The Transposition of Gothic

Abstract

The publication of The Monk by Matthew Lewis in 1796 marked a decisive turning-point in the development of Gothic. Other writers of the 1790s, such as Radcliffe, Bage and Holcroft, had taken over a genteel literary tradition and attempted to open it up by broaching within its parameters themes of personal and political liberation. Since their paramount value was reason, they felt obliged to maintain a consistent moral perspective in their work. Oddly, The Monk too is written from a rationalistic point of view and there is much in it that is consistent with the radical temper of the times, but it is marked off from its predecessors by its unequivocal character as a work of popular literature, by its frank espousal and even exultation in the erotic, in violence, in the horrors of the supernatural. Where Mrs Radcliffe presented mysterious happenings and then explained them away, Lewis presented the satanic as real; where she hinted at illicit sensuality and gestured towards obscure crimes, Lewis openly presented and described. What made the book all the more disturbing was the equivocal attitude which Lewis took towards his subject: behind a genteel deploring of such nefarious goings-on can be discerned a humanistic point of view, similar to that Diderot, which sees the religious and ascetic life as unnatural because it contradicts the essential nature of man; but at the back of that is the implication that man is most truly himself when most utterly perverse: that is to say, when he follows deep and unexplained impulses within him. The Monk reflects the intellectual ferment and confusion in the aftermath of the French Revolution: its clearest message is the disintegration of all traditional moral values and one which the Gothic iconography is able to present with the utmost force.