The sex and authority with excess are applied to episodes in order to generate strong emotions in characters. Ambrosio’s desire is so strong that he fails to manage them and lets them overtake him. This forces him to act horribly, which not only causes imposed sublime feelings in his victims but in him as well. Ambrosio’s soliloquy denotes his excessive passions and loss of ability to pursue fun and pleasure in the secular world, for the nuns appear to be attractive to him and their appearance is seductive as well:
I must accustom my eyes to Objects of temptation [of the noblest Dames of
Madrid], and expose myself to the seduction of luxury and desire. Should I meet in that world which I am constrained to enter some lovely Female, lovely…as you Madona… (40).
As Ambrosio is overtaken by the fame of meeting those young confessors, his mind is full to overflowing with lust and pride, both of which drive him to commit crimes. The purifying
ceremony of confession in the altar is changed into the filthy beds of lascivious imagination.
His soliloquy reveals his regrets, regrets for things not in his domain. A sense of
desperation is revealed from what he exclaims: “Oh! If such a Creature existed, and existed but for me! […] Woman is for ever lost to me” (41). Unable to find an outlet, he resorts to the picture of Madonna for comfort. He personalizes the objects he desires in hope of extinguishing the fire of lust only to find it in vain. The feelings of want turn into a strong sensation of loss which stems from his yearning for the unattainable persons and objects.
Therefore, his yearning turns into relentless craving for the lost object that forces him into violence and sexual abuse of his victims. Failing to fulfill the sense of loss, he can only gratify his senses by adopting other means.
Lust constructed from his sense of void in some sense has similar qualities to that of the
“loss” of love (Burke 37). The loss of love leads to the state of madness, close to “positive pain” that constructs the important element in the Sublime. “Desire is ineffably linked to the dual commodities of beauty and virginity in The Monk” (Wright 44). To Ambrosio, both Antonia and Matilda’s virginity in some sense can be consummated like products. Satiated with excessive sexuality, Ambrosio cannot feel satisfied from his manner. He is forever lost in the “enthrallment” of the gothic dynamic through the attempt to seek transformation by taking action; in the long run he becomes his own victim by his identity-seeking (Day 26).
Once the intercourse is done, the virginity is gone like products that may wear out some day.
If that performance exists simply for great sensation, Burke suggests, it cannot perform its function to generate real pleasure in man. Instead, one may end up submitting to “indolence and inaction” (38). Accordingly, Ambrosio’s pointless pursuit of sexual pleasure does not have a real purpose such as procreation. Therefore, going after sexual pleasure merely keeps him in the state of asking more and makes him grow unsatisfied with Matilda. His pursuit becomes a vicious circle in an effort to fill up a hole that can never be full.
The excessive craving and lament for his imagined loss compel him to fill his loss by means of power of authority and satiation of sexual pleasure. Therefore, as he falls prey to debauchery, he indulges himself in “intemperate appetites” for he is going after incomplete satisfactions of sexual pleasure (224). It is incomplete in a way that he cannot gain any spiritual satisfaction from physical encounters with Matilda. Ambrosio’s lustful satiation and ambition for dominance amount to excessive degrees as to bring repugnant feelings towards Matilda: “His warm constitution still made him seek in her arms the gratification of his lust: But when the moment of passion was over, He quitted her with disgust, and his humour, naturally inconstant, made him sigh impatiently for variety” (235). The monk is supposed to feel gratified after his sexual intercourse either with Matilda or with Antonia.
Moreover, Ambrosio’s satiation with sexual pleasure comes along with ennui. Hoping to get away from the ennui of the monastery, he finds himself imprisoned in repetitive sexual acts invoking nothing but boredom. His sexuality is not gratified by sexual abuse of Antonia or intercourse with Matilda. On the contrary, the thrilling pleasure in intercourse is decreased or even eliminated by Ambrosio’s refracted response of misogyny after sex.
Lewis establishes the uncanny and sublime atmosphere based on The Monk’s spectrality.
