Introduction

Indian Diamonds 169
Moonstone 374). It is equally “a blank” (455) as his origin 19. In the discovery of the
diamond, he translates and completes Mr. Candy’s confession spoken in delirium.
Ezra Jennings functions as a medium because of his own opium usage and his
intermediate and indeterminate position due to his mixed racial heritage. Through
the mediation of Dr. Candy’s delirious words, and in helping Blake to identify
opium as the true cause for the theft, he is in both instances a “mysterious intersection
point” (Thomas 71) situated on the borderline between sanity and insanity,
the domestic and the Other. It also accounts for his access to Dr. Candy’s irrationality.
Both in Dr. Candy’s delirious speech and in the revelation of Franklin
Blake’s involvement in the theft, Ezra Jennings interprets the subconscious to
solve the crime. The regular representatives of the police, Superintendent Seegrave
and Sergeant Cuff, at least partially fail at this task (Ascari 71).
Ezra Jennings offers an alternative method of detection, as many critics argue:
“Jennings then is a man of faith as opposed to reason” (Murfin 663). Yet the
opium experiment is conducted as a scientific undertaking and Ezra Jennings can
finally offer the explanation for Franklin’s theft, not the least because he is a professional
physician and scientist (Thomas 70). His detection combines science
with methods reminiscent of the Brahmins’ mesmerism in his use of opium, and
its success thus “unsettles imperial dichotomies” (Carens 257) as the combination
proves successful. In criticism, Jennings’ behaviour is seen as either proof of his
role as “serving” Franklin and thus as a deliberate assertion of the existing imperial
order (Nayder, Wilkie Collins 122) or as a subversive and triumphant undermining
of racial stereotypes (Carens 256). Although Jennings is depicted as a
wreck whose misfortunes, it is indicated, are at least partly caused by his heritage,
he nevertheless assumes a position of power: Ronald R. Thomas argues that, in
solving the crime, Jennings relies on the latest forensic research and applies it to
turn Franklin Blake’s body into the evidence for his guilt (67). The solution demands
the scientific scrutiny of Franklin’s body so that he finds himself in the
same position as Ezra Jennings before him: Ezra’s “remarkable” appearance, ,
speaks against him and makes him a suspect. The same scrutiny applied to Franklin’s
body, its “reading” proves his complicity albeit an unconscious one, in a
crime.
All Others are first perceived as perpetrators and as inherently suspicious. The
image of the “criminal who is by definition the ‘other’” (A.D. Miller 36) is turned
around in The Moonstone. The potentially thieving Indians of Betteredge’s narrative
(Collins, Moonstone 26), later suspected of having stolen the diamond, are pronounced
to be “as innocent as the babe unborn” (91; also 154). Following in the
same vein, Ezra Jennings first elicits the expected reaction of distrust from Betteredge:
“We none of us liked him or trusted him” (153; also 322) and Franklin admits
that “his appearance […] was against him” (364). Nevertheless, Ezra
19 Ronald R. Thomas takes it for granted that Jennings’ mother is Indian (71), but this is never
clarified in the text.