Chapter Three: Gender Performativity
II. Stereotyped women and cultural performance
The male and female classifications work in tandem with the third category. While the third kind signifies the gender’s slippage, the other two denote the authority established through regulation of masculinity’s and femininity’s value. Women in the novel are
characteristic of their various traits shown outwards and sorted out as the gentle, the married, and the rapacious. “The character…may be written on countenance, brow, fancy, mind, or heart…but it veracity is …proportional to the very image of writing or engraving seems to insist that the ground be seen strictly as surface” (Sedgwick 154).12 Forging his characters in this way, Lewis can manipulate the interplay of gender types. The three
women—Antonia, Agnes, and Virginia de Villa-Franca—fall in the category of the gentle, a type of gender idealized by male-oriented values. Despite the divergent fate that awaits them, the three young ladies have one thing in common, the tender manner. However, from tenderness to docility, there is only a thin line separating the two. The gentle, docile
features accompany the signification of purity and innocence in characters as well as in sex.
From the implicit display of female virtue, the three women manage to stay away from sensual pleasure of all sorts, termed as forbidden and punishable. They are the ideal women in a patriarchal standard as much as what William D. Brewer calls Antonia: the
“unambiguously feminine woman” (200).
Virginia makes her debut in the parade appear to be astonishing to the on-lookers that
“[her] beauty [one] may have heard celebrated” (348).13 Yet it is not merely her corporeal beauty that wins her the Duke’s graces but also her treatment of the invalid nun: “while his eyes were enchanted with her Form, the sweetness of her manners and her tender concern for
the suffering Nun prepossessed his heart in her favour” (395, italics mine). Her angelic
manner later wins her a husband as, in words of Toni Wein, “‘virtue’ gets entangled with12 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. (New York: Methuem, 1980).
13 The quotation in Mattew G. Lewis’s The Monk in this thesis will be followed only by page numbers in the parentheses, and without any abbreviation preceded.
economic reality (127). Lewis grants Virginia the opportunity of a better life, escape from convent life and an union with Lorenzo, rewarding her gender type of the virtuous woman.
In resonance with the morality of female virtue incarnate in Virginia, Agnes, at the end of her narration, addresses Raymond, her husband-to-be, saying: “the more culpable have been the errors of your Mistress, the more exemplary shall be the conduct of your Wife”
(417). Her succumbing to sexual intercourse and pregnancy are voiced through her mouth and simplified as the mere effect of the unguarded moment; the incident is endowed with a purpose, which marks “a new marital ideal that privileged the desires of the prospective spouse as the proper foundation for marriage” (Jones 139). Virtue in Agnes is functional with family name and with a woman’s reputation. During her narration, Agnes does not utter a word about female sexual pleasure, which directs the reader to think of Agnes as loyalty to her lover, faithful to her virtue, but fallen prey to passion.
The reality of premarital sexual intercourse--her baby is born in the dungeon of the sepulcher—does not taint Agnes’s narration or her consummation of love with Raymond. It is partly attributed to their marriage made up for by the author, and partly to Agnes’s
faithfulness not only to love but to her husband. The possible passage to arouse sensual feelings is eliminated by Lewis for the purpose to make the couple appears to be pure as ever.
With the promise of pure, uncontaminated soul guaranteed, the couple is immune from the name of impurity.
Agnes is characterized as a woman faithful to her spouse and obedient to morality, thus buttressing the basics of society’s solidity. In comparison, Antonia symbolizes another expected type of gentle women. Antonia is both praised and punished for her naiveté. She is characterized as innocent, timid, and modest. If the trait of timidity is translated in terms of gender, Antonia is beyond a doubt passive. Leonella’s parodied behavior in gentlemen’s presence also to “…play off her airs of modesty… and expected the compliments of Don
Christoval” simply contrasts and makes stand out Antonia’s involuntary “crimson” on her face much welcomed by the gentlemen as shyness (203). Modesty like any other trait functions in the text as a sign superimposed on each character; some have it and some don’t.
The one who do are thus complimented by the gentlemen; the ones who don’t but mimick it, find themselves trapped in the embarrassment of futile endeavor.
Antonia’s innocence is attributed to the lack of sexual knowledge and sensual love.
Her mother’s bowdlerizing of the Bible’s plain words related to sex is another token of purity:
pure women are meant to be kept innocent and overprotected from the complexity of sex as always. Her inner reflection to the Friar Ambrosio’s question about love’s nature divulges the most ignorant kind of a naïve damsel can have: “she thought of a Husband with all a Virgin’s terror, and negatived the Friar’s demand without a moment’s hesitation” (260). She confuses adoration for her equals with admiration for the elders. While Ambrosio asks if she feels the way for someone that the thought is fully occupied with his faces and voices, Antonia neglects or even misinterprets Ambrosio’s euphemistic and ambiguous words in language.14 Her confidence in elders exposes her as precious yet helpless meat to her predator. Besides, she values her virginity to such an exceeding extent that after the rape she beseeches the ravisher to release her; in return she would not disclose his mischief to the world. Instead of fighting back, she compromises to escapes from life imprisonment because she gives up the hope of getting felicity of marriage ever.
The second category Lewis pays little attention to play supplementary roles merely to form a contrast to the gentle damsels: the mature women with wisdom, Marguerite, and Antonia’s mother Elvira Delfa. Both gain their wisdom concerning the darker side of love’s nature from the sediments of life experiences. Marguerite realizes her husband involves in bloody murder of innocent travelers; on the other hand, Elvira notices her husband’s profound
14 See The Monk in page 261.
melancholy and homesickness occasioned by lack of money. His irresponsible nature cools down the heart of love, and supportive attitude Elvira is originally capable of. The
standards for wives in the two women are measured and rewarded not by their virtues or feminine traits anymore, those ironically do not help in plagues of marital problems, as it does in courtship. During their seclusion from original society, one thing is certain that both women here are loaded with more burden than their husbands to repay the wrong-doings done by two.
The rapacious, like the Duchess, Donna Rodolpha, and the ridiculed, forward Leonella, Antonia’s aunt, bear some resemblance in that the two women are both drawn to men that show no interest in them. They are “self-assertive” women including the Domina who receive torture or death whereby, as Karl J. Winter terms it, Lewis addresses his stance in forms of misogyny (Winter 97). In the patriarchal society women become scapegoats for him to shirk responsibility for the cruelty and violence imposed on them. Leonella and the Duchess commit the same blunder that they are too eager to take the initiative to unfold their true feelings, which is supposed to be the job of men. The stereotyped characters they represent are more vocal than the gentle women, more rebellious than the mature, even more outward and aggressive in pursuit of courteous love. Thus, their directness performs an aggressive gesture and signals their voluptuous nature, which is not only jeered by women but also by men. Leonella is punished by her ungrounded vain ridiculed by many others especially Don Christoval in private; Donna Rodolpha is punished by ending up with death caused by stroke. The ill treatment of such a type of women reveals that the patriarchal centered idea of femininity denies the existence of such kind of women as ones to be loved and taken seriously.