing to adorn those other things: women on the marriage market. Indian, Brazilian, and African stones were conveyed to Western Europe, becoming more desirable, more profitable, and more symbolically and culturally charged than any other prized jewel has been since. They were especially present in Britain’s capital given that crafting, marketing, and wearing these gems was inextricably mixed with London’s economy. As Gedalia Yogev explains, the city was at the center of the diamond trade, having become a “great mart for diamonds and other precious stones and jewels, from whence most foreign countries are supplied,” partly because Jewish diamond merchants had immigrated from Europe to London, and partly because an Act of Parliament had, in 1732, “abolished customs duties on diamonds”; thus, London had “a virtual monopoly” on importing uncut diamonds from India, with the East India Company controlling sales.²³

As this stone became especially big business from the mid eighteenth century on, treatises were written purporting to show how to ascertain a diamond’s authenticity and value. For example, the third edition of David Jeffries’s best seller, A Treatise on Diamonds and Pearls, appeared in 1800, the same year that Edgeworth was writing Belinda. In this Treatise, Jeffries says that the finest diamonds will be “free from stains, fouls, spots, specks, flaws, and cross veins”; these “will carry the highest lustre of any whatever, and will be esteemed the most perfect”; one strives to find, he says, diamonds with “the greatest purity and perfection of their complexion, which … must be like a drop of the clearest rock water.”²⁴ Literature borrows such images, as when Alphonse de Lamartine’s Raphaël describes his lover’s letters as “fire and purity combined, like light and transparency in a diamond.”²⁵ Even Percy Shelley shows he was familiar with the patois of diamond-bride assessment, writing to James Hogg in May 1811 that his soon-to-be wife, Harriet Westbrook, was “more noble, yet not so cultivated as [her] elder [sister]—a larger diamond, yet not so highly polished.”²⁶ Here the jewel marks “naturalness” as more valuable than enhancement, and though Shelley goes on to disparage such comparisons – “I confess that I cannot mark female excellence, or its degrees, by a print of the foot, a waving of vesture, etc., as you can” – it is fitting to note Jeffries’s warnings about the ways large diamonds fracture when not correctly “manufactured” as prophesying Harriet’s fragility, or rather of the failure to “manufacture” her properly.

Treatises, written to show how to ascertain a diamond’s authenticity and value, stake their claims using what we could call “bride” language, as they siphon from gender-talk such trademark concepts of purity and perfection. For example, The Discovery of the Vital Principle, or Physiology of Man (1838) genders diamonds while simultaneously emphasizing the gem’s illuminating life force, construing the best stone as one that is “perfectly crystalline, resembling a drop of clear spring-water, in the middle of which you will perceive a strong light, playing with a great deal of spirit.”²⁷ The author, who goes on to trace the diamond’s genesis in the earth, emphasizes its motility, its “tender nature,” and its “tender matter,” as he draws on the analogy of human fertilization and growth in the womb:

Concerning the fouls and other imperfections that take from the value of the diamond, it is said, that all diaphanous stones are originally fluids and spirituous distillations, falling into proper cells of the earth, where they lie until they are ripened, and receive the hardness we generally find them of. … While this petrific juice, or the matter which grows in the stone, is in its original tender nature, it is liable to all the accidents we find in it, and by which it is so often damaged: for, if some little particle of sand or earth fall into the tender matter, it is locked up in it, and becomes a foul black spot; and, as this is bigger or less, so it diminishes the value of the stone.²⁸

The language here underscores the spillover between the nonhuman and human as it articulates a double sensation of stone and embryo. We hear the fluid softly drop into a home gendered as a womb and feel the volatile matter to which this “tender matter” is revealed. Reminding readers poetically of the stone’s origins in nature, of its life outside of consumption, it then curtly returns us to “value,” rendering “foul” contamination an economic concern. And though neither The … Vital Principle nor Jeffries’s Treatise are narratives like Diderot’s Les bijoux, I want to point out that all three of these texts listen to things which divulge truths about themselves since the “jewels” recount their stories and the diamonds reveal how they ripen during their budding growth.

Connections between the language of women and purity and the diamond lexicon of spotlessness subtly make their way into Belinda, which, like Les bijoux, motions toward multiple “mouths” that speak: for example, Hervey pronounces Virginia St. Pierre’s heart as “perfectly pure,” and Lady Delacour uses the phrase “immaculate purity” to portray Belinda and styles Vincent, Belinda’s suitor, as having a “soul in which neither spot nor blemish can be found” (B, pp. 367, 182, 277). These allusions are roguishly problematical, however, given that Virginia’s heart is neither pure nor transparent (a point I will return to in Chapter 4), that Lady Delacour is ironic in portraying Belinda, and that when praising Vincent her hyperbole traduces him since she prefers Hervey as a husband for her friend. The novel, thus, refuses to reproduce as a standard for women the power relations diamond descriptions enforce between purity and value: In the diamond trade only those which have escaped “blemish” can be classified as valuable and worthy, while the blots on Belinda’s characters emit tension and ultimately deliver happiness in the novel, an argument I developed in Chapter 1, where I emphasized that Belinda does not endorse the conventional associations related to women’s stainless perfection, but instead scrutinizes such unrealizable gender expectations.

While engaging in such scrutiny, Belinda aptly draws on the technical vocabulary associated with the diamond trade so as to mouth “indiscreet” knowledge of aristocratic women. She critiques their collapse into objects for sale, as when she characterizes the “overdressed” Lady Newland “entangled in her bale of gold muslin, … conscious of her bulse of diamonds” (B, p. 169). Lady Delacour’s nice play on words arises from having listened to and understood the language of export from India or Brazil to Europe: these gemstones are sent in “bulces, which means parcels of diamonds neatly tied up in muslins.”²⁹ She also links these two markets when she jokes that the “two lady R’s stic[k] close to one another; their father pushing them on together, like two decanters in a bottle-coaster—with such magnificent diamond labels round their necks!” (B, p. 74). Further, when she refers to heiresses as “lozenge[s] … of sovereign use” who heal the “consumptions” of aristocratic males who have gambled away their inheritances (B, p. 36), her wit highlights the word’s double meaning, since she refers as well to the French “en losange,” which means both a lozenge and a diamond’s shape. Belinda repeats the word “lozenge” again, this time in relationship to slavery. Marriott buys hempseed for the bullfinch, only to discover that the food is “wrapped” in “a printed handbill” which she almost discards, thinking it is “some of those advertisements for lozenges or razor-straps, that meet one wherever one goes; but miss Delacour picked it up, and found it was a kind of hue and cry after a stolen or strayed bullfinch” (B, p. 326). This evokes Rochfort’s earlier description: “Belinda Portman, and her accomplishments, I’ll swear, were as well advertised as Packwood’s razor strops” (B, p. 25).³⁰ Thus, by aligning the “razor strops” – used to whip the enslaved – and lozenges, née diamonds, used to ally women to rich men, the novel links the exploitative economies of the slave trade, the marriage market, and the labor exacted from those working in diamond mines and on plantations.³¹

