The Moonstone: Hyperbole 6 key examples

In this passage, Rosanna uses the diction of suffering and suffocation to give the reader a bold visual image of her fear of the Sand. She imagines it to be full of "hundreds of suffocating people" below the surface, and although this is hyperbolic, the quicksand itself does eventually prove to contain "suffering." It hides evidence from the people investigating the theft of the Moonstone, and it is associated with secrets, pain, and strife by every narrator. 

When people describe the Sand, as Rosanna does here, it is linked to the visual language of obscurity and loss: it has "dreadful deeps" like grief and is "horrible" to look at as it shivers like a person in terror. The language of pointless struggle in Rosanna's descriptions also provokes a sense of hopelessness and despair for the reader, as she describes people "sinking lower and lower" into the muck. The alliteration of "Throw a stone in, and let’s see the sand suck it down!" also provides the reader with auditory imagery: the sucking "s" sounds in this phrase echo the plop and sink of a stone into the quicksand. All of this obsessive, gloomy talk foreshadows the later point at which Rosanna drowns herself in the Shivering Sand. She follows the arc of the stone that is "thrown in" and is also "sucked" down, never to be seen again.

A last link between Rosanna and the dark sensory language surrounding the Shivering Sand is made by Franklin Blake at the end of this chapter. As he "closes" his discussion of her suicide note, he describes the next stage of his story as his "toilsome journey from the darkness to the light." In Chapter 8 of his Third Narrative, he resolves to "force his way through all obstacles, from the darkness to the light" with the help of Sergeant Cuff's detective work.

Betteredge is so stunned by even the "flash" of the diamond that Rachel gives him that he has to "bless" himself to express his surprise. All of the sensory language of sight that Collins uses here makes the diamond seem uncannily enormous and engaging. It's just a stone in the hand of a young girl at this point, but it's also an object that contains "a yellow deep" that the manservant finds difficult to describe. The imagery of its relative smallness—"you could hold it between finger and thumb"—is contrasted with descriptions of its enormous and supernatural profundity. It is "as unfathomable as the heavens themselves": so "unfathomable" indeed that Betteredge uses the word twice in the same phrase.

Collins also, even at this very early point of its presence in the story, gives a supernatural veil to the Moonstone. When Betteredge describes it later in the passage he says it does not merely reflect light, but actually, impossibly, "contains" it. The jewel is so valuable and so eerily beautiful that it shines by itself like a light is on within it. Its "moony glow" is still visible, coming from the "depths of its own brightness" as it scintillates  "awfully" alone in the dark. This imagery supports the narrative that the Moonstone is cursed. It isn't just a stone, even after it has been removed from the Moon God's Temple. It is an object with its own, frightening power.

In this passage, Collins lampoons Miss Clack's apparently Christian attitude. Her protesting language only underlines the hypocrisy of her actions. In order to feel all right  about taking money for doing a good deed, she needs to justify her "struggle" to accept "pecuniary remuneration." She does this by reframing it as  "Christian humility" to herself and to Franklin Blake, the intended reader of her "Narratives." Clack protests a great deal but eventually takes the cheque from Blake, as she clearly doesn't really intend to turn it down.

This is really self-interest reworded as a "hard struggle" for "self-denial." Miss Clack is un-self-aware enough to apparently believe that her exaggerated, hyperbolic self-criticism and "reflection" covers up the self-regarding reality of her choice in this passage. Collins implies that with enough bluster and self-deception, even the most banally selfish or money-motivated choices can be framed as Christian behavior. 

Clack's hyperbolic hypocrisy doesn't just extend to excusing herself. She is horrible about other characters—particularly Rachel Verinder— in a very overt way. However, because she can't see herself clearly, her discussions of them are also delivered as moralistic tracts meant to persuade the reader of her wisdom and her moral righteousness. Similarly, when she admires someone, they are also described in naively hyperbolic language. In the same chapter, she begins to call Godfrey Ablewhite the "Christian Hero," going on to describe his mugging by the Three Indians in the terms of a Christian parable:  

When the Christian hero of a hundred charitable victories plunges into a pitfall that has been dug for him by mistake, oh, what a warning it is to the rest of us to be unceasingly on our guard! How soon may our own evil passions prove to be Oriental noblemen who pounce on us unawares! I could write pages of affectionate warning on this one theme, but (alas!) I am not permitted to improve – I am condemned to narrate.

