Okay, I'm reading some Wilkie Collins because of a Stephen King book. In The Long Walk one of the characters is dying and mentions that The Woman in White is his favorite book and since I read The Long Walk for the first time I've wanted to read The Woman in White.
But it wasn't available as a free e-book until recently so I read The Moonstone instead.
The book is fine? Like the story is fine and I'm actually pretty pleased with how the narrative structure was arranged. That's peachy.
But oh wow is it kind of pretty damn racist. I mean hey, yeah, big surprise, here's a book written by a white British Victorian dude, who would have thought he'd be pretty fucking rude about Indians? Yeah.
The plot of the novel is compelling, unfortunately it's rooted in the idea that three "savage" Indians are tracking down a gemstone that was stolen from their sacred temple as a war trophy and that the "savage" Indians are wholly in the wrong here.
This would be *so* easy to fix by making it a haunted gemstone, or a gemstone belonging to a local conniving duke whose sons are tracking down their ill-gotten gains or whatever. But that's not what happens and so we can't really get around it.
I enjoyed significant parts of this book, it can be extremely funny. But it isn't commenting on the harms of racism and imperialism, the way that Twain did, it's reveling in the idea that pure, virginal British women are threatened by foreigners motivated by mysterious magic.
And that just kinda sucks.
Cheers,
- Alli
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