What rights might a diamond and a bride have, especially when treated duplicitously? In Les bijoux a gemstone (un chaton) unmasks infidelity; likewise, both Edgeworth and these treatises address the ways diamond and bride manufacturing both traffic in deceit, but also how they can expose violation of human and nonhuman rights. In doing so, they link consumption and marriage to respect and care for the thing itself, though in the diamond business, such nurturing is always held in strain with economic gain. Jeffries discloses the scams inherent in production and merchandizing by coiling together human and nonhuman beings – buyers, traders, and diamonds – to show how fraud injures all the bodies concerned. Like Mangogul’s ring, A Treatise on Diamonds and Pearls tells truths hitherto secreted from view: it

contains rational and plain rules for estimating the values of diamonds and pearls under all circumstances, and for manufacturing diamonds to the greatest perfection: both of which have hitherto been but very imperfectly understood. From hence, all property of this kind has been exposed to the greatest injury, by being subject to a capricious and indeterminate valuation; and the superlative beauty of diamonds has been much debased…. [This is] a circumstance of no small concern, inasmuch as their worth has hitherto been rated by fancy and caprice, which has frequently proved very injurious even to traders in them, as well as to others who have brought them for their use. … [A large stone, badly cut, will create] defects … to the still greater prejudice of the stone and therefore it will be purchasing deformity at the price of beauty.³²

Injuring a diamond, he implies, desecrates its right to “be” itself: Has it, for example, been well manufactured – is it cut well? And what is its value relative to the whole versus the size when cut? In addressing the human and nonhuman as living, vulnerable beings, subject to mistreatment and even to prejudice, he rethinks alleged binaries between bodies and things, suggesting that what is best for the diamond will also be best for the purchaser. A Treatise on Diamonds and Precious Stones also enlightens readers about the diamond racket, describing how “[w]hite topazes, and rock crystal, have been exposed for sale as diamonds, and glass has also been made into peculiar forms, to resemble the rough gem.”³³ Jeffries’s sense of these “peculiar forms” conjures up misused human, as well as nonhuman bodies. Belinda’s critique of “delicacy” in women as a moral state (B, p. 229) anticipates Mawe’s vocabulary when he speaks of “splitting” diamonds as “delicate” work and of merchants engaging in the “delicate method … of offering polished diamonds for sale.”³⁴ The novel clinches the link between these when Lady Delacour describes Hervey as a “fair appraiser of delicate distresses” (B, p. 83). As Belinda makes clear, marriage matchmakers (like stone cutters and sellers) do indeed enter into “delicate” labor.

Rights for the “diamond-bride” resound when treatises present “rational and plain rules for estimating the [economic] values of diamonds,”³⁵ and Edgeworth explores what constitutes a “rational” plan for estimating the quality of a future partner’s moral character. When a woman’s value is artificially inflated, the marriage market practices a parallel sort of hoax that Jeffries identifies: While diamonds were cut to emphasize their weight and increase their price, brides were engineered to amplify their charms, with both entities suffering the loss of their integrity. Though Hervey acknowledges Belinda’s diamond-like allure – “there’s a kind of electricity about that girl” – he suspects her of “artifice in every word, look and motion”; he lives “with [the] increasing dread of being taken in to marry a niece of ‘the catch-match-maker,’ the name by which Mrs. Stanhope was known among the men of his acquaintance”; suggesting a parallel between matchmaking and diamond swindling, Hervey explains that: “Young ladies who have the misfortune to be conducted by these artful dames, are always supposed to be partners in all the speculations, though their names may not appear in the firm of the house” (B, pp. 24, 15; emphases original). Diamonds and brides, however, appear more often as dupes of these maneuvers rather than “partners.” From this perspective, they resemble the women in Les bijoux, who, unhappily married and unsatisfied, having been forced to live a lie, become the jewel’s truth-telling victims.

Ann Bermingham illustrates that eighteenth-century “[f]emininity is constructed … within a particular relation to high art. Whereas classical art – in the form of the statue – deals in essences, the art of accomplishments, like the art of femininity, deals in appearances. Like femininity it demands to be read as a surface of socially signifying signs: harp; dress; hair-style; deportment.”³⁶ To her list I would add diamonds. While Chapter 1 discussed how femininity is constructed in relation to statuary, here, six of Mrs. Stanhope’s nieces have been “read” by their future husbands as “surfaces” and have themselves been subjected to deceptive plots. When reckless of long-term happiness, Mrs. Stanhope sets up one young woman as a “musical girl” and marries her to a music connoisseur, though she “has no more ear than a post” (B, p. 24), her manipulations recall how the diamond business (like the marriage market) can produce a stone “of an ill form, … lifeless and dull.”³⁷ Another of Mrs. Stanhope’s victims, the newly married Mrs. Tollemache, had nothing, according to a potential suitor, “but a pair of good eyes. Her aunt, to be sure, taught her the use of them early enough. … However they are going to part now, I hear—Tollemache was tired of her, before the honey-moon was over” (B, p. 24). Misused and disregarded, she resembles diamonds “exposed to the greatest injury, by being subject to a capricious and indeterminate valuation.”³⁸ I glean from this that Edgeworth – alongside some of these treatises, which of course teach readers to be financially self-interested – sees the larger implications of abusing both the nonhuman and human, and that in the end all will suffer.

Metonymically, then, Belinda relies on the substitution between brides and diamonds since the novel aims to differentiate two ways of choosing a husband or wife: an honest courtship versus one based on false appraisals that deny the rights of both parties. As exploitative as the two markets for these “goods” are and as strongly as Edgeworth intertwines them for her own critique, Belinda ultimately contradicts the notion that “rational and plain rules,” such as those Jeffries’s Treatise advocates, work when the commodities being assessed are women. This is not to make a claim for superiority held by one or the other, but to signpost how these guides, not unlike conduct books or sentimental novels, promise a mastery over rather than a belonging with the thing – whether diamond or wife. Thus, what appears “rational and plain” easily backfires since dominance over any object eludes “buyers” in one way or another. Further, exercising authority over stones or brides can make both diamond and marriage merchants forget that human connections with things require reciprocity, or, to use Nancy’s term, “l’entrecroisment” (BSP, p. 5). Belinda crisscrosses the manufacture and trafficking of diamonds and brides so as to uncover the “indiscreet” truth that such fraudulent dealings wound all parties in this nexus of mineral, laborer, purchaser, bride, and groom.

