Deconstruction of the sexed role

The stereotyped characters acts according to the gendered norms placed on them;

interestingly, the norms enclose other layers of signifying elements in some characters. The slipperiness of gender crossing over to the other side is characteristic of Matilda/Rosario.

Her transgendering defends the women who do not fit in the categories of ideal docile women.

That she survives the monk and escapes from the judgment is explained away by Lewis with the excuses that she is sent by the devil to lure him. Her transformation from Rosario to Matilda brings into play the question as to her real gender, a question that leads to the argument that gender is culturally constructed.

If stereotypes derive from the cultural context whence Lewis finds inspiration, then the cultural sets of gender’s roles delimits his imagination. From the mere explanation by the devil—“I observed your blind idolatry of the Madona’s picture [and] bad a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form”—Matilda from then on has no gender identity problem (440). She becomes the amorphous spirit fashioned by the devil according to his needs rather than a particular gender incarnation. As Brewer puts it:

Matilda’s transgendering does not seriously undermine the prevailing social hierarchies, it does expose the arbitrary and contingent nature of gender identity.

And while Matilda’s repudiation of established value systems and her affirmation of the joys of sensual gratification are unlikely to becomes public policy in a patriarchal society, her critiques…of the restrictions of prescribed gender roles and the mental limitations caused by faulty and incomplete educations cannot be easily dismissed” (204).

She is fashioned with the mask of apparition, things beyond cognition. And she is foreclosed from not only the normal marital lives but from the secular world.

In addition to Matilda’s unworldly being and ambivalent gender-crossing, Beatrice, another revengeful woman trapped in the curse of murder, indulges herself in passion, lust, and love. Her episodes convey the uncanny adventure Raymond has and the legendary figure he meets, the Wandering Jew. Raymond’s interference with the history in his family echoes the theme: men to the rescue and women waiting to be saved, as Lorenzo and his attendants do to the nuns. The chaos brought up by the unmanly monk, and the Prioress, is restored by men symbolizing the righteous against the evil, the masculine against the wicked women. These women by the way are not real women at all, for they are nothing like the gentle, docile or timid women characterized.

The number of wronged women in the novel outweighs that of wronged men. The Domina’s crime results from her pride and rigid authoritarian dominion over her nunnery.

At the end of the revelation, the reader find that Camilla, follower of the authority, does conceal the truth of Agnes’s being alive and conspires with the Domina to fulfill her aim to keep the absolute purity and sanctity of the abbey. The revelation by St. Ursula brings on the fire of hatred among people. The nuns, consequently, are termed the incarnation of evil as they are associated with the crimes of a single person, the Prioress, on the basis that they

all wear the habit that defines that person. The contiguity of covers has spread to the skins underneath it as much as what Clara D. McLean says about the hymen that represents the virgin, “the veil… was already the most solid thing about her—the desired object itself” (117).

The veil of virgin’s hymen is desired by men, while the habits those nuns wear becomes the most distasteful thing. It is the extension of the contiguity that the habits represent—the evil crimes. The mob wants to restore order by destroying them all, not just the Prioress: “[They]

swore that by the break of day not a Nun of St. Clare’s order should be left alive….Some employed themselves in searching out the Nuns…” (357). The contiguity of evil pervades the whole convent and the nuns in it. It shows the work of collected consciousness that turns against the other nuns.

The mob’s destruction of the nunnery is an act of violence against the female sex. The nunnery thus turns into another kind of abject femininity that is to be foreclosed by society.

The abjected nunnery is seen as cloaking evils that the rioters hanker to destroy and

annihilate like the rejected other in a community. The passage describing how the Prioress is publicly disgraced before she dies mimics astonishing of someone who commits the crime of homosexuality:

they showed her every sort of insult, loaded her with mud and filth, and called her by the most opprobrious appellations….They stifled with howls and execrations her shrill cries for mercy; and dragged her through the streets, spurning her, trampling her, and treating her with every species of cruelty which hate or vindictive fury could invent. At length a Flint, aimed by some well-directing hand, struck her full upon the temple. (356)

The hatred toward the innocent nuns is the potential abhorrence against homosexuality.

Homosexuality, to some extent, in the eighteenth century is the conspiracy of same-sexed crime.