Womanhood: sublimity of power

The sexed role of men and women is not bestowed by masculine power unto women.

Hancock analyzes how womanhood becomes a dominant concept as domesticity is extolled, and succeeds in spreading ideas that take root in people’s ideological thinking in general.

Appropriating Hancock’s study and applying it to eighteenth-century female characters, the readers are to find the power lying behind presentation and performances of each act. What domesticity is to nineteenth-century female characters is what virginity, chastity and purity are to eighteenth-century heroines. The presentation of sexuality is bridled by these chaste concepts that compose of the womanhood.

The concept of womanhood embodied in female characters shows forth the sublimity of power that not only inscribes regulations on female bodies but also utilizes the inscription of power to control and confine female perception of the world. The inscribed bodies reflect the ideology of sexuality, female virtue and virginity. The power does not merely control Agnes but also other females’ movements as they encounter the other sex. It also constitutes an irresistible enticement that draws men to attempt to conquer the power of sublimity. As the transition of womanhood takes effects and transforms from nature of beauty to sublime, sexual intercourse is more than a mere act stimulated by sexual desire. It mingles with the swelling ambitions of men to turn the power in womanhood’s sublimity into their possession as if they conquered the power of female virtue inscribed on women’s bodies.

When Rosario’s identity is known to him, Rosario’s religious virtue reflects his purity in mind as well as in body. Rosario confesses “’Tis my unbounded adoration of religion; ‘Tis my soul’s exquisite sensibility of the beauty of fair and good, that loads me with shame!” (55).

The virtue cannot but arouse his sensual feelings. Physical beauty opens up his sensual feelings; female virtues like chastity, innocence and virginity encompassed in womanhood, facilitate those feelings to take root in Ambrosio’s heart and change them into sexual desire.

As Ambrosio listens to Matilda’s confession,

He felt a secret pleasure in reflecting that a young and seemingly lovely Woman had for his sake abandoned the world, and sacrificed every other passion to that which He had inspired: Still less did He perceive that his heart throbbed with desire, while his hand was pressed gently by Matilda’s ivory finger (62).

Following each word in Rosario’s discourse and leading unto the confessions of Matilda, Ambrosio strongly receives the signal that the passions of the beauty are devoted to him and him only. Seeing that the single-minded passion is devoted to him with purity, his

exceeding joy is beyond words, and at last would drive him to seek power residing with the female sublimity in womanhood.

The power of sublimity in womanhood, in essence, is that it gives them autonomy over their own bodies. The notion of staying pure in terms of sex and sexuality is inscribed on their bodies and drives them to perform the principle. And male characters desire to gain authority over women’s autonomy that guides their manners and behaviors. Since educated and protected by the ideological strongholds on virginity, Agnes’s voluntary surrender to her lover symbolizes that the power of her virginity is in the hands of her lover. And her lover who gets her consent begins to safeguard womanhood in turn. The womanhood’s sublimity is protected by the men in the case that ladies willingly submit themselves to their lovers.

Yet, as to Ambrosio, he violates Antonia’s autonomy by force, breaks down the power of sublimity. As for other male characters, to replace the autonomy with male attraction by winning over the females’ hearts is in a sense the replacement of power. The replacement of female autonomy over their bodies is fully exemplified by Agnes’s surrender to Raymond, and Lorenzo’s efforts in turning the power of a mother given by the power of womanhood to his favor. Lorenzo assures Elvira of his true feelings by relating to his fortune and

background that can offer a better life for her daughter. “I have no reason to dread his

forbidding the marriage,… But supposing him to refuse his sanction, what have I still to fear?

My parents are no more; My little fortune is in my own possession” (212). Lorenzo makes efforts to change the mother’s thoughts, regarding the possibility of marriage between him and Antonia to be an “imprudent step” (212). The mother’s power of sublimity is shown on her capability to determine her daughter’s future for fear of Antonia following her footsteps.

She is meant to prevent her daughter from the miserable life she suffers from an unapproved marriage. And Lorenzo is struggling with Elvira’s supposition of the romantic vision. He is struggling with Elvira’s authority over her daughter, and with the autonomy of not

submitting the chastity easily to romantic vision despite the man’s superiority in social status.

III. The issue of desire

Lewis’s contemporaries dread the evil effects of the Gothic writing that with much emphasis on themes such as sexuality, violence and implicit taboo may cause the reader go astray in morality. Since “‘Gothic writing’ was a product of ‘Fancy,’” the traces of ideology are not meant for didactic aims (Mishra 8). Lewis presents the ideology of sexuality

through supernatural contexts. As Mishra explains:

we always ask ourselves three fundamental questions: what is the nature of the sublime objects (the text), who is the agent that produces this object (the author), and what is the nature of the spectator (the reader) who encounters the object.

Depending on our ideological position, we may well have radically different answers. (21)

Because of the perspectives the readers take, the way to examine the ideology projected unto the work may also vary. Considering the elements used in The Monk, readers are to find that as Eagleton suggests ideology has many faces. By the same token, the sexuality of The

Monk cannot be defined in a word to conclude whether Lewis extols sexual liberation to go

against the contemporary ideological thinking or not. Besides, it would divert from the point to refer to The Monk as index of the contemporary ideology concerning sexuality.

When it comes to desire, Fredric Jameson suggests it is beyond the restriction of space and time. Taking into account the many different presentations of sexuality, readers can see the heterogeneity of thinking in Lewis’s composition. “[It] is a commonplace that

transgressions, presupposing the laws or norms or taboos against which they function,

thereby end up precisely reconfirming such laws” (Jameson 68). Lewis neither preaches nor shows his own strong attitude in condemning the wronged characters. Not to suppress or punish the villain or the victimized characters that fall prey to their desire of whatever kinds, the author takes heed not to follow the romance’s duty in teaching right from wrong.

Lewis avoids expressing the imperatives of virtue. He arranges a “passage from virtue to terror,” which leaves the necessities in morality unresolved and suspended in the depiction of horror and terror (Brooks 251). The gothic novels transmute physical collisions of ideas into spectral and supernatural descriptions. The ideology of sexuality neither represents the contemporaries’ stances nor Lewis’s, owing to its basic position as the product of fantasy.

Taste is the combination of personal experience, preference and social productions that betray contemporary thoughts. As David Lorne Macdonald in the biography of Lewis asserts, “the reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho and Caleb Williams bracket[s] the writing of The Monk”

(110). Since his youth, as his sister Sophia recalls, Lewis has cultivated a fascination for bizarre romances and old mansions built in gothic style. The boarding school he attended was infamous for its rigid tradition of brutality practiced by senior boys towards junior or weaker ones.⁸ Lewis’s fascination with the Gothic demonstrates that the novel is the collaboration of Lewis’s aesthetic vision with the social structure in presenting art. It is likely the distinct sexual indication and stance are based on his thoughts and imagination.

8 Sophia Lewis’s description is on page 29, and life in boarding school range from 95-108. See David Lorne Macdonald, Monk Lewis: A Critical Biography. (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000) 29, and 95-108.

Maggie Kilgour suggests that “Lewis sets up veils only to have them almost immediately penetrated by authorial omniscience helping the reader through the world of illusion” (150).

The ideology of sexuality is also based on the same method of Lewis’s authorial power piecing together different elements to make his point. There is surely the ideological thinking performed by means of the characters and the justification of the theme, but the fantasy can also make up an unreal world that exclusively exists for the supernatural world.

No matter how unreal the unreality, the fantasy world he constructs is still based on the real world.