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BA in English
Personal Study Programme

THE MONK
Since Gothic is considered to have sprung as a reaction to the
ideas of rationality and belief in the individual and the ability of
human beings to rely on their faculties, The Monk suggests that
even religion in its extreme function of the monastic life cannot
free people from their passions. The separation of the body and
the spirit, as it is seen in the case of Ambrosio, is a chimera. The
individual is presented as a fragmented entity consisted of
multiple characters that emerged reacting in different
circumstances.
In the beginning of the novel, almost none in the congregation is
there for what they are supposed to be, which points to the
traditional opposition of reality vs. appearance. Women try to
hide their sexuality behind veils but without any result. [p. 9]
The disruption of the individual is reflected in the disruption of
the most important social fibre, the family. Ambrosio, by killing
his mother and his sister after raping her, shows that deepseated psychological instincts are diffi cult to suppress.
The opposition of humility vs. pride, which Ambrosio feels after
his sermon, is another example of how diffi cult is for religion to
regulate and even more to suppress normal human feelings.
His strange attraction to the picture of Madonna and his
indulgence in sexual fantasies with her is a further indication of
the suppressed sexuality coming up the surface.
When Ambrosio learns Matildas true identity, he is afraid that he
will not be able to resist temptation. When he sees her bare
breast he yields to her supplications and calls her enchantress,
a term that he will use again for Antonia.
Ambrosios case shows that temptation is not something external
but it exists already inside ready to emerge if provoked.
Dreams are also very important because there appear in them
hidden, suppressed desires, which escape the censor. Of course,
the dreams in The Monk are of a crude nature because they are
very straightforward and not coded, as Freud has suggested.
The story of the Bleeding Nun might be taken to symbolise some
secret in a family, which has been suppressed but always finds
ways to reappear. It can also refer to some guilty conscience that
has been confined to a remote chamber of the mind.
Female sexuality is attempted to be suppressed by putting
women in convents. Matilda, who indulges her sexuality, is an
instrument of Satan. When Ambrosio has indulged in his sexual
passions with her or even later with Antonia, he feels disgusted
and accuses them of provoking him. Even victims like Antonia are
described as Enchantresses or Temptresses.
The passage that describes Ambrosios upbringing from the
monks shows is indicative of how religion or education is used to
suppress Nature. [p. 238]
Matildas mirror can refer to secret fantasies that men have of
sleeping with their mother or sister. This is connected with the

University of London
BA in English
Personal Study Programme

element of incest, which along with the issue of matricide point

to the disruption of basic element of social coherence, the family.
From the Introduction of Oxford Worlds Classics The Monk, by Emma
McEvoy
Ronald Paulson, in Representations of Revolution, suggests that
Ambrosio is both a victim and aggressor.
There is a technique of paralleling or doubling where characters
are very easily interchangeable.
There is also an aspect of contagion.
Not only does Lewis challenges the Gothics supposed sexual
innocence but the innocence of the characters themselves.
Metonymy and synecdoche comes close to usurping the
experience of the authenticity of character altogether. The
disguises characters wear too easily become their fates. Bodies
lie, clothes lie, and identity either seems to be constantly
shifting, or reveals itself as inessential.
One of the most contradictory aspects is that though the text has
acquired a reputation for salaciousness, the further the sex
descends into the realm of the necrophiliac and incestuous
fantasy, the more distant it becomes. It tends to leave the reader
cold; the sex is curiously static and concentrates on the
importance of the visual.
There is a scene in which the imperative to rape, imposed on
Ambrosio by his authors perverse aesthetic of modesty, is
encoded in the work itself. After the rape, it is only Ambrosios
perspective that is recorded in the narrative. The text seems to
have a Sadean fixation on female mortality, and the idea of the
pure woman.
Sex inheres within image; it lies in the fascination with what is
denied, or proved impossible, and it flirts around the boundaries
of definition of man and woman, chaste and whore, and even
living and dead.
The diffi culty in distinguishing the tone of The Monk is one of the
most important and interesting features. It seems to be always
transforming itself.
The narrator appears as a sorcerer; nowhere is this more
apparent the in the constant harping on superstition. The word
superstition is a near-synonym for Catholicism.
The crux of the matter is that The Monk feeds off a Catholic
aesthetic, though it takes its morality from its Protestantism.
However, because Virtuous Anglicanism does not make for a good
story, Spectacle is the dominant aesthetic.
Lewiss Gothic Revolution
From The Rise of Gothic Novel, Magie Cilgour

