Review: The Monk

 

English; Matthew “Monk” Lewis; The Monk; Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2002

Octavo; paperback with illustrated wrappers; 442pp. Minor wear, otherwise very good.

 

Sometimes, as we examine the offerings of what is considered “shocking” literature, we seem to adopt the position that nothing emerging in our zeitgeist can possibly be matched by those outrageous publications of yesteryear. Well, cast aside your copy of the mewling, simpering misadventures of the overly-tedious Christian and Anastasia: this is the real deal. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk is fifty shades of deepest black!

When it first appeared in 1795-6, this book was considered too shocking to be borne. Polite members of society were condemned for reading it, although pretty much everybody was reading it behind closed doors. It wilfully rushed in to those places where any decent person would fear to tread, and it did so with malice and forethought. In doing so, it established the further limits of what would come to be known as the Gothic Novel and thus paved the way for all the horror literature that was to come.

The first Gothic Novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Inspired by a dream, Walpole tossed together this miasmal confection in 1762 and it has never been out of print since then. Set in Italy, it involves a scandal surrounding an inheritance, the destinies of two young lovers and the supernatural justice meted out to the no-good relative who instigated the crime. There are some stark images that make the book memorable: a giant gauntlet perched menacingly at the top of a flight of stairs; an enormous arrangement of leg armour blocking access in a castle corridor; and the gigantic helmet that falls from the sky into the castle courtyard, imprisoning one of the protagonists within its steel compass. There are damsels in nightwear tiptoeing through galleries by candlelight; rapiers flashing in the dark; oubliettes; hidden passages: it’s on for young and old.

(I once dealt with a very early Basel edition of this book, printed as a landscape quarto, bound in dark red morocco, with a rare series of brooding engravings of gloomy castles in wild countrysides. Yum!)

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) followed hard on the heels of Walpole’s only book, penned by Mrs Ann Radcliffe. It, too, has young lovers lost in dank dungeons, imprisoned at the whim of evil relations, beset in a ruggedly beautiful Mediterranean wilderness. To be honest, although I’ve tried many times to read this turgid offering, I generally fall asleep by about page twenty: life’s too short for bad writing.

But these are cream-puffs in comparison to the rum-soaked, triple-choc, mud cake that is The Monk

 

The first thing that struck me, dipping into this black pool, was just how red-blooded everybody is. Damsels and cavaliers espy each other across the pews in church and instantly remark “phwaugh!”, or “hubba-hubba!” They know what they want and they don’t spend pages mooning over whether that “nice boy/girl might like me or not”. The women are particularly pro-active: Agnes establishes a dead-drop for letters from her lover in the Cathedral, in order to plan her escape to him through the walls of her nunnery; Matilda, even more daring, disguises herself as a novitiate and enters the Abbey to be near her amour, the eponymous Monk. This, after having had her portrait painted as the Virgin Mary and sent to the Abbey to see if the object of her desire might warm to her charms (he does). Thereafter, she thoroughly seduces him. Or they seduce each other. Whatever – things get very steamy atop an altar at this point...

This is a refreshing change from the modern alternatives where the mopey dead boy stalks his potential new girlfriend; or the pouty canine misdirects his anger and frustration at all the wrong targets; or the sociopathic CEO acts out his repressed desires to play with his sister’s Barbie dolls on the new secretary. There’s no beating about the bush: love is declared; passions enflame; duels are fought; lust is slaked. Ba-da-bing! Ba-da-BOOM!

Of course there are those who will say that the writing isn’t descriptive enough: they want the acrobatics, the biological details, the ‘insert-Tab-A-into-Slot-B’ blow-by-blow report. Thankfully, they didn’t have this open slather approach to the subject back then, so there’s a lot of artistry in the descriptive passages: just as Anaïs Nin could elicit steam from a simple large-buckled belt, so too can “Monk” Lewis set pulses racing with what he doesn’t say, more than what he does. This is erotica people, not Sex-Ed. I spurn E.L. James’s detailed and dubious admixtures of sex and feminine hygiene: erotic fiction is supposed to make you squirm in a good way...

