The Monk

by Matthew Gregory Lewis

It is a dark passion which serves the selfish, greedy opportunism that drives Ambrosio to disaster. It is connected, as the hostile critics of the novel realized, with sex.

All the characters are driven by sexual desire. This has terrible consequences, yet Lewis seems not to present desire as bad in itself.

When Ambrosio succumbs to Matilda’s charms, Lewis asks ‘Who then can wonder if he yielded to the temptation?’ (p. 81). Agnes similarly yields to Raymond whe...

Sexual desire overwhelms other thoughts and feelings, at least for a while. But Lewis is equally clear that sex is not just a matter for individuals. It has a social context which is better not...

Other people – mothers, brothers, friends and, as Agnes’s case shows, children – are involved. Indeed, Ambrosio’s problem is that he believes, wrongly, that he is beyond such attachments; his lust drives Antonia into such a state; and Agnes’s rescue consists o...

Sex, however, is associated in The Monk not only with violence ...

He will later drug Antonia to a death-like state to overcome her resistance. All three, together with Agnes, will descend deeper into the underground graveyard as the novel goes on.

But it is in the second plot that the most graphic image of sex joined with death appears, when Raymond embraces the Bleeding Nun, claiming her as his, as she in turn will claim him. David Morse is one of several modern critics to see the Bleeding Nun as central to the deeper meaning of the novel:

The myth of the Bleeding Nun is built around a structural opposition between the fact that the nun is veiled and the fact that she is bleeding. The veil stands for the traditional chastity ascribed to women, the fact that their charms are traditional...

The symbol of the veil is contradicted by the symbol of blood, which implies both the defloration of the virgin and the menstrual flow, which is a perpetual si...

Morse’s mention of the nun’s veil reminds us of the opening scene of the novel, when Lorenzo and Christoval try to see behind Antonia’s veil, a desire for the uncovering of female beauty which reappears in a different context

‘All the female characters,’ he writes, ‘are shown to be highly sexed – in fact, the women characteristically take the initiative.’12

Is it possible then to see in The Monk a positive perception of women’s sexuality, a recognition of the falsity of what Morse defines as ‘the belief that sex does not and need not concern them’?

There certainly seems to be a vast difference between Lewis’s women and the heroines of Ann Radcliffe. Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho is a passive figure who seems always at the mercy of more vigorous individuals, especially men.

Her father organizes her life and education, and when he dies she becomes the victim of more unscrupulous figures, notably the sinister and unprincipled Montoni, who takes her to the castle of Udolpho, w...

The contrast with Agnes is quite strong. Lewis’s character flirts with her lover, makes fun of religious superstition and attempts to use it to aid her elopement. She meets her lover at night in lonely places, and yields her virtue to his desires. What’s more, she is capable of arguing strongly in her own defence and refuses to be condemned by conventional judges.

In contrast, the over-protected and timid Antonia seems to be the object of criticism at various points in the early part of the novel for her dimness about her own feelings and those of others and her consequent lack of honesty about herself.

As Jacqueline Howard says, ‘although the novel offers sympathetic and respectful representations of sexually active women whose lives are being ruined by the corruption and small-mindedness of society, it is difficult to maintain that The Monk champions a liberated attitude to women’s sexuality’.13

For one thing, there is the unliberated way that the ruined Antonia is quickly disposed of as the object of Lorenzo’s affections in favour of a new female character introduced for no better reason than to provide the second hero of the novel with a bride, thus ensuring the usual ending in marital bliss for all good characters.

Virginia de Villa-Franca appears in Chapter X as the brilliant centre-piece of the nun’s procession, like a crowned beauty queen, and if anything she stands for an even more sexist view of women than the unfortunate girl she replaces. But it is not just Lewis’s conventional re...

The most glaring example of this is the treatment of Leonella, Antonia’s ugly, man-hungry aunt, who is clearly meant by Lewis as a figure of fun.

She is a character in the long line of comic middle-aged women, bawdy yet prudish, ill-educated but unabashed, silly yet cunning, who appear in eighteenth-century novels like Joseph Andrews and Humphry Clinker and, even more, in Restoration and eighteenth-century plays.

What both characters have is a voice. Like the stage characters on which they are modelled, they talk, often inconsequentially, usually suggestively and always at length.

He relies very much on dialogue to further the action, so that important information is conveyed to the reader not by the narrator but by one character telling another.

Lewis seems to have a strong visual awareness of how they look and what they are doing.

This is like a set of stage directions for an actor playing the part of a disappointed villain in a melodrama, but however stagy the effect of this and similar passages in the novel they give it a directness and liveliness of presentation which contrasts with the long, meditative paragraphs of Mrs Radcliffe.