Identifying diamond and bride sales as contiguous in their embodiment of or rejection of rights, Belinda entangles domestic and colonial immorality, but not by finding venality an “import.”³⁹ As Tim Fulford explains, Britons judged it reassuring to believe that “‘infections’ of moral and political corruption were [not] endemic to the British character,” but were threats “from without.”⁴⁰ Belinda indeed repudiates that such contamination stems “from without” or from “abroad.”⁴¹ Specifically linking contours between diamonds and wives and disputing that purity always equals value, the novel takes on another anxiety: that “[d]iamonds were a tainted material artifact from India, … markers of new wealth, signs that becoming an imperial power was reshaping Britain. They were not to be touched by good Britons.”⁴² Instead, such human–nonhuman separations taint life locally and afar. In Section 3.2, I show how Belinda reveals collusion between home and abroad as she explores the role of one particular diamond – the Pigot – in the political and economic arena of Britain, India, and Ireland.

3.2 “Conflict” Diamonds and Colonial Domesticity in Belinda

Belinda intensely mines the diamond’s refractory powers when it alludes to the Pigot diamond, a stone named after its owner, George Pigot, who received it as a bribe while serving for the East India Company. This diamond “bouche” tells a dense, almost mythic narrative which interweaves bribery and corruption on foreign and home soil, further “enlarging” the myriad implications of this 48-carat giant.⁴³ Sean Silver contends that cosmetics “only work as cosmetics by forgetting the global empire to which they are attached;⁴⁴ in contrast, I argue that the Pigot only works as a diamond by remembering that global empire since it functions as a conduit for linking personal profiteering with what was being done on the colonial stage and underscores the collapse between foreign and domestic pursuits.

Edgeworth’s novel mentions the Pigot once in a scene that forges a subtle, but powerful economic connection between women, colonialism, and diamonds.⁴⁵ The reference occurs when Lord Delacour, innocently praising the innocent ingénue Belinda to his daughter, Helena, says, “[t]he more you know of miss Portman, the more you will like her, child—at least, I have found it so.” This compliment unwittingly fires his wife’s paranoia that the young woman connives to enthrall him, Helena, and his title. Lady Delacour replies, attempting to let Belinda know she is in on the seduction game the younger woman allegedly plays:

“Clarence Hervey would, I am sure, have given the Pigot diamond, if it were in his gift, for such a smile as you bestowed on lord Delacour just now” …. For an instant Belinda was struck with the tone of pique and reproach, in which her ladyship spoke. “Nay, my dear! I did not mean to make you blush so piteously,” pursued her ladyship, “I really did not think it a blushing matter—but you know best.”

(B, p. 188; emphasis added)⁴⁶

As if they are things in a smash-up, the two women collide: Miss Portman’s physical reaction – her smile – wounds Lady Delacour, who accordingly strikes back with words that cause a somatic shock, making Belinda blush. The impact arises when Lady Delacour links the marriage and diamond markets, as she assumes that the younger woman considers herself a “brilliant” available for marital purchase, ready to deceive, if that is necessary, to secure her goal. As I show in Section 3.2.1, the Pigot diamond causes even more rumbling tremors in Belinda: Beyond the material dynamism of this thing–human exchange, the parallels between this diamond’s history and the novel’s narrative resound, as Lady Delacour’s above speech comes to embody an entire historical event and to reembody the thing (the Pigot) to which it alludes. This thing, like Diderot’s bijou, tells its own indiscreet story.

Scholars have ignored Belinda’s allusion to the Pigot,⁴⁷ but I claim that, though mentioned only once, the diamond plays a central role by sounding out three ideas it helps the work explore: the East India Company’s imperialism and its impact on British political and domestic life; gambling as inextricably linked to colonial pursuits; and the takeover of Ireland, an interventionist act, euphemistically called a “Union.” I will analyze these three throughout the rest of this section, beginning with the history of the stone’s owner, Pigot.

3.2.1 Embodying, Smashing, and Excising Colonial Power

George Pigot happily served as Governor of Madras from 1755 to 1763, only to experience a fatal end during his second term from 1775 to 1777 when the East India Company (EIC)’s change in policy toward Indian rulers ensnared and penalized him.⁴⁸ During his first stint at Fort St. George, Pigot, obeying Company policy, recognized the nawab, Muhammad Ali Khan, as the sovereign and possessor of economic and military power. Perhaps his support was what led the nawab to give Pigot the eponymous diamond. After 1763, Pigot left India opulently wealthy, taking up residence in Ireland; however, during his recess from office, a mutually dependent and negative relationship between this nawab and the EIC materialized. Though recognized as the self-determining potentate, Muhammad Ali Khan was unable to protect his holdings, so he relied on the EIC to do so, but at a high cost, since maintenance for these troops came from his revenues. To pay, he took out loans of as much as £750,000 from EIC employees at extortionate interest rates. Also rendering this alliance more tumultuous were the nawab’s continued requests for EIC support to attack Tanjore and wrest the territory from its raja, which they did in 1773.⁴⁹ At this point, the nawab was levying power not only in India, but in England. As Nicholas Dirks explains, “between 1763 and 1792, at least a dozen Englishmen actually sat in Parliament with seats bought by Nawabi money” and Pigot, himself, now having “exhausted” the fortune he had brought to Ireland, was still awaiting a “promised pension” from the nawab.⁵⁰

There was reason, thus, to subjugate this increasingly aggravating figure, and in 1775, Pigot, now a baron and foremost among those persuading the EIC directors not only that “the nawab had to be restrained but also that Tanjore had been badly treated,”⁵¹ was ordered from Ireland back to Madras to clean up the mess. Reinstated as governor, he restored the raja of Tanjore’s full authority. Pigot inevitably met with opposition from the nawab and, not surprisingly, from his own colleagues at Fort St. George, since his actions endangered these EIC employees’ ability to get a return on the money they had lent to Muhammad Ali Khan. However, Pigot had to stand almost alone in this negotiation since, by 1776, “almost every European in Madras was involved in some way in [the nawab’s] debts.”⁵² The British council in India mutinied against and arrested Pigot, who died imprisoned in 1777. To atone, Parliament posthumously exonerated him and promised recompense to Pigot’s heirs via the diamond.

These events concerning Pigot occurred in the 1760s and 1770s; nevertheless, the EIC’s role continued to inflame feelings in both Britain and India, especially with the parliamentary debate in progress concerning whether the Pigot diamond lottery – whose proceeds would financially compensate his heirs – should be held. This debate, which I examine in Section 3.2.2, reanimated public memory and imagination in 1800, just as Edgeworth was writing Belinda. When the Annual Register reported on Pigot’s story, they expressed a bias against the nawab of Arcot, describing him as having, “through the protection and alliance of the East-India company, grown to very great power, and … to an uncontrouled influence, not only over the natives, but by various management, over the British settlements also.”⁵³ They took the higher ground by favoring the displaced raja, though, as we have seen with Pigot’s championing of him, hypocrisy inflected such a morally superior stance.

