The Monk: A Romance

Disguise and misrecognition remain important motifs in these chapters, contributing to the novel’s ongoing critique of Religion, Power, and Hypocrisy as well as its exploration of Appearance Versus Reality. Disguise appears comedic in Theodore’s narrative; Theodore charms the nuns by assuming the role of a handsome beggar extravagantly grateful for the nun’s charity. This adventure points out the religious hypocrisy of the nuns, who are enthralled by a handsome face and happy to have their “vanity” appealed to. Theodore’s facility at disguise, “changing his shape every day” (218), serves as a comic foil to the serious—even tragic—ability of Ambrosio to maintain the façade of a holy man even as he grows more sinful. In Ambrosio’s narrative, religious hypocrisy is literally a matter of life and death, as his determination to maintain his public reputation for saintliness leads him to murder Elvira. This social status as a holy man leads to multiple instances of dramatic irony in these chapters, as Antonia welcomes her mother’s murderer into her home and her landlady seeks out Ambrosio to exorcise Elvira’s ghost. Even Ambrosio, however, is unaware of the deepest layer of misrecognition and tragic irony at play in these chapters: the inability of Elvira, Antonia, and Ambrosio himself to recognize one another as family members. The Monk portrays social relations as so distorted by deception and hypocrisy that its characters literally cannot recognize one another; the novel supports Elvira’s pessimistic view of society as “a world so base, perfidious, and depraved” that no one (217)—not even the “Idol” of Madrid—can be trusted.

This pervasive mood of pessimism and doom reflects the novel’s depiction of Human Frailty in the Face of Temptation and Ambrosio’s continuing fall from grace. The narrative of Ambrosio’s fall follows a clear structure: In Part 1, Ambrosio succumbs to sexual temptation; in Part 2, he commits the far more terrible crime of murder to conceal his sexual transgressions; and in Part 3, Ambrosio symbolically descends into hell itself when he rapes Antonia in the tombs of St. Clare, reaching his “lowest” point both literally and morally. As in many Christian narratives of a person’s “fall” from grace, evil possesses its own momentum. Once Ambrosio succumbs to temptation, the narrative suggests, he will continue to sin ever faster and more terribly. Indeed, Ambrosio’s murder of Elvira only makes him more determined to seduce Antonia, “as if the crimes into which his passion had seduced him, had only increased its violence” (237).

The Monk portrays not only sin in general but sexual desire in particular as momentously powerful and perverse; Antonia appears utterly doomed because, the narrative suggests, corrupt sexuality longs to destroy innocence. In another instance of tragic irony, it is Antonia’s purity that marks her out as Ambrosio’s victim. The narrative repeats again and again that Ambrosio is attracted to Antonia precisely because of her lack of sexual desire: “An air of enchanting innocence and candour pervaded her whole form; and there was a sort of modesty in her nakedness, which added fresh stings to the desires of the lustful Monk” (232). This attraction to sexual innocence suggests a gendered power dynamic in which men lust to dominate vulnerable women. Ambrosio appears obsessed with the idea that once Antonia is in the tombs of St. Clare, she will “be absolutely in his power” (232). This dynamic also reflects the novel’s repeated association of sexual desire with destruction and death: Ambrosio gives in to Matilda’s sexual demands as she hovers on the brink of death; Don Lorenzo’s elopement with Agnes leads to his “marriage” to a corpse; Ambrosio murders Elvira when she interrupts his attempt to rape Antonia; and Ambrosio agrees to poison Antonia—making her “the exact image of Death […] She will appear a Corse to every eye” (254)—to sexually assault her. Even as The Monk suggests that religious orders unjustly repress natural sexual desires, the novel still links Sexual Desire, Danger, and Deviance to one another.

These chapters also continue the novel’s motif of Dreams and Omens; Elvira’s ghost appears to warn Antonia that she will soon follow her into the afterlife. However, just as Antonia dismissed the fortuneteller’s prophecy earlier in the novel, Antonia ignores her mother’s ghost, convincing herself that she hallucinated her mother’s appearance. The Monk portrays religious hypocrisy as so pervasive—and religious leaders as so untrustworthy—that supernatural beings seem to offer an alternative source of higher truth outside the structures of organized religion. However, the novel’s characters seem unable to make use of these revelations, as these specters simply terrify them. Elvira’s ghost, wrapped in a white shroud, also recalls the Bleeding Nun. Like the Bleeding Nun, Ambrosio is a member of a religious order who commits murder in his pursuit of sexual pleasure; this ghostly appearance foreshadows not only Antonia’s but also Ambrosio’s ultimate demise.