By the time Matthew Lewis writes his novel, a transition of taste has taken place from a neo-classical emphasis on symmetry, equilibrium, and control to a late eighteenth-century stress on power, infinity, and extremity of all kinds in aesthetics. In the eighteenth century, a gothic fiction like The Monk is considered to take up a position somewhere between high and popular culture. “Gothic fiction specifically draws upon popular cultural sources to provide the elite with substitutes for the ludic opportunities that have been lost” (Carson 263).
Besides, Addison states that people are “weary of” the format of the classics and show more interests in medievalism (25). It is a vogue in progress by the end of the eighteenth century.
Such is the transformation of taste in art as well as in fiction. E. J. Clery suggests that the promotion of commercialism indirectly helps the growth of the literature of terror. John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld, eighteenth-century critics, assume that reading frightful stories of apparitions brings forth designed terror which produces pleasure. The horror is wrought with “sublime and imagination” that form the stories (Aikin and Barbauld 124).
The pleasure one gains from reading is,
attached to the excitement of surprise from new and wonder objects…Passion and
fancy co-operating, elevate the soul to its highest pitch and the pain of terror is left in amazement. Hence, the more wild, fanciful, and extraordinary are the
circumstances of a scene of horror, the more pleasure We receive from it, and where they are too near common nature, though violently borne by curiosity through the adventure, We cannot repeat it or reflect on it without an over-balance of pain. (Aikin and Barbauld 125-6)
Aikin and Barbauld associate the terror in the Gothic romance with the effects of the sublime.
They believe that an infiltrating air of suspense and surprising horror allow readers to gain pleasure from this kind of reading. Otherwise, one may fall into ennui because of trivial and trifling narrative details in a novel. As to the sublime experience, they consider it to be the working of artificial terror where one can go through such experience with pleasure, yet untouched by real pain. On reading tales of apparitions, the artistic experience elevates the soul to a different level of sensational enjoyment. Literature of terror begins to be
appreciated by Burke’s contemporaries and begins to gain its due reputation by the eighteenth century. Clery assumes that the readers can indulge themselves with “a fantasy of fear” in the thoughts of being “free of” the “social determination” (9). By this indulgence in terror, the readers can enjoy the pleasure that gothic novels bring when they enjoy the effects brought by the spectrality—the sublime and uncanny.
The sublime is regarded as an aesthetic experience which calls forth extreme feelings.
However, feelings of the sublime are produced on condition of self-preservation and generate pleasure in the process of witnessing terror of all sorts. Edmund Burke suggests that terror
“is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close” (Burke 42).
The sublime incarnates and distances the negative emotions or passions incurred from the exterior stimulations while maintaining self-preservation, which makes the aesthetic representation of themes most horrible and terrible, but ultimately safe. This kind of
aesthetic vogue spurs the production of gothic novels.
Burke defines the sublime in his book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as follows:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling (36).
It is imperative to understand thoroughly what causes the sublime. The sublime, applied to the novel, distorts aesthetic presentation and representation in the form of violence and power.
Hence, despite the voluptuous theme that penetrates the whole story, The Monk’s aesthetics is still that of performing horror and transforming experienced horror into pleasure. The uncanny is a mood of insecurity, a feeling of being pressed by invisible danger. The sublime, however, is a violent, emotional response caused by exterior stimulation. The qualities of an object to generate sublime feelings are generalized as follows—color, shape, size, touch, and amount, all of which appear in full strength; hence emotional response always comes in full intensity. They always come in forms—such as the darkest in color, the most irregular in shape, the largest in size, the roughest to the feel, and the amounts in infinity—are conductive to feelings of the sublime. Beside those qualities, the sublime is also associated with the characters of infinity, obscurity, and power.
Infinity gives the sense of eternity that one can never grasp or dominate. As to obscurity, it “[makes] any thing very terrible” since terror often comes with uncertainty (Burke 54). Hence, the sublime is mainly constructed by feelings of terror which are often triggered by danger. Power is another element that causes insecurity, danger, and
intimidation. The sensation of being subjected to power leads to the idea of pain, which “is always inflicted by a power in some way superior” (Burke 59). Such power derives from
immense strength that is never subservient to man’s use or dominance. It carries the features of destruction that is also uncontrolled. Power often gives impression of
intimidation with horror. Therefore, anything that is regarded as powerful in a destructive way is often termed sublime.