When the Pigot opens its mouth to speak about Belinda, we hear that it, like all things, has manifold and sometimes contradictory meanings, as the diamond’s excess implications overflow, offering prismatic interpretive avenues for exploring belonging with. I propose, then, several ways – all “indiscreet” – that the Pigot’s history and Belinda’s inclusion of the diamond ferry meanings between them, exposing how dishonesty abroad disturbs lives at home, and vice versa. As I will show, these interpretations sometimes differ, but are all viable. Returning to Lady Delacour’s criticism of Belinda (Section 3.2), it seems that she sees her protégée as resembling the nawab, who “grow[s] to a very great power” not only over the EIC, but also local native populations – that is, in her case, Helena and Lord Delacour. She associates the Pigot with Belinda’s alleged ambitions, and her evident knowledge of the diamond’s history further opens up the possibility that Belinda, in living with Lady Delacour and purportedly helping her, also comes to embody Pigot and his actions – first as the British colonizer who enters a territory initially pledging fealty to one ruler (Lady Delacour, herself, and correlatively the nawab), and then, second, switching allegiance to the raja/Lord Delacour so as to extract greater prizes from this new “friend.” I emphasize that because the thing’s excess overflows, I am not creating a one-to-one allegorical “match-up.” Instead, this historical and fictional exchange between human and nonhuman reveals the wide-ranging concern that a perverse balance of power based on bribery, one leading to instability, reverberates back and forth between the domestic and the colonial fronts.

When we move toward the Pigot, encouraging it to belong with its history, prismatic combinations between fictional and historical characters radiate. As Belinda varyingly embodies the Pigot diamond, Pigot himself, and the nawab, so does Lady Delacour see herself as Pigot, himself, post mutiny: Belinda thus now performs the role his rebelling council did when, power-hungry to accrue and maintain capital through allegiance to the nawab, they imprison Pigot, an act leading to his death. Disclaiming their responsibility, they mouth Pigot’s actions as “arbitrary,” “unconstitutional,” and “violent and illegal.”

In the name of his Majesty, and the English nation, from whom are derived the authorities and powers of the Honourable East India Company, our constituents, We, the subscribing members of their government of Fort St. George and its dependencies, composing a majority of the members of the said government, and therefore by law, and the express orders of the Company, being virtually the government, issue the following Proclamation.⁵⁴

The council, believing they had the right to replace and imprison Pigot, employ here powerful legal justification to rationalize their actions. And though lawfully permissible, identifying the Company as “being virtually the government” reinforces it as an abstraction that dislocates them and it from any consequences to the human–nonhuman nexus outside their own financial maneuverings. Lady Delacour believes that Belinda, too, has formed a “virtual” government to produce her own profits, a move that will, allegedly, eventuate in the former’s exile and death and the husband’s re-formed alliance in remarriage.

In addition to this single allusion to the eponymous stone, the novel also introduces a diamond coronet; when interpretively connected, these gems brandish truths about toxic and intersecting organisms – enslavement, the colonial system, the diamond trade, and the marriage market – where bribery, deception, and profit dominate. Struck down by these infections, all players are compromised and all experience, in varying degrees, collateral violence. Lady Delacour renders this relational entity tangible when she accuses Belinda of wanting to marry Lord Delacour (thereby receiving a coronet) and of believing that she “stands between” the ingenue and her machinations. Lady Delacour sees herself in a situation that once again refracts polychromatically from the EIC and George Pigot’s intrigues, for now a dense and volatile analogy emerges between her and the raja of Tanjore, with whom the British newspapers sided, contending that he “defended his capital bravely; but being subdued after a sharp siege, the unhappy Prince was stripped, without remorse or pity, of every thing but life.”⁵⁵ Feeling besieged and betrayed, she exclaims:

“The poor mad wife would still be in your way, would yet stand between you and the fond object of your secret soul—a coronet!” As she pronounced the word “coronet,” she pointed to a coronet set in diamonds on her watch-case, which lay on the table. Then suddenly seizing the watch, she dashed it upon the marble hearth with all her force, “Vile bauble!” cried she, “must I lose my only friend for such a thing as you? Oh, Belinda! Do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?”

(B, pp. 206–207)

Like that “unhappy Prince,” she feels she will be “stripped, without remorse or pity, of every thing.” Rendering human and nonhuman contiguous, she attacks this bijou indiscret since it allegedly reveals Belinda’s indiscreet betrayal, one which strips her of friendship – belonging with – for supremacy and possession. Smashing the coronet constitutes a violent encounter among characters and things, one that explores the excess radiating outward when the diamond and marriage markets are seen to belong together, in this case a belonging that, paradoxically, cultivates greater understanding about how both intensify alienation. Jonah Siegel has suggested that “excess and death are twin elements that are juxtapose[d] … not simply for contrast but to suggest relation.”⁵⁶ Lady Delacour’s terror that Belinda’s treachery will not only steal her husband but her right to live weaponizes her arm, which propels the watch into space. The coronet she thinks her friend idolizes must be “dashed” and thus defaced so it can materialize her thoughts, rendering them visceral for Belinda, since a marriage for alliance has disfigured Lady Delacour. The watch’s ruined “face” thus doubles as her “death-like countenance” (B, p. 31), while simultaneously anticipating Belinda’s, if she were to pursue this same course.

In light of the Pigot and the coronet’s ability to expose in tightly compressed allusions the colonial, slave, diamond, and marriage markets, we should pay attention to what consequences arise when a writer “shuts up” these diamond mouths, silencing even their murmurs. To do so, I turn to the first French translation (and rewriting) of Edgeworth’s novel, Octave Ségur’s Bélinde, conte moral de Maria Edgeworth traduit de l’anglais (1802).⁵⁷ Here Belinda is recycled, becoming its own after-book, one which resembles Paul et Virginie more than Edgeworth’s original. This translation expurgates the Pigot diamond – and thus colonial history – when Lady Delacour merely says to Belinda that Clarence “would have given his fortune” (Ségur, vol. 2, p. 92) to have received the same smile that Belinda has just bestowed on Lord Delacour. Ségur also eliminates the multiple fiscally driven connections between heiresses and diamonds Lady Delacour satirizes, and he excises allusions to slavery in the analogy that Belinda is marketed like “Packwood’s razor strops” (B, p. 25); instead, we hear that her perfections are as widely advertised as pretty muslins (jolies mousselines) (vol. 1, p. 41).

