The Monk - Critique

Critique

The Monk is one of the more lurid and "transgressive" of Gothic novels. It is also the first book to feature a priest as the villain. In this respect it would serve as a model for such future works of literature as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This novel shares a number of traits with Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels The Italian and The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Featuring demonic pacts, rape, incest, and such props as the Wandering Jew, ruined castles, and the Spanish Inquisition, The Monk serves more or less as a compendium of Gothic taste. Ambrosio, the hypocrite foiled by his own lust, and his sexual misconduct inside the walls of convents and monasteries, is a vividly portrayed villain, as well as an embodiment of much of the traditional English mistrust of Roman Catholicism, with its intrusive confessional, its political and religious authoritarianism, and its cloistered lifestyles. The American fictitious anti-Catholic libel, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, borrowed much from the plot of this novel. Despite the critics' comments on its crudeness and lack of depth, it proved to be one of the most popular novels of the Romantic Period.

It is among the many Gothic works referenced in the Jane Austen novel Northanger Abbey.

This novel was considered by the Marquis de Sade as a reaction to the 1789 French Revolution, with Lewis using the Gothic to express concerns circulating around England in the Romantic Period. Concerns such as social stability and the mis-use of power are some of the issues explored.

Robert Miles suggests that The Monk is about “veiling and disguise” and that it is possible to read into the novel a possible expression of the “open secret” of Lewis’s homosexuality through the characters of Ambrosio, Rosario/Matilda, and Lucifer. “In the end, Ambrosio’s desires are insatiable... But Ambrosio’s desire may be insatiable because it is denied its true object. The closest the text gets to disclosing what this object might be is an elaborately staged event which obfuscates as it reveals. In the centre of the text, in quick succession, Matilda performs two acts of conjuration. In the first, Antonia’s coy, modest, naked body is displayed before Ambrosio in Matilda’s magic mirror. In the second, in labyrinthine caverns beneath the monastery, Matilda invokes an androgynous, decidedly camp ‘Daemon’: ‘a Youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled’. The ‘beautiful’ figure, ‘perfectly naked’, with ‘silken locks’ and surrounded by ‘clouds of rose-coloured lights’ (277), appears as the key to Ambrosio’s possession of Antonia. The figure, at Matilda’s strident behest finally relinquishes the 'myrtle' which will enable Antonia’s seduction. The parallelism of the stagin raises the question of causation: is the Daemon the key to the sexual possession of Antonia, or is Antonia’s image a screen for Ambrosio’s true object of desire, the epicene devil?”