Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
(New York: Penguin Books, 1998)
It is hard to speak of first impressions of The Monk without falling into the usual embarrassed chuckles. Lewis wrote this sensational novel at the tender age of nineteen, filling the racier scenes with interjections such as: “The weapon’s point rested against her left breast: and, oh! that was such a breast!” (60). Obviously, this makes for a good read; even the overwhelming ridiculousness and awkwardness of some plot turns and phrases does not entirely destroy the power of suspense.
Resembling and repeatedly alluding to Shakespearian plays (more on the order of Romeo and Juliet and the “problem” plays than the “serious” tragedies) the novel itself interweaves the stories of the innocent and poor Antonia and her mother Elvira, their relative Marquis de las Cisternas, his nephew and heir Raymond, his beloved, Agnes (who is forced into a convent), whose brother (and Raymond’s friend) Lorenzo is in love with Antonia. Ambrosio, the eponymous Monk, both unifies and disrupts these circuits of love and property relations, which gravitate around a standard marriage plot.
A “brief” plot summary (sorry): the novel opens on Antonia and her garrulous aunt making their way through a crowded Madrid cathedral in which Ambrosio, a universally respected and apparently holy man, is about to preach; they converse with two gentlemen, one of whom is Lorenzo. He is impressed by Antonia, and offers her assistance in securing the support of her rich relation, Marquis de Cisternas. After the sermon, Lorenzo accidentally sees a man leaving a letter under a statue, and later recognizes his sister, who is a nun, as its recipient. He challenges the man to a duel, only to find that it is his best friend, Raymond de Cisternas, the Marquis’ nephew. Raymond persuades Lorenzo to listen to the story of his unsuccessful attempts to marry Agnes. A very long travel-adventure-and-intrigue narrative ensues, with an elopement attempt finally foiled by the intervention of a ghost; Agnes agrees to join a monastery, convinced that Raymond does not love her. Later on, they meet clandestinely on the monastery grounds and she becomes pregnant. Upon the conclusion of this story, the two friends agree to rescue her (still on this first night of the novel’s action), but the plan miscarries because Ambrosio, Agnes’ confessor, sees the letter, which told her of the escape, and turns her in. Unknown to Lorenzo or Raymond, Agnes is locked up in a dungeon; her death is announced. Meanwhile, Abrosio is seduced by Matilda, a woman who joined his monastery in drag, and has become his close friend. He comes to hate her and wants someone else, when he meets Antonia, who has come to ask for a confessor for her ill and apparently dying mother. He becomes infatuated with the girl, and decides to be the confessor himself, in order to obtain his desires. He eventually uses demonic help from Matilda, who is a sorceress (and, we later find, a demon herself) to obtain access to Antonia by sedating her, but the plan goes awry when he is surprised by Elvira; terrified of exposure, he kills her and runs away. Matilda now invents a scheme, which involves drugging Antonia to make her appear dead, and burying her in the vault of the monastery, which is shared by the convent in which Agnes is confined. In a final night of action, Lorenzo seizes the mother superior of the convent to charge her with the murder of Agnes; the story of Agnes’ apparent murder is told on the street, causing a riot in which the mother superior dies, and in which the convent is destroyed. Fleeing from the mob, Lorenzo wonders into the crypt, where he discovers his emaciated sister, and frightens Ambrosio, who has just raped Antonia, into killing her. He also meets a young noblewoman, Virginia, whom his relatives have meant to be his bride all along. Eventually, he and Virginia, as well as Raymond and Agnes, get married. Discovered and imprisoned by the Inquisition, Ambrosio sells his soul to the devil for freedom; taking him to a precipice, the devil discovers to him that he was Elvira’s son and Antonia’s brother before killing him.
As can be seen from the above, this is very much a plot-driven novel; yet it is composed of a large number of sources or influences, which necessarily occasion sub-plots and episodes, and is periodically interrupted by poems, which are written into the fabric of the text, but are also separately pointed out in the table of contents.
Some remarks:
The origin of evil in the novel is mysterious if not mystified, as can be seen from the example of Matilda, the temptress. She starts out as merely a woman who gave in to weakness, proceeds to being a manipulative sorceress, and turns out in the end to have been a demon. Similarly, remarks on the evils of monastic upbringing (204-6), which have corrupted the naturally good man Ambrosio and which clearly can be related to Rousseau (and seen echoed in the story of Frankenstein’s monster’s education), do not occupy the forefront of narrative/authorial attention for long. More and more, Ambrosio becomes merely the puppet of his infernal passions. As an initial guess, I am tempted to say that these two figures of progressively de-humanized evil, as well as the stern mother superior, exist as natural opposite numbers to the young het-lovers; not simply as villains, but as containers of queer excitement which needs to be conquered in order for the novel’s conservative plot conclusion to take place. (Or, of course, vice versa: the abruptly conventional conclusion is necessary to permit the horror and weirdness in the middle run wild).
The pseudo-Oedipal situation revealed by the devil in the conclusion has little dramatic power; instead, it seems merely to be the reason why Antonia and Ambrosio may not be allowed to survive the end of the novel, which also provides an additional source of titillation (if you get the hints along the way). Its plot explanation, though, is interesting enough in itself. Seen in the longer-term perspective of the class and marriage plot, the novel’s problem lies in the existence of a naturally timid but sexy, ideal and noble in other words, young girl who comes from a tainted bloodline. Her mother, while acting the part of a noblewoman very well, is in fact a bourgeois, whom a nobleman secretly married for love. This family history is wrapped up with the possibilities produced by the fantasy “new worlds” of colonialism, which promise an escape from the strict demands of class endogamy. Escape, however, is futile; alternatives to the traditional family (and poss. the bourgeois public) space are revealed to be tainted and untenable: monastery, old castles, the colonies are all abandoned as possibilities.
In a way, the people who die must die so that the illusion of prosperity and regular inheritance of property may go on as before. In different ways, Ambrosio, Elvira, and Antonia transcend their space in society as subjects/objects of value, and are therefore “unprotected” by family; they are also not integrated into social circles in any conventional or stable way.
With more time on my hands, I would like to think of this as a novel of education on the order of Frankenstein.
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