There’re plenty of supernatural shenanigans too. At one point, two of our young lovers are residing in a German castle which is haunted every five years by a “Bleeding Nun”, a wandering phantom known to have scared to death previous barons of the castle. Whilst attempting to elope, the young Count Raymond inadvertently absconds with the ghost who thereafter becomes attached to him, haunting him each night. It takes the intercession of yet another legendary figure – the Wandering Jew – to exorcise the Nun, allowing the lovers to get back on track with their romance.

What strikes me most is that, although much of the action is redolent of Shakespeare, with comedic misunderstandings and elaborate plot constructions about which the stories weave, the characters are relentlessly pro-active in circumventing the strictures placed upon them. Agnes plots and schemes her way out of the nunnery into which her relatives have consigned her; Don Raymond is equally motivated to aid her. I have read that Lewis has been branded as “anti-feminist” and a misogynist but I find the evidence for this less than compelling (or at least as compelling as the claim that Stephenie Meyers and E.L. James are championing some form of ‘new feminism’). Lewis is mainly concerned with showing us the disintegration of the character of Ambrosio, the Monk of the title and, in allowing his perfidy to fall most squarely upon the female characters, Lewis merely underscores his antagonist’s villainy. To this end, there is a ‘fortunate’ pair of lovers and an unlucky set; both feel the weight of Ambrosio’s evil (and that of his associates) but only one couple win through to anything remotely like a happy ending. It’s wise, I think, to remember that this tale is a product of its time and, in flouting convention, it assaulted the expectations that readers of the time had adopted as inviolable: if anything, the literary status quo which maintained that all female literary characters be wrapped in cotton wool and worshipped by their male guardians, rather than allowing them choices and the potential to strive and possibly fail, is far more sexist.

Lewis published The Monk when he was twenty and did so anonymously; the second edition – issued by popular demand – bore his name and the acknowledgement that he was now an MP. By 1798 and the fourth edition, he had been forced onto the back foot by a strait-laced public and took a razor to his work, admitting:

 

 

“Twenty is not the age at which prudence is most to be expected. Inexperience prevented my distinguishing what should give offence; but as soon as I found that offence was given, I made the only reparation in my power: I carefully revised the work, and expunged every syllable on which could be grounded the slightest construction of immorality. This, indeed, was no difficult task, for the objection rested entirely on expressions too strong, and words carelessly chosen; not on the sentiments, characters, or general tendency of the work.”

This and subsequent editions were milder in tone and remained so until Oxford University Press saw fit to revive the original printed version in 1980.

The copy I have is an OCR’d cheap version issued through the Oxford University Press. As is usual with this process (and I’ve discussed this previously) there are glitches in the transfer process, including some whole words in a couple of places and the annoying misread of “or” as “of”, but generally it’s okay. The most pressing issue is the fact that all of the footnotes have been deleted, without removing the asterisks that highlighted them, from the body of the text. For any reasonably well-read person, this shouldn’t be a problem – the definitions of such things as ‘Capuchin’ and ‘Franciscan’ should be within the grasp of most – but the omissions do make you feel as though you’re missing out on something crucial.

 

 

I don’t want to toss any spoilers into the mix here, save that the balance of the novel contains some horrific and starkly terrifying imagery: Ambrosio’s descent from pious intolerance to lascivious deviltry takes him and the rest of the characters down some particularly dark turnings, leading to infanticide, incest and murder. In this way, it’s possible to see that this book remains as shocking as anything that is being touted as ‘edgy’ nowadays. Do yourself a favour: ditch the bloodless, teenaged maunderings of the Meyers/James/Stiefvater crowd and dive into a copy of this, a book that Stephen King describes as a “black engine of sex and the supernatural”. You couldn’t do better.

Four tentacled horrors.