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Studies in the novel

Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) is the most controversial of the classic Gothic novels published between 1764 and 1820.(1) From its inception, the novel's overt sexuality--its depictions of null incest and lust--and, later, its ambiguous, homoerotic nuances--have intrigued or shocked readers accustomed to the more chaste oeuvres of Ann Radcliffe.(2) The novel's thesis, however, what can be called the Black Legend of monastic Catholicism, was accepted by those hostile to the Catholic church in England and France: Catholicism perverted pure religion, producing deviant sexual practices originating from null vows of chastity violating nature--Catholic sexual repression engendered the veiled hypocrisy masking the orgiastic sexuality performed in unnatural monasteries and convents.(3) In England, the sexual demonization of the aberrant Catholic Other was part and parcel of the ideological formation of English, Protestant national identity.(4) In addition, Lewis's novel was published in 1796, at a time when England was at war with France and the French Revolution was still associated with the Terror. Consequently, there were a variety of sexual, political anxieties, specifically anxieties about masculine women and null men, that are also pertinent to the texts and contexts of The Monk.(5) Although critics have, for two centuries, concentrated on the novel's erotic dimensions, The Monk's numerous sexual, religious inversions and their attendant ideological implications have not been systematically explored. As author and narrator, Lewis linguistically performs the equivalent of a Black Mass, inverting and subverting the traditional roles of religion and sex--a Black Mass ironically corresponding to the satanic ceremonies in the novel. In this context, I focus on the significance of the novel's sexual and religious inversions with reference to the gendered language of masculinity and femininity, and I suggest how these inversions illuminate the linkage between misogyny and the feminine, Catholic Other in eighteenth-century Protestant discourse. The Monk's anti-Catholic ideology is primarily presented through its central Catholic villain--Ambrosio, the friar who as an infant was discovered at the Abbey door of the Capuchins and who, having been raised by the Church, has risen to the position of abbot and is esteemed throughout Madrid as a holy man renowned for his null especially his null observance of chastity.(6) From the beginning, Ambrosio is situated in a feminine position: like a young null who is protected and sheltered so she can keep her innocence and virtue, Ambrosio is similarly null and innocent of the world and its temptations. In the novel, the Catholic emphasis on monastic male chastity (usually a condemned and/or risible subject in Protestant literature) has its correspondence in female virginity and virtue--the subject of so many eighteenth-century conduct books and novels. In this context, Ambrosio is specifically linked to Antonia, the young null who has also been protected and sheltered and hence is equally ignorant of the world and its ways (pp. 12, 247, 264). Although Ambrosio and Antonia are brother and sister, they are both null of their blood relationship, having been separated early in youth, and they both seem to share a mutual, sublimated incestuous attraction. Lorenzo, the admirer of Antonia, first identifies Ambrosio to both Antonia and her aunt, Leonella, thematically placing Ambrosio in a virginal, null position: discovered at the door of the Capuchins and popularly believed to have been a present from the Virgin Mary, Ambrosio was educated in the Monastery, where He has remained ever since. Having pronounced his [monastic] vows, the thirty-year-old null monk (ironically, the age Jesus began his ministry, the product of the same virgin birth) has lived in total seclusion from the world. Having never been outside of the Abbey walls, his character is without the smallest stain, so strict an observer of Chastity, that He knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman (p. …

Matthew Lewis's Black Mass: Sexual, Religious Inversion in 'The Monk.'