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Clack's description of this "pitfall" is nothing short of ridiculous, especially as she uses the example of Godfrey being attacked and searched as a cautionary tale. She aligns moral vigilance and being "unceasingly on our guard" with avoiding being "pounced" on by "Oriental noblemen," a ridiculous comparison in any context. She then goes on to immediately deny she's speaking moralistically, as given the terms of her contract with Blake, she isn't "permitted" to "improve" others and can only "narrate." Collins's satire is painfully sharp here. Clack can't seem to tell that this plain and scientific  "narration" she believes she is  "condemned" to writing for Blake has already become a pompous and moralizing screed.

The "Sunday-School style" of this speech reads as being unbearably patronizing and high-handed, especially because Clack begs an insincere "thousand pardons" and then doesn't stop preaching. All of Clack's language is exaggerated and overblown, as she exhorts people to be "morally tidy" in their behaviors. In this passage, Collins pairs weighty Christian ideas like moral purity with seemingly trivial ones, like "tidiness." The self-evident silliness of these duos reflects Collins's low estimation of people who held these opinions. 

The use of chiasmus in this passage also adds to its hyperbolic quality. Chiasmus is a a rhetorical figure often used in religious texts, where words are repeated in reverse order, as when Clack says "let your faith be as your stockings, and your stockings as your faith." With this phrase, Collins employs another ridiculous juxtaposition of a big, important thing with a small, silly thing, in language that sounds almost Biblical. This chiasmus is central to the satirical work of this passage, as it shows the hypocrisy of the self-important and persnickety Miss Clack's views. Collins was publicly critical of what he viewed as the hypocritical and pompous behavior of people who preached evangelical Christianity in mid-19th century England. If people like Miss Clack can put on or take off their "faith" as easily as their stockings, Collins implies, their moral "tidiness" is probably not as "spotless" as they believe.

Just before this, Rachel has declared that she cannot bear to have Godfrey blamed for the theft of the Moonstone, and she writes a document declaring his innocence. Godfrey destroys it instead of using it; unbeknownst to Clack, however, he has selfish motives for doing so. Miss Clack has no idea that Godfrey's destruction of Rachel's signed declaration of his innocence is anything but another piece of evidence that Godfrey is a "Christian Hero," as she dubs him earlier in the novel. She is transported into hyperbolic throes of ecstasy by this "good deed."

Her reaction to it is so intense that she almost passes out from this "unearthly ecstasy." Collins injects a little comedy into the scene here, as when Clack opens her eyes Godfrey has already left. She's brought abruptly down from "heaven" and finds herself embarrassingly returned to Earth, where there is "no-one but [her] aunt in the room." This is another instance of Clack's self-aggrandizing and unselfconscious religious silliness, but is also a key moment in the characterization of Ablewhite in The Moonstone. Miss Clack is transported out of her body by her impressions of his "heavenly" behavior. Godfrey, however, is not; he just rudely leaves her to her reveries and gets on with his own machinations.

Drusilla Clack thinks Rachel is arrogant, badly behaved, and un-Christian, and is always trying to improve her behavior by forcing fundamentalist religious pamphlets on her. It's unsurprising, given this, that Clack believes Rachel's friends are "the most audaciously dressed women" she's ever seen. The situation she is describing—people arriving to pick up a friend in a carriage—is actually quite normal, but through Clack's hyperbolic voice, it becomes an occasion of bombastic significance.  

Clack refers to the girls in the carriage as "the World, the Flesh, and the Devil waiting before the house." This trio of things is an allusion by the author to the writing of Thomas Aquinas, a 13th century Italian theologian. Aquinas described the three things Clack references here as the "implacable enemies of the soul." Aquinas is a canonical Christian figure, and this reference would have been a familiar one to Collins's largely Christian British audience.

Of course, the idea that some flashily-dressed girls in a carriage could be the embodiments of the "enemies of the soul" is obviously farcically overblown. Nevertheless, Miss Clack sees opportunities for sermonizing everywhere, especially when they involve criticizing Rachel. This is another instance in The Moonstone where the insatiable Miss Clack makes a ludicrously exaggerated and negative religious reference to align something quite ordinary, even pleasant, with something very bad indeed.