Introduction

Indian Diamonds 179
different forms, the characters desire the diamonds and are consequently disfigured
by the contact with the Orientalising vice of greed. They are obsessed with
the idea that the diamonds are valuables which have to be obtained at all costs.
The Sholtos, John Vandeleur and John Herncastle are, accordingly, in relation to
the diamond, depicted as unscrupulous collectors of treasure. The presence of the
diamond as a collectible thus leads to the discourse of degeneration through the
appropriation of an Oriental practice.
The Return of the Repressed: The Diamonds as Uncanny Spectres
In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Sigmund Freud defines the uncanny by reiterating
the etymology of its German equivalent and the relation between things
heimlich and things unheimlich. He explains the etymological relation by stating that
the uncanny is “something repressed which recurs” (Freud 166, italics in the original)
and which is intrinsically known. The known and heimlich fact turns unheimlich
when it reappears in an altered form from the state of repression to which it had
been banned (166). The imperial gothic, like the gothic, is preoccupied with this
kind of return and the uncanny effect of the altered revenant.
The most obvious instances of repression are the sinking of the Rajah’s Diamond
in the Seine and of the Agra Treasure and the Great Mogul in the Thames.
In both instances the irretrievability of the diamonds is emphasised. Jonathan
Small throws the Agra treasure into the Thames because he insists that “no living
man has a right to it, unless it is three men who are in the Andaman convict –
barracks and myself” (Doyle, Sign 212). He distributes the treasure over a great
stretch of the riverbed so that it is impossible to retrieve it. Tonga, too, lies on the
bottom of the Thames, and in describing his resting place, Watson conspicuously
employs the present tense when he says that “[s]omewhere in the dark ooze at the
bottom of the Thames lie the bones of that strange visitor to our shores” (Sign
205) (Keep and Randall 217). The impossibility of recovering the treasures and
Tonga’s body assures their continuing existence in the rivers.
Prince Florizel throws the Rajah’s Diamond into the Seine to end “its empire”
(Stevenson, “Rajah’s” 131). The sinking of the Rajah’s Diamond collides with the
discarding of the “Arabian author”: In the end of “The Rajah’s Diamond”, the
editor takes his place in finishing the story and sends the “Arabian author”
“topsy-turvy into space” (131-132). In discarding the “Arabian author” of the
presumed ‘original’, Stevenson turns around the hierarchies which have been established
in the text before, as the narrator/editor professed that he “must follow
[his] original” (Stevenson, “Rajah’s” 102). Thus in the final paragraph, “the outside
narrator, by the merest succession of words and sentences, can turn the Arabian
author into an invention and the narrator into a reality” (Menikoff 343). While the
“Arabian Author” is exposed as literary, the editor meets Prince Florizel in a
metalepsis which bridges frame and nested narrative. The authority of the Oriental