Lewis also constructs his novel round a series of incidents, like the events of a play, varying them between the public and the private and including some large set-pieces and some thrilling spectacles, notably the summoning of a devil at the end of Chapter VII and the grand procession, and its aftermath, in Chapter X.

even in a written description, in building atmosphere and expectation, and he also shows a pleasing ability to surprise the reader, as when the summoned devil’s a...

is typical that in this scene Lewis pays attention to the senses of sound and smell as well as sight. Coleridge was right to describe The Monk as the product of an imagination ‘rich, powerful, and fervid’,15 e...

The greatest difference between The Monk and a stage play is the presence of a narrator who comes between the reader and the action. It is indeed this narrator whom Jacqueline Howard most blames for the sexism in the novel, since his comments on wom...

These are surely the characteristics of a young man of talent and ambition, not quite sure of himself and rather overdoing the effort to impress.

Lewis correctly saw that one way for a new writer to win acceptance is to remind the reader of connections with established works of literature.

Hence his use of quotations from approved sources, for example in the epigraphs to his chapters and elsewhere in the text, and his deliberate appeal to contemporary neo-classical taste in his Preface, an imitation of a poem by Horace.

This at once signals that the author is a man of education (for all such would have studied Horace at school), but it also challenges comparison with the greatest imitator of the ...

David Punter, indeed, suspects this self-display is a deliberate feature of the novel: ‘many of the lurid qualities and sensational oppositions in the text are calculated more to show us the range of the author’s dramatic abilities than to provide any profound comment on life’.17

Lewis seems to have wished to outdo this. Before we reach the text of The Monk we are given a ‘Table of the Poetry’, listing the ten poems in the novel. All of these poems rhyme but only two are in the same metre, a striking display of virtuosity which drew praise from Lewis’s contemporaries.

Several times Ambrosio, Antonia and Elvira seem close to discovering their true relationship, though it is not until the end that the puzzle is solved.

The being that Matilda is revealed to be converts Ambrosio from her seducer to her victim. Raymond mistakes the Bleeding Nun for Agnes and escapes by burying her, which turns out to be the fate of Agnes herself. In all these cases statements characters make about themselves turn out to be ambiguous or capable of interpretations they or their hearers do not foresee. Absolute control over meaning is not possible and what seemed reliable ground for action and decision becomes treacherous uncertainty.

The rise of the Gothic novel which climaxes in the work of Radcliffe and Lewis is seen as both an expression of and a commentary upon the social and political turmoil at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, turmoil centred on the French Revolution.

At the same time, the picture the novel paints of tyranny and hypocrisy in the church is a parallel with the conditions in pre-revolutionary France which were thought to have contributed to its downfall.

In principle, the overthrow of the secretive and unregulated power of the prioress ought to be a step towards freedom and justice, thought to be guaranteed in Britain by a constitution far in advance of anything in France, or Spain or Germany, but, as Lorenzo soon realizes, the good intentions of those who try to oppose tyranny do not prevent their attempts at reform getting out of hand and bringing about what seem worse evils.

What this amounts to, then, is that, like Gothic in general, The Monk gives expression to deep disquiets of its time but cannot offer solutions.

In this respect it manifests the first of the three things David Punter argues are definitive of Gothic, that is, the concept of paranoia. Gothic is what he calls ‘paranoiac fiction’, that is, ‘fiction in which the “implicated” reader is placed in a situation of ambiguity with regard to fears within the text, and in which the attribution of persecution remains uncertain and the reader is invited to share in the doubts and uncertainties which pervade the apparent story’.22

The other two qualities Punter says define Gothic are ‘the notion of the barbaric’, that is, the limits of the civilized, and the nature of taboo, ‘areas of socio-psychological life which offend, which are suppressed… one thinks first and foremost of the question of relations between the sexes’.23

Lewis’s unhesitating introduction of devils and demons, and various magical devices and events, re-asserts the role of the supernatural in Gothic fiction as a device to inspire fear of forces beyond human understanding.

What these forces are is left unspoken – do they really exist, or are they projections of the psyche? However much he may have been consciously striving for sheer sensationalism in The Monk, Lewis also forces Gothic fiction further into the realms of psychological suggestiveness which his successors in the genre were to map out more and more.

Constructed on the one hand by the incestuous desire of (for) his mother and on the other by an overly brutal separation from her, the borderline patient, even though he may be a fortified castle, is nevertheless an empty castle.

encompassment that is stifling (the container compressing the ego) and, at the same time, draining (the want of an other, qua object, produces nullity in the place of the subject). The ego then plunges into a pursuit of identifications that could repair narcissism – identifications that the subject will experience as in-significant, ‘empty’, ‘null’, ‘devitalized’, ‘puppetlike’.

It seems to describe the stages of Ambrosio’s career, from orphan to monkish creation, to desperate pursuer of fulfilment in the female other and to a final emptiness.