Ségur not only purges colonial references, but his Bélinde rejects Belinda’s palpable physicality in the watch-smashing episode. He includes Lady Delacour’s physical instantiation of her rage by having her throw the coronet away from her (elle la jeta loin d’elle avec force), but in omitting its collision, he silences metal and mineral striking marble; Lady Delacour cries out that she, herself, will always be

“un obstacle entre vous et l’objet secret des désirs de votre âme. La possession d’un titre.” En prononçant ces mots, elle fixait les armes de Lord Delacour représentées en diamans sur sa montre, qui était sur la table; la saisissant alors avec vivacité, elle la jeta loin d’elle avec force. “Vils enfans de l’orgueil!” s’ecria-t-elle; “faut-il que pour vous je perde ma seule amie? O Bélinde! ne deviez-vous pas voir que la grandeur ne donne pas le bonheur?”

(Ségur, vol. 2, pp. 137–138; emphasis added)⁵⁸

As seen in this extract, instead of using the word “coronet” (couronne) three times, as Edgeworth does, Ségur first substitutes it for “un titre,” second for “les armes” (heraldic symbols on a coat of arms), and third for “la grandeur.” Ségur’s substitutions, I suggest, lack the form that the diamond coronet gives to us. A crown functions, of course, as a symbol and works that way in Belinda as well, but, in literally striking the marble, the diamond coronet conjures more somatic specificity than reference to an ancestral title does. I draw here from Angela Leighton, who explains that form, because of its “multiple significations” and “innumerable associations … is mobile, versatile. It remains open to distant senses, distortions” and constitutes “a matter of crusading physical presence.”⁵⁹ She quotes from Raymond Williams’s Keywords that “the dictionary definitions of the word [form] range from ‘an essential shaping principle’ to ‘a visible or outward shape, with a strong sense of the physical body.’”⁶⁰ While my differentiation of coronet from “title” or “coat of arms” or “la grandeur” is subtle, I suggest that in the thing’s collision with the marble hearth, the qualities of form Leighton highlights – energy and transformation – reinforce the watch’s be-diamonded materiality, a thinginess which returns us to these markets’ exploitative economies. These diamonds model interpretive excess, excess “everywhere, just behind the corner, in the footnote, between the lines, in what is not said.”⁶¹ For anyone who has read the source text and Ségur’s translation, the coronet’s surplus overflows in Bélinde as well, not because it is present in the text, but because its absence signifies what cannot be said. Analyzed comparatively, these embodiments, conspicuously lacking in Bélinde, render their presence in Belinda especially conspicuous, with the Pigot diamond specifically and the coronet more generally providing links to the colonialism driving the novel’s emotional and financial domestic chaos, which itself, in turn, resembles how, by 1800, London itself had completely lost control of the East India Company, which was millions of pounds in debt.

3.2.2 The Pigot Diamond Lottery: Gambling, Gender, and Colonial Pursuits

In Section 3.2.1, I excavated how the Pigot turns readers toward the East India Company. Here I decipher a second way in which Edgeworth’s colonial and feminist critique extends beyond the West Indies. On July 2, 1800, “His Majesty was … pleased to signify his royal assent” to the “Pigot’s Diamond Lottery,” a means by which Pigot’s heirs should be allowed to “dispose of a certain very valuable diamond.”⁶² This mouths a history one no longer hears, but one that deserves to be told. As I will show, the lottery itself embodies the descriptive and economic overlappings between diamonds and women, ones that demonstrate colonialism’s rippling effect on domestic customs. It further underscores how the Pigot was not an ancestral possession, but imperial booty, English owned, but then state sponsored, such that it sanctioned the Pigot’s sale just as the East India Company, and collaterally British governing powers, legitimated bribery and imperialism. Pigot’s heirs were unable to sell the stone for its appraised value, and the government no doubt felt guilty for the governor’s death at his own countrymen’s hands: in retrospect, the East India Company apparently did not have the right to imprison and thus dispose of Pigot himself. Parliament debated the issue, though, because lotteries “encourag[ed] one of the worst species of gaming”⁶³ – an activity readers will recognize as pertinent to Edgeworth’s criticism of colonial enslavers’ indolence. For example, Vincent, as a youth in the West Indies, gambles day after day, and ultimately as an adult in England risks his entire fortune in such play.⁶⁴ Certainly, like gambling, this lottery transplanted from India the English nabob’s fantasy of getting rich quick. Over 10,000 people, including Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton, each spent two guineas on a lottery ticket. Possessing such a splendid thing – a gorgeous stone excessively large, brilliant, and valuable, normally inaccessible even to the very rich – suddenly became a shimmering possibility for anyone, even women.

Indubitably, the lottery announcements struggle with the gender democracy this sanctioned gambling seems to promise. The London Oracle and Daily Advertiser (1800) reveals that “The Goddess Fortune”

recommends the Pigot Diamond to the patronage and protection of the Ladies in the Imperial Dominions of Britain; [she] declares likewise that it shall be given to the Fairest who of them would not therefore adventure the trifle which purchases a ticket in the Lottery for the Superb Jewell, when the fortunate she who obtains it, will not only excel most of her competitors in Fortune, but also all of them in Beauty, as the Deity above mentioned has declared.⁶⁵

This advertisement renders the lottery an exercise in “gender performativity”⁶⁶ and connects the varying themes I have been discussing: those of gambling (the “Goddess Fortune”); links between women and diamonds; colonialism (“Imperial Dominions”); and female “virtue” as disassociated from agency. Women evidently want the Pigot diamond (perhaps it would ensure their liberty and thus the happiness of their other “jewel”), but according to the announcement’s logic, such a desire would be excessive, and to take action to secure it would have women striving, an affront to constructions of female identity. Here, instead of offering us multiple mouths – perspectives – this advertisement chatters out both sides of its mouth, for “morality” forbids these women from pursuing the gem while motivating them to covet it; hence they have the right to do so, but only via a male proxy. With dizzying circumlocution, the advertisement ensures that if “the Fairest” refuses surfeit longings, she will gain the Pigot, yet this unmistakably appeals to a woman’s vanity, for if she or her male proxy were to win the prize, this outcome was already prophesied by the Goddess Fortune.⁶⁷

3.2.3 “An Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland”

