Misplaced intimacy is not only an implied evil in The Monk and The Italian. It in fact represents a genuine Pandora ’s Box, from which misery proceeds. Not surprisingly, the correction of misplaced intimacy parallels a character’s ascent to happiness. Agnes’s
relationship with her dead infant is a case in point, a relationship that has attracted polarized comments from critics. Conger argues that Agnes “is tortured by the corpse of [her] dead child” (125). Fincher highlights Agnes’s maternal delight in beholding her baby, however monstrous and disgusting it may be for others (92). Both views are only partially correct because they fail to take into consideration the gradual change in Agnes’s affection towards her dead child.
Agnes’s maternal fondness is first characterized by physical contact: “I placed [the baby] on my bosom, its soft arm folded round my neck, and its pale cold cheek resting upon mine” (412). The intimacy between mother and child affects even Agnes’s persecutor. But as the dead body turns into “a mass of putridity,” tender affection translates into mad infatuation:
“I vowed not to part with it while I had life . . . In vain did human feelings bid me recoil from this emblem of mortality” (412). Not until this point can we claim that Agnes is “tortured” by her dead child. Despite her unwillingness to part with the corpse, Agnes acknowledges that it has become a source of disgust: “Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms, which bred in the corrupted flesh of my Infant. At such times I shrieked with terror and disgust, . . . trembled with all a Woman’s weakness” (415). The shift from a mother’s love to a woman’s weakness marks the increasing discomfort of the physical intimacy that Agnes insists on sustaining. This discomfort stems from the fact that Agnes’s infatuation with her child is misplaced in two senses. Not only does it deprive the child of the right to a proper burial. It also perpetuates the Domina’s punishment of her, because her refusal to leave the corpse confirms and exacerbates her exclusion from the living world.
Significantly, it is not until Agnes meets the Marchioness and Virginia, until their kind friendship replaces the memory of her child in her mind, that she is willing to bury the dead.
Agnes’s return to a happy world coincides with a redirection of her affection. But Lewis’s narrative focuses primarily on what happen before such a redirection, before intimacy conforms to social norms.
Lewis’s dramatization of the affective bond between parents and children must have arrested Radcliffe’s attention. Radcliffe reworks Agnes’s reluctance to leaves a beloved object and elaborates it with more details. Agnes’s declaration “I vowed not to part with it while I had life” surfaces in The Italian as Ellena’s professed refusal to yield a cherished portrait of her “father” to Schedoni: “I cannot part with it, … you do not wish me to part with it” (235). On the face of it, these two emotional ties differ as much as infatuation differs from attachment. A profound fear of separation urges Agnes to treat her dead child as if it were alive. On the contrary, Ellena acknowledges that death has already separated her from her father. Far from chilling her filial fondness, separation prompts Ellena to remember her father and to think of her father with wistful yearning: “Alas! he is dead! Or I should not now want a protector” (235).
Despite this stark contrast, Agnes’s infatuation and Ellena’s attachment share one important common ground. Like the former, the latter is predicated on misplaced affection, one that undermines the value of intimacy. To begin with, Ellena wrongly regards the
miniature of her uncle, Schedoni, as that of her father, the first Count di Bruno. And Schedoni
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also mistakes Ellena for his own child. Although this mistake is not revealed until the end of the novel, interspersed in the narrative are uncomfortable hints that this assumed father-daughter relationship is a false one. For instance, Schedoni both desires and fears Ellena’s expression of daughterly tenderness: “at one moment he would pause to gaze upon her, and in the next would quit her with a frenzied start” (237). Betraying a strong sense of uncertainty, this alternation suggests that Schedoni does not know whether joyful embrace of a daughter or strong disgust at an enemy is the right course of action to take. Similarly, Ellena alternates between trusting and doubting Schedoni’s claim of paternity. At one moment Schedoni’s apparent familiarity with Ellena’s family “remove[s] every doubt of his identity” (239). The next moment sees “the gloom of doubt and apprehension again over-spread[ing] [her
features]” (247). Blurring the boundary between close friends and unwelcome strangers, this disturbing uncertainty exposes the possibility that Schedoni may be unworthy of her filial attachment. Mistake and intimacy are intertwined.
