Introduction

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Sabina Fazli
knew that she was paste, and knew that Lucy was real stone” (628). In her simplicity
and moral uprightness she is everything which Lizzie is not: “She was not
beautiful. She had none of the charms of fashion. […] There was a reality and a
truth about her […]” (151). To a certain extent Miss Morstan falls into the same
category: “There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume
which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was sombre grayish,
beige, untrimmed and unbraided […]” (Doyle, Sign 131). Miss Morstan, as well, in
the end, is the true reward for Watson, the socially acceptable substitute for the
immense riches of the Agra treasure. Both Lucy and Mary Morstan are described
as plain so that the metaphor of the diamond-like virtuous woman can be conferred
on them.
The most telling use of the sentimental image of the diamond can be found in
Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House of 1856: Felix compares Honoria, the
idealised wife, to the Koh-i-Noor (Patmore 185) (Hancock 8). Canto XIII of
Book II, “The Espousals”, is titled “The Koh-i-Noor” and praises Honoria’s
submissiveness, but also her cunning and lying in pleasing her husband: “She joins
the cunning of the snake, / to rivet and exalt his love; / Her mode of candour is
deceit” (Patmore 181). It is probably no coincidence that Patmore associates
Honoria’s “cunning” with the diamond. It is, of course, unintentional and comes
to her naturally, “[t]o the sweet folly of the dove” (181). The Canto ends asserting
that “’A woman, like the Koh-i-noor, / Mounts to the price that’s put on her’”
(185). Canto IX, “The Friends”, directly following “The Koh-i-noor”, contains
the related imagery of empire: “A woman is a foreign land, / Of which, though
there he settle young, / A man will ne’er quite understand / The customs, politics
and tongue” (186). While Patmore obviously draws on what Plotz terms the sentimental
or affective image of woman as diamond, he inevitably leads over to a
comparison of woman and a colonised land. The explicit naming of the Koh-i-
Noor already introduces empire and the diamond as a symbol of possession.
I will look at this connection in a separate chapter and begin by showing that it
is possible to distinguish two currents of imagery in the narratives of diamonds
where there are “two very different circulatory systems, one affective, the other
fiscal” (Plotz 337) both subsumed under Daly’s domestic (70) strand. The diamond
which moves around, like money, which is paraphernalia as the Eustace
Diamonds, highlights its material worth and its evasiveness as a possession. It
represents female sexuality as “tendered openly in the market” (Trollope 523).
The diamond as a sentimental metaphor, as applied to Lucy or as in Patmore’s
poem, retains the view of women as objects of desire, minus the fiscal considerations
of material but rather sentimental worth, as the unassuming “Angel in the
House”.