To turn to the third main way the allusion to the Pigot broadens Belinda’s political critique, it is important to read about both bills passed on July 2, 1800: “His Majesty was … pleased to signify his royal assent to the bill, intitled, ‘An Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland’; And also to Pigot’s Diamond Lottery.” History has conjoined these two bills, and I claim that at the narrative level Belinda does so as well, awakening us to reframe the novel and see fresh meanings through the register of things. The Pigot and its lottery not only guide our focus to India, but also to another colonial critique by turning the light onto Ireland. Pigot himself was created an Irish peer and it was in that country that he squandered his fortune, precipitating his need to return to India. Additionally, not only were these two bills linked chronologically, but they share the same leitmotif of bribery: The latter passed primarily because, as is well known, the British awarded honors and peerages to the Irish in exchange for votes, so that parliament, though self-righteously condemning the East India Company, was unquestionably pursuing the same policy in Ireland as the Company did in India.⁶⁸ And that policy was, to requote the Annual Register, “trac[ing] out new sources of power and wealth, wherever they could be discovered in the various and remote parts of this widely extended empire.”⁶⁹ This global conflagration further echoes the equations between profit and loss, for when diamonds were discovered in Brazil, the Indian market crashed; when Africans discovered diamonds, the South American market collapsed. Each abandoned country tried to lure the traders back by avowing that the new profiting nation’s diamonds were fake, substandard, or even inferior stones stolen from their own domain. Finally, historically, too, imperial expansion continues to reverberate around the Pigot since, in 1804, after purchasing the diamond for 8,000 guineas, the jewelry store and workshop Messrs. Rundell, Bridge and Rundell sent Philippe Liebart to Paris with the Pigot hoping that Napoleon might purchase it for his coronation.⁷⁰ This journey, as fraught with secrets as Belinda, itself, required that Liebert travel with the Pigot and other diamonds “sewn into the hem of his coat.”⁷¹ When officials doubted the origins of the stones he carried, Liebart fled, abandoning the diamonds, which were not recovered until 1818.⁷² The saga of colonial invasion that rendered diamond ownership possible continued for the Pigot, with one more mysterious episode, for it was at this time that Mohammed Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, purchased the Pigot from Rundell in 1822 for £30,000. He then gave it to the Ottoman Sultan, Mahmoud II, possibly as a bribe, an act that potentially repeats the Pigot–nawab phenomenon of extortion masquerading as gift giving. At this point, the Pigot vanished from history and its whereabouts remain unknown.

I have argued that when we listen to the Pigot, Belinda excoriates colonialism, though scholars have said otherwise, even about this earlier edition, one not bowdlerized, that includes the interracial marriage between Lucy and Juba and the heroine’s engagement to Vincent, who, as a creole, functions as a displaced racial other.⁷³ I base my claim partly on the evidence that even in later versions of the novel with those erasures, the Pigot and other diamonds remain. Their presence inspires us to hear that those multiple markets – the marriage, the Indian, the West Indian, and the Irish – necessarily belong with each other if we are to expand our understanding of Belinda’s broad and interwoven colonial critique.

3.3 The “Nature” of the Diamond

This section investigates the gendered ecosystems of women, ornaments, and nature. As I will show, Belinda explores this bionetwork by focusing on human and nonhuman disconnection from and connection to nature, suggesting that a belonging with things can also involve a happy renunciation of them as possessions.⁷⁴ The ecological disasters accruing from diamond quarrying and the racial inequities staining the diamond trade, given the abuse of the natives who labored to find them but also given the prejudice against Jews who sold them, offer excruciating examples of dislocation from human and nonhuman life. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century environmentalism led Harry Emanuel to call the discovery of diamonds in Brazil “a curse” on humans and their environment: When the Portuguese detected these stones they “took forcible possession of the land, expelled the original inhabitants, and declared the diamond trade a monopoly, and themselves the exclusive proprietors”; claiming that nature itself punishes those who abuse the earth’s riches in such ways, he says that during the year the diamonds were discovered, “the whole district was afflicted with a dreadful drought [and a] fearful earthquake …. It seemed as if the genii, guardians of the treasure, were indignant at the presumption of man, and tried by every means to prevent the dispersion of their buried treasures.”⁷⁵ In this account, mining for and possessing diamonds challenge nature’s laws, which strike back.

Though our contemporary society endorses the practice of personally boycotting diamonds, this phenomenon in fact emerged in the eighteenth century, and to some degree it resembled the Romantic-era abstention from sugar and rum in loyalty to the abolitionist movement. For example, in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, or the Ruin in the Rock (1795), Caroline Ashburn rhetorically asks, “those diamonds heaped into different ornaments, how were they obtained? Thousands perhaps—Oh, Sibella! I have laid aside my ornaments!”⁷⁶ Her silent pause, graphically signaled by the em dash, substitutes for the horrors those “thousands” suffered, indicating that such tormenting circumstances must remain unsaid. Perhaps Caroline had been reading travelers like Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who, as early as the seventeenth century, documents the torment unspoken in the space of that em dash. Travels in India (1676) strives for an objective voice, and yet the account’s facts silently mouth the laborers’ working conditions. At the Kollúr mine, “close upon 60,000 persons” toil: the men dig, and the women and the children carry earth,⁷⁷ and at Raolconda, “[b]usiness is conducted with freedom and fidelity” but the “poor” workers earn only “3 pagodas per annum, although they must be men who thoroughly understand their work.”⁷⁸ John Mawe’s 1809 revelations also expose grueling circumstances of workers in Brazil who labor long hours in uncomfortable postures “while washing” the diamonds, positions that deform the bones of “young growing negroes”; and yet their food is “poor and scanty,” while the “officers are liberally paid and live in a style of considerable elegance …. Our tables were daily covered with a profusion of excellent viands, served up on fine Wedgewood [sic] ware.”⁷⁹ One wonders if those dishes carried the famous image of an enslaved and enchained man accompanied by the motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” which Wedgwood first reproduced in 1797, and, if so, if anyone heard his plea.

To clarify my argument: I differentiate between the kind of ethical renunciation Caroline demonstrates – one Belinda’s Lady Delacour also enacts – and the flat sense that wearing diamonds reveals iniquitous female extravagance, an example of which Secresy illustrates when Caroline explains how Sir Thomas Barlowe’s “fears have made him covetous; he hoards his diamonds in their cases,” an activity which disrupts drawing room politics by allowing Mrs. Ashburn to “out-glar[e]” Lady Barlowe’s “glitter.”⁸⁰ My point is that diamonds in eighteenth-century novels do more than merely link possessing jewels with wealthy pageantry, the dreary lesson Hannah More reaches for when she finds that disrespect for women follows naturally from owning these gems: “A relation of the Duchess of Chandos died … a few days ago, at the card-table: … they stripped off her diamonds, stuck her upright in a coach, put in two gentlemen with her, and sent her home two hours after she was dead; at least so the story goes.”⁸¹ As I shall show, there are more positive implications to owning diamonds than More’s equation suggests – diamonds and gambling lead inevitably to humiliating dénouements – since women varyingly enacted the buying and displaying of such jewels. Certainly, it was not the case that the most commendable fictional characters constitute those who have never owned a diamond.

