57 pages • 1 hour read
Matthew LewisThe Monk: A Romance
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1796A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: The Development of the Gothic Novel
Lewis’s The Monk significantly influenced the development of the Gothic novel in English. The genre first emerged in the late 18th century with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Ann Radcliffe’s novels published in the 1780s and 1790s, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). These novels draw on popular European folklore in depicting eerie castles and crumbling ancestral mansions. Often portrayed as the decaying ruins of a pre-Enlightenment age, these settings conjure an appropriately terrifying atmosphere for tales of family curses, murderous secrets, and scheming aristocrats. Radcliffe’s novels typically feature innocent heroines imprisoned in castle towers or dungeons, struggling to free themselves from villainous captors.
Lewis draws heavily on folklore, ghost stories, and ballads to create a chilling atmosphere for his characters’ adventures. He also clearly builds on the work of Radcliffe in The Monk; Lewis’s heroines contend with similar threats of imprisonment and sexual violence. However, The Monk also contains new elements that shaped the development of the Gothic novel. In Radcliffe’s work, the supernatural threats posed by ghosts, demons, and sorcery are always revealed to be fictitious; a Radcliffe heroine ultimately discovers that the ghostly terrors exist only within her imagination. In The Monk, the supernatural world—including not only ghosts but also omens, prophesies, magicians, and Satanism—is absolutely real and powerfully impacts the fates of Lewis’s characters. The Monk rejects Enlightenment rationalism to depict a mysterious, haunted, and magical world in which the demonic is an ever-present threat. Later Gothic novels similarly employ supernatural phenomena as key elements within their sensationalistic plots.
Perhaps most influentially, Lewis presents monasteries and convents as ideal settings for horror. While the castle and the mansion remain key structures within the tradition of the Gothic novel, The Monk inspired an entire sub-genre of 19th-century literature depicting haunted abbeys, corrupt convents, lustful friars, and tyrannical mother superiors. This choice of setting would have dovetailed with the likely preconceptions of Lewis’s readership. Predominantly Protestant cultures like 18th- and 19th-century England tended to view Catholicism skeptically, associating it with the appearance rather than the substance of faith as well as with oppressive ecclesiastical hierarchies. By portraying monasteries and convents as sites of superstition, corruption, torture, and imprisonment, The Monk offered a new direction for the Gothic novel—one that emphasized Religion, Power, and Hypocrisy as sources of horror.
Historical Context: Horrors of the French Revolution
Published in 1796, The Monk appeared only four years after the start of the French Revolution in 1792. The French Revolution—which deposed and executed members of the ruling monarchy and established a more democratic, republican form of government in France—caused widespread horror and anxiety throughout Europe; governments feared that their peoples might adopt similarly revolutionary measures, while powerful aristocrats proclaimed the dangers of overturning the traditional social order. These conservative fears seemed vindicated in 1793 when the French Republican government entered a period known as “the Terror”; during this period, thousands of aristocrats—and anyone else determined to be an enemy of the state—were publicly executed by guillotine. Revolutionary idealism gave way to fears of new forms of tyranny. Lewis, the author of The Monk, lived in Paris in 1793, and he witnessed the build-up to this extended period of violence.
The seemingly new power of the common people—or “the mob”—to enact violence against the elite and powerful was perhaps the greatest source of cultural anxiety in the era of the French Revolution. Influential philosophers like Edmund Burke feared that such crowds would destroy British institutions of law and order. The Monk captures this contemporary fear of mob violence in the scene of the destruction of the Convent of St. Clare. While Don Lorenzo and Mother St. Ursula are initially eager to reveal the prioress’s crimes to the public, the crowd soon transforms into a riotous mob set on vengeance not just against the prioress but upon the convent itself (as well as the innocent nuns inside). In many ways, The Monk seems to share the French revolutionaries’ hatred of tyranny and corruption; chained and starving in a dungeon, the innocent Agnes resembles the prisoners of the Bastille freed at the start of the French Revolution. However, the novel ultimately discourages inciting “the Populace” against corrupt institutions by suggesting that “popular phrenzy” inevitably leads to “devastation and horror” (275-76).