For Lewis the artist is a lawless force who obeys no limits and
cannot be restrained.
The Monk rewrites Radcliffes plot as an oedipal narrative. The
main plot is divided between the two Buldungsromanen, which

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follow both the male and the female entrance into the world, and
development from innocence to experience. In the case of both
Ambrosio and Antonia, the private and sheltered world of
innocence is associated not with safety but with repression. The
home has become a prison.
In the case of Ambrosio, cloistering becomes a metaphor for the
repression of the flesh, body, nature and the illusory idealisation
of spirit, mind, and art. The structure of the churchs world is also
reproduced within Ambrosios head, who becomes split into an
innocent surface and evil substance. His story suggests an
inverse opposition, in which a naturally good individual has been
corrupted and alienated from his authentic self by social
hypocrisy.
While Ambrosio, first as a saint and later a gothic villain, seems
to be an individual opposed to society, he is in reality its
embodiment, who replicates its own hidden contradictions.
The theatrical metaphors used through the text, from the opening
scene, suggest a world in which characters are actors playing
roles that the public demands of them, but whose real, less
socially acceptable identities lurk under the surface appearances.
The plot has a very staged quality and deaths especially are
staged.
Lewis focuses on the mother as a figure of authority crucial in a
childs development. Antonias downfall occurs through too much
mothering. Well-meaning females are worse as in their attempts
to help and protect other females they only end up keeping them
in a state of extreme vulnerability. Concerned with monitoring her
daughters education, and controlling her transition from
innocence to experience, Elvira not only keeps her at home but
also censors Antonias reading. The central image for the
mothers protection of her daughter is the veil that makes her
wear out in public.
The author keeps on revealing the reality behind appearances
through continuous stripteases, which make sure we are never
taken in by disguises. He tries to build up suspense when the
ending is known from the very beginning. While in Radcliffe, if
you put off a tragic discovery long enough it might just go away
altogether, in Lewis delay is only a means of working up to an
even nastier and more expensive conclusion. The principle of
delay operates in different forms throughout the text; events take
a long time to unfold, and the plot is dismembered into different
parts. Foreknowledge never stops anything from happening; it
merely intensifies suspense by creating an atmosphere of certain
doom. While these delays are means of heightening suspense,
they also introduce the possibility of a definitive interruption of
the sequence of events.
Another important structural principle of delay in the text is that
of multiple plots. The proliferation of plot suggests that narrative
itself is a disruptive force that cannot be controlled. The subplots
interrupt the plot proper in a way that has tragic consequences
for Antonia and Ambrosio.

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BA in English
Personal Study Programme

In The Monk, life is itself art a theatrical spectacle. To

complicate matters, art is both fraud and yet what is real when
works of art come to life. At the end of Matildas story is revealed
to have been another fiction, an elaborately constructed
narrative that gains its seductive power by suggesting the ability
of desire to realise the ideal. The realisation of his fantasies does
not lead to satisfaction but disgust. In general the realisation of
the imagination has disastrous consequences in the text;
fantasies that may be indulged in private take on a frightening
autonomy when they are manifested and projected beyond the
boundaries of dreams. In the case of the Bleeding Nun the
fictitious personage becomes real, and from using her for his plot,
Raymond suddenly finds himself as part of her plot, a character
not an author.
Lorenzo and Ambrosio can be taken as doubles for each other,
whose identity is indicated by the fact that they are often
connected in Antonias imagination. For both Ambrosio and
Lorenzo, the realisation of desire creates terror. The convergence
of the plots identifies further the two men, hero and villain,
whose meeting is murderous.
In the end, Ambrosio becomes a debunked Prometheus.