Female ownership of diamonds could prove liberating, allowing for recycling that often first required shopping. More than simply something that women wore to represent fashionable surfeit, these jewels became an alternative currency, one they could draw on to help themselves and others. A common medium of exchange during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, diamonds shared the same properties as any capital. Between 1750 and 1850, the “Brazilian diamond … became a valued security for making bank loans. The stone now found a new use as a money equivalent, or diamond-as-capital.”⁸² Profitable and portable, these gemstones remained a dominant unit of account because of their allegedly indestructible materiality: “[D]iamonds deserve the chief regard of all jewels. … [T]hey lie in the smallest space of any, and are therefore the most portable” form of money; further, “their superlative hardness secures them from all injury by wear.”⁸³ Their transportability made them even more important: “In times of revolution and political trouble, jewels, from their extreme portability, have always risen in price: in Paris, during the great Revolution of 1789–96, diamonds doubled their previous value, and even now, in foreign countries, many personages of note make a practice of keeping them in their possession in case of emergency.”⁸⁴ Such exchange involves recycling. Natacha Coquery shows, for example, how eighteenth-century Parisian (as well as English) jewelers “played an essential role in the flourishing second-hand and antique markets within the luxury and semi-luxury sectors,”⁸⁵ an indication that “second-hand trading was not part of a parallel, invisible economy but actually thrived at the very heart of the elite luxury market. … Recycling was not marginal but central to consumption.”⁸⁶ Further, the right to recycle jewels by selling them remained an exception to the prohibition usually levied on women owning and transferring property since it could thus provide an escape route during crisis, permitting women to evade the intensive control political bodies exercised to manage their power.⁸⁷ A Treatise on Diamonds and Precious Stones provides an educational précis for women who, by “necessity,” must enter the “extensive traffic in these precious substances, exclusive of the regular trade between the jeweller and the merchant.”⁸⁸ He wants to help those who are “delicately situated” – presumably women who must be discreet – to receive full value for their stones. Here diamonds, now belongings, are material bodies acting as radiant forces impacting other bodies, providing a means for the disenfranchised to survive and transforming the act of possession. Conceiving of diamonds as a “practical superfluity,” Belinda, as I have shown, relates belonging with them to the positive superabundance of multiple meanings, those embodied in “the excess [le surcroît, the addition, increase, extra]”⁸⁹ that a diamond’s material qualities radiate.

The novel demonstrates the force a woman, specifically Lady Delacour, can wield when she chooses to recycle her belongings. Fennetaux, Junqua, and Vasset “study the various processes of what Susan Strasser has termed ‘the stewardship of objects,’ that is the different strategies at work to adapt, repair, or transform everyday objects in order to lengthen their lifecycles.”⁹⁰ Playing “steward,” Lady Delacour will recycle her jewels by giving them to Belinda, who she hopes will sell them, if poverty so demands. No longer a diamond “on the market,” she now decrees the ethical metamorphosis of these stones, writing in her will that

it is my intention that the said jewels should be part of my bequest to the said Belinda Portman. If she marry a man of good fortune, she will wear them for my sake: if she do not marry an opulent husband, I hope she will sell the jewels without scruple, as they are intended for her convenience, and not as an ostentatious bequest. It is fit that she should be as independent in her circumstances, as she is in her mind.

(B, p. 299)

Here the novel identifies how jewels could offer financial power, indeed, “independence” to the marginalized gender, a fact that reminds us that a woman’s relationship to any object is complicated by the economic rules that dictate what she is authorized to own, buy, and sell. Here Lady Delacour’s jewels constitute belongings, things meant to be shared. Her use of such lawyer-like language as the “said jewels” divulges that she knows she has the lawful right to bequeath her things,⁹¹ a knowledge contrasting to her earlier impatience with reading legal contracts and her willingness to squander material resources of her own, protected by law. The passage suggests that a thing’s overabundance can offer liberation when it is a belonging, rendering objects that might be considered merely luxurious life-giving forces. The contiguity between a woman and her jewels reveals that Lady Delacour here claims the same independence, at the level of mind and corpus, that she bequeaths to the less “nobly” endowed Belinda.⁹² In keeping, renouncing, or transforming their diamonds through exchange, women can assert their virtuous, ethical responsibility; thus, I avoid merely denouncing materiality in general or diamond custodianship more specifically, since censure merely crafts an antagonistic relationship to the nonhuman, one that fragments the affiliation humans and things require for joint survival. As I demonstrate, when Lady Delacour recycles a diamond her husband bequeaths to her, the kind of virtue she manifests arises precisely from her newfound connection to the nonhuman.

Belinda, while not charting environmental disasters, reconnoiters, via the interrelations among a diamond, an aloe plant, and a cherry tree, the eco-social and ecological consequences of exploiting nature and laborers for gain. We see these connections by entering into that domestic “mine,” the Delacour union. When the couple decides to reconcile, the Lord gives his Lady, as a pledge, a “handsome diamond ring,” one he had purchased, on credit, for her adversary, Mrs. Luttridge (B, p. 291). In one of the odder examples of “regifting” in English literature, Lord Delacour imagines that as a present the gift will “be peculiarly acceptable” to his wife, and that she will “do me the honour to wear it for my sake” (B, p. 291). Given that he originally chose this diamond for Mrs. Luttridge, the ring functions as the opposite of a gift, as one ideally imagines it. Scott Shershow comments that:

On the one hand, the gift presents itself as a radical Other of the commodity – and therefore also of work, insofar as the latter is understood as an investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit. On the other hand, the idea of the gift seems constantly to be drawn back under the horizon of rational exchange, and to be thus endlessly revealed as a secret ally of both work and the Work.⁹³

As Lord Delacour’s “gift” to Mrs. Luttridge and later to his wife, the ring proffers a perverse “investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit” since, in the first case, he labors to procure and maintain as an ally his wife’s nemesis and, in the second, to inflame her enmity for and competition with Mrs. Luttridge. Such an “investment” renders contiguous Lord Delacour’s exploitation of this diamond to bribe two women and Pigot’s distributive favoritism toward the nawab and then the raja of Tanjore. His “gift” diamond, then – as Lady Delacour’s pulse had done, beating in shadow against the wall, visible for all to see and for Dr. X to diagnose as disturbed – incarnates the illnesses afflicting the couple: gambling, emotional infidelity, and alcoholism.