The association of mistake and intimacy culminates in Ellena’s own explanation of Schedoni’s late visit to her room. In this instance, mistake helps both to shape and to reshape a close affective tie. Ellena wrongly believes that Schedoni comes to save her life from the villain Spalatro: “O! my father, do not deny me the pleasure of shedding these tears of gratitude, . . . can I ever forget that it was my father, who saved me from [Spalatro’s]
poniard!” (248). This is one of the rare moments in the novel when Ellena calls Schedoni by the name of “father” with apparent sincerity. The implied intimacy in this appellation, however, does not please Schednoi: “‘It is enough, say no more;’ and he raised Ellena, but turned away without embracing her” (248). Readers know, as well as Schedoni, that it is Ellena’s mistaken gratitude, her confusion of a murderer with a savior, that annoys her
“father.” If Ellena’s mistaken gratitude prompts her to be verbally intimate with Schedoni, it also prevents an intimate affective bond from taking root between them, because it constantly reminds Schedoni of his criminal intention and because Ellena finds it the only sentiment that she is capable of feeling in his presence. “[S]he perceived it was now nearly impossible to love and revere him as her father, and she endeavoured, by dwelling upon all the obligations, which she believed he had lately conferred upon her, to repay him in gratitude, what was withheld in affection” (302). Instead of being her father to whom she is connected by blood, Schedoni assumes the role of her friend to whom she owes a debt of gratitude. Bound up with mistake, father-daughter intimacy becomes either undesirable or unattainable.
Ellena and Schedoni are not the only characters in The Italian who find filial/parental intimacy disturbing. Misplaced affection has a powerful impact on Olivia and Vivaldi as well because it threatens to tinge intimacy with depravity. Throughout the novel Ellena never allows emotion to overwhelm her prudence. The only exception occurs when, impatient to arrange a reunion of her parents, she sends Schedoni a message requesting to see him.
Olivia’s agitated response spells out the consequence of this imprudence:
‘if he sees me,’ said Olivia, I am irrevocably lost! O! unhappy Ellena! your
precipitancy has destroyed me. The original of this portrait is not the Count di Bruno,
my dear lord, nor your parent, but his brother, the cruel husband’—
Olivia left the sentence unfinished (380-81; emphasis in original)
This passage associates misplaced intimacy with terror. Wrongly believing that Schedoni is her father, Ellena terrifies Olivia by inviting her enemy to meet her. Olivia’s speech is arrested probably by her terrible memory of her reluctant physical intimacy with Schedoni and the consequent marriage. Misplaced intimacy is terrifying because it collapses proper emotional boundary separating father and uncle, husband and ravisher. Without this boundary, intimacy is tainted with moral disgust.
Tainted intimacy has long been an obstacle to the consummation of Ellena’s and Vivaldi’s mutual attachment. The Marchese consistently associates Vivaldi’s affection for
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Ellena with mistakes generally, with moral lapses in particular. This can be inferred from the way he describes Ellena: “It is said that she had so artfully adapted her temper to yours, that, with the assistance of a relation who lives with her, she has reduced you to the degrading situation of her devoted suitor” (29). In this sentence the Marchese portrays Ellena as a manipulative fortune hunter whose artful contrivance has caused a young man to forget his family duty and to deviate from the right path. The Marchesa’s plotting with Schedoni against Ellena has led most readers to believe that Ellena’s obscure family background is the only reason why her marriage with Vivaldi is undesirable.22 But the Marchese’s comment indicates an alternative reading. What stands between Vivaldi and Ellena is not simply the latter’s inferior social class but also her allegedly depraved morality. And moral flaws corrupt intimacy as easily as unequal social status.
By the end of the novel, concern for moral depravity overtakes that for class as the primary barrier to Vivaldi’s union with Ellena. Schedoni’s dying confession clearly illustrates this point. Convinced that the Marchese, like his wife, objects to the marriage on
socio-economic grounds, Schedoni declares in his presence that Ellena is of noble decent: “[Ellena]
is my daughter, . . . She is the daughter of a noble house, . . . In me you behold the last of the Counts di Bruno” (392). In this instance, the content of the confession becomes less
important than the identity of the confessor. By this point of the novel, Schedoni has been convicted of murder. This identity has already made him a social pariah and made any alliance with him repulsive. Far from exhibiting any joy, the Marchese “smile[s]
contemptuously” in response to this revelation because Schedoni’s avowal of his paternity
22 The abbess of San Stefano’s taunting comment on Ellena confirm this impression: “You never can be sufficiently grateful … for the generosity the Marchesa displays … she permits you to return into [the world], and gives you a suitable partner to support you through its cares and toils, — a partner much more suitable to your circumstances than him, to whom you had the temerity to lift your eye” (83).
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succeeds more in besmearing Ellena with taints of depravity than in dispelling the
Marchese’s prejudices (392). Even Vivaldi acknowledges that, were Schenoni Ellena’s father, he must despair of marrying her (391). The removal of this obstacle, significantly, relies on the clarification of the relationship between Schedoni and Ellena. Schedoni’s misplaced paternal affection for his niece must be redressed, the distinction between father and uncle established, before mutual attachment and marital intimacy can be desirable.