However, not giving full credit to such effects in his gothic fiction, he pokes fun by making it a burlesque by means of deflating the apogee of the ghostly atmosphere.
D. The parody of gothic sublime
Lewis adopts Ambrosio and Matilda to perform the spectrality on which uncanny and sublime feelings are based. But, he caricatures not only the characters but the spectrality as well. He succeeds in manipulating the discontinuity of the uncanny and sublime effects resulted from the story’s spectrality. Besides, the sentimentality is made into a caricature,
“via his cynical presentation of the persecuted heroine” (Watt 87). It is best exemplified in
Virginia’s case:
Virginia requested that the Unknown might be given to her in charge. […] In truth, She made this promise more from consideration for herself, than for either Lorenzo or the Captive. […] She hoped that her attention to this Unfortunate would raise her a degree in the esteem of Lorenzo (375; ellipsis mine).
The discontinuity of styles and atmosphere renders the writer able to shift his stance freely.
All of the above-mentioned elements usurped by Lewis to perform horror are in parody of sublime and uncanny effects and in burlesque of sentimentality and a spectral air.
Regardless of the genuine affection Matilda has, the narrator later explains away
Matilda’s motives for seduction by her identity. Besides, in spite of her identity as someone sent by a demon, her characteristics also undergo transformation, from a docile maid who offers everything to her lover, to an assertive woman. The monk also possesses
contradictory features. Elizabeth MacAndrew supposes that the protagonists being punished by another arch villain is the formula of the gothic novel used in order to go against the tradition of the sentimental novel where protagonists are defeated by their environment.6 And The Monk is neither a typical gothic novel nor a sentimental novel, since “characters in the Gothic are frequently flat” (Mass 233). Though Ambrosio as an arch villain, morally ambiguous, in that his intended mercy to either Agnes or Antonia is finally impeded by Matilda but he is also persuaded and commits the crime. He intends to pardon Agnes’s sin and leave Antonia secluded yet alive. In terms of a gothic story, it is not a marvelous work that explains everything. There are “morally ambiguous” features in their characterizations (Hume 285). The ambiguity in morality does not group Ambrosio into as completely a resentful villain as Lucifer.
The discontinuity makes the work more diverse in styles. The sudden appearance of
6 See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. (New York: Columbia UP, 1979), 68.
biblical figure coming to the rescue kills off the horrific air that the ghostly nun invokes.
Apart from that, the failure of self-preservation in Ambrosio’s case testifies to Lewis’s violating the rule of the sublime. The monk’s death makes the novel less sublime than uncanny. His punishment executed by a demon suggests not an authoritative fulfillment of justice, but a more questionable ending—that is, the last justice is done by the hand of a vicious being instead of righteous personae, such as, God or His surrogate, the Church of Rome. The biblical figure and the villain’s tragic but cowardly ending demonstrate Lewis’s aim to use anti-climax in the resolution of his plots. What is more, the Gothic novel is a kind of literary style that opposes “bourgeois rationality, modernity or enlightenment”—the spirits representing the eighteenth century in general (Baldick & Mighall 210). The punishment of Ambrosio implicitly suggests the narrator’s unreliability towards conducting moral judgment in realistic novels.
The way in which Lewis deals with his protagonist’s death indicates a defiant form of tradition. On the surface, it neither follows the tradition of the sentimental novel nor fully exploits the Gothic sublime. In the way Ambrosio is killed off, a moral didacticism seems at work. Lewis has the demon, the arch villain, who incarnates all collective sins, deceive the monk and instigate another sin through which the monk indirectly receives his punishment.
The demon’s inducement and deception leads to Ambrosio’s death. The novel with “the combination of styles” appropriates the sublime to its own use and condemns the “Faustian overreacher” to damnation, instead of salvation on a par with the prime rule of
self-preservation in the sublime (Howard 13). According to Punter, seeing that the author is conscious of his narrative strategies, the theme of violence as well as the techniques of spectrality are but his ways of “using all the resources in [his] power to convince us of the reality of phantoms and then sneering at belief” (67).