Instead of accepting the diamond, Lady Delacour reframes the life she has lived by recycling it: She tells her husband that: “If you wish to do me a kindness, I will tell you what I should like much better than diamonds”; when he asks: “What should you like better, my dear, than this foolish ring,” she explains that she wants him to bestow its worth, in the form of an annuity, on the gardener she had earlier exploited (B, pp. 291, 292).⁹⁴ We recall that she had purchased from that gardener an aloe that blooms “but once in a hundred years” (B, p. 63) so that her party could outrival Mrs. Luttridge’s; this jousting, which used as a weapon a rare flowering plant, ultimately leaves the gardener a “beggar” (B, p. 106).⁹⁵ The diamond ring and the aloe fold into each other since both were deployed to inflict rage on others. Now restored to happiness and able to attune herself more emphatically both to the human and nonhuman, Lady Delacour finds that belonging with these things in greater harmony helps her to terminate the revenge cycle which she has pursued throughout her life and to enter an orbit where generosity prevails. While her “reparations to the gardener” do reveal that to be properly reformed “she must fulfill domestic duties and those required of the aristocratic woman,”⁹⁶ I add that, to be fully virtuous, reformed, and restored, she must also develop respect for the nonhuman and joyfully nurture the living – herself included. In giving the gardener an income and hiring him to cultivate cherry trees, both Lady and Lord Delacour cultivate belonging with by promoting rational exchange and fostering beneficial work. The couple thereby reground their ethics in nature by establishing positive links between gifts and labor, which they render the “secret ally” of work. Rancière has written that during the Romantic era, what he calls the “aesthetic regime of the arts,” “sensible materiality was the very goal of the activity of thought in general. … Art anticipates work because it carries out its principle: the transformation of sensible matter into the community’s self-presentation.”⁹⁷ Once Lady Delacour listens to the links between the nonhuman and the human – the aloe, the cherry tree, the gardener, and the flashing gem – the first three can thrive and the fourth becomes, shall we say, a more conflict-free diamond. Via these connections, Belinda, itself, intimates that the East India Company’s work comprises a perverse “investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit.”⁹⁸

In recycling the diamond into fair trade, which equitably compensates the gardener, Lady Delacour rights the injustice she had committed, for now, rather than trying to master a thing, she moves toward relationships power politics do not fully dominate. However, this pomological solution can emerge only because the gardener himself agrees to belong with: He willingly entertains a second attachment – the cherry tree has “succeeded the aloe in his affections” (B, p. 292) and it gives him “pleasure” to tend to it. This sideways treatment of the subject of second “loves” brings us back to gender and things insofar as it reminds us that, in 1802, the novel gives Belinda the freedom to break her engagement to Vincent and marry Hervey. Thus, the gardener’s loss of the aloe and his acquisition of the cherry tree cross with Belinda’s and Hervey’s rejection, respectively, of Vincent and Virginia for each other. The aloe after all, would only have bloomed once – rather like the relationship between Vincent and Belinda, since if they had wed, her rational, loveless regard for him would have prevented any flowering in the marriage; the cherry tree, however, bears flowers and fruit again and again, as we are expected to believe that Belinda and Hervey’s union will. Lady Delacour repurposes the diamond when she swings from one love (extravagant purchases for rivalry) to another (ecological and social work for healing), a choice reaffirming the novel’s belief that the human and the nonhuman work best when they work together.

Belinda thus treats the stewardship of things as a serious work, even implying that belonging with advances the capacity to appease, to mend, and thus to enchant, a pattern Chapters 1 and 2 highlighted. This enchantment partly manifests since diamonds can baffle their owners, as when, in being reset and given or lent to another, the gem could not be identified as belonging to the previous owner.⁹⁹ But most often in Romantic-era literature, diamonds signify a truth-telling magic, a pattern the ring and its stone in Les bijoux performed. Accordingly, these jewels become oracles spotlighting social customs and emotional imbalances, and, in Belinda, actual illness. Discussing Emile Durkheim’s “history of reenchantment,” Roach emphasizes the “Idea of Force,” a phrase used “for the powers of nature embodied in an object or person.”¹⁰⁰ Many novels express faith in the ancient belief (scientifically verified, in some cases) that the electrical current between gems and their wearer can have therapeutic properties (coral, associated with good health, was given to newborns). Charles King documents how diamonds had been, since antiquity, valued for their medicinal uses; he emphasizes how “[t]he diamond is highly electric, attracting light objects when heated by friction; and almost alone among gems, has the peculiarity of becoming phosphorescent in the dark, after long exposure to the sun’s rays.”¹⁰¹ This in itself is a form of belonging with – a movement toward and attraction sparking radiant connection. Indeed, Corinne draws on beliefs in psychokinetic powers when Oswald gives the heroine a ring and pledges his love to her; she exclaims, “if you stop loving me, the ring itself will tell me. Does not an old belief tell us that diamonds are more faithful than men, and that they become dull when their giver betrays us?” (C, p. 271).¹⁰² Here, either by sustaining sparkle or becoming leaden, a diamond itself becomes a steward, embodying the “Idea of Force” to unveil secret truths to the one who wears it. In Belinda, belonging with this diamond voices the “secret” of how to forge a newfound connection to the environment, one which stimulates ethical practice and expedites healing from emotional alienation and physical pain.

Conclusion

Walter Benjamin suggests that “[s]imultaneous with any cognition of an object is the actual coming-into-being of this object itself.”¹⁰³ Edgeworth’s engagement with brilliants, coronets, and the Pigot diamond brings these things “into being,” but does not exhaust their meanings. A comparison between Belinda and an enormous diamond reveals, indirectly, the East India Company’s back story of corruption and internal mutinies, a narrative allied to violent domestic conflicts, international wars, and the crushed Irish revolt, which led to the “union” between Ireland and Great Britain. Thus, diamonds, prismatically repurposed in Belinda, would “sparkle no more” in the novel if they were to remain separated from their histories. Lady Delacour’s reformation arises when she transforms her understanding of the human–thing network and claims her right to belong with. Captive to a materiality without dimension or multifariousness, she had glibly abandoned her material wealth and independence, only later to be, ironically, nearly devoured by the material decay of a physically tormenting and unhealed wound in her breast. Her bodily discomfort, in fact, leads to baffling behavior – possibly stemming from temporary psychosis (her delusion that Belinda will steal her diamond “coronet”) or religious fanaticism (obsession with Methodism and death). Such bafflement itself recalibrates Lady Delacour’s relationship to things, and thus to humans. Wendell Berry, pinpointing how form can baffle us, argues that

the Muse of Realization … returns again and again to say, “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. … It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.¹⁰⁴

In Belinda such material forms – a colossal diamond such as the Pigot, the shattered coronet, or Lady Delacour’s breast wound – sing to readers in ways that bewilder and thus reorient understanding. When readers or characters practice belonging with the nonhuman, they engage in “real work” given that the abundant meanings that things engender both obstruct our journey (“we no longer know which way to go”) but also illuminate it, making things hum. Finding “companionship in physical objects,” to quote again from Corinne (p. 82), requires “real work,” what Oswald, as I have shown, finds impossibly hard labor. In investigating truths that the nonhuman whispers, this chapter has listened to things that are not supposed to “be” listened to. Like Diderot’s “jewels,” this longing to hear might be seen as “indiscreet” – injudicious, imprudent, and indecorous – and yet my goal has been to hear the interpretative possibilities that arise when we can